My favorite.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

-E. E. Cummings

Black Cat

As they stood holding hands
watching fireworks explode out over the waves
each silently considered the show
as a metaphor for all that life had become.

He: Loud and colorful
and bustling with strange patterns
and beautiful innovation.

She: An unavoidable spectacle charging top speed out of darkness
begging your total attention
and gone just as quickly as you think you’ve got it figured out.

-Dallas Clayton

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

-Billy Collins

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey’s Version Of “Three Blind Mice”

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife
or anyone else’s wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic’s answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard’s
mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.

-Billy Collins

A Prayer in Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

-Robert Frost

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. ‘Pooh,’ he whispered.

‘Yes, Piglet?’

‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw, ‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’”

Thoughts on Spring

I just love springtime so much.  I think most people in New England do, it’s so full of promise.  Even though it is still Lent (barely!), I began to celebrate at the first sight of budding trees.  Celebrating spring includes planting spring things, buying spring things (wisely? you be the judge…), and reading spring things.

I was very happy today to find that both my daisies and basil plants have sprouted!  Inspired, I finally planted my salsa garden: tomato, cilantro, cayenne pepper, and sweet pepper.  The salsa garden, daisy, and sunflower (not yet planted) seeds were a gift from the nurse last year.  The basil seeds were from Mom (thanks, Mom).  It’s probably a little late for the tomatoes, etc (right?) but I figured I’d try anyway.

I also finally bought an umbrella.  It’s been raining for as long as I can remember, and, even though my feet are very much protected by my LL Bean Wellies (thanks, Dad), the rest of me has been defenseless.  I found a really cute umbrella at H&M for six bucks, but it’s rather too delicate for this weather we’ve been having.  It’ll have to do.

Another recent purchase (with an old Maurice’s gift card, hush.) was of course the floppy hat.  You know what I’m talking about?  I think it may even be pictured in the post titled “Home.”  Anyway, that’s more of a late spring, probably summer item really.  And I’m not even sure I’d wear it in public.  With a sundress?  Maybe.  Garden?  Yes.

And spring reading.  Well I’ve been reading a few spring things, but the only one really worth talking about is my prized collection of E. E. Cummings poetry.  He wrote the loveliest poems about spring, and every March I read through them.  Here’s a good one:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing and placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps hand
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.

-E. E. Cummings

I’ll leave you with a song that isn’t necessarily about spring, but brings me almost as much joy.

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door–
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor–
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

-Billy Collins

I Taught Myself To Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life’s decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

-Anna Akhmatova

“Small” by Dallas Clayton

Prize fighter
captain of industry
great and powerful ruler
remember
there was a day
not too far back
when someone
who loved you
washed you in a sink
just like an empty cereal bowl.

www.dallasclayton.com