Tag Archives: poem about self-revelation

Maybe it is My Heart

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Maybe It Is My Heart

Maybe it is my heart I hear when I think I hear Coyotes.
Maybe it is my heart I hear in the croaking of the frogs.
Maybe it is my heart tap-tap-tapping on the window glass.
Maybe it is my heart walking across the rooftop.
Maybe it is my heart howling in the treetops.
Maybe it is my heart in the two long rumbles of thunder.
Maybe it is my heart in the three-minute violence of hail.
Maybe it is my heart in the rustle of the Redwood trees.
Maybe it is my heart in the weeping of the loon.
Maybe it is my heart in the quiet undulations of the reservoir
Maybe it is my heart that splits the water with the paddle.
Maybe it is my heart that reflects from the breast of the waves.
Maybe it is my heart that has found its own places
Maybe it is my heart that is looking for me.

 

This post came about because of a Facebook message from Linda Levy, a friend of many years who lives in Bonny Doon, California. When she saw news of my upcoming show entitled “The Poet’s Eye, the Artist’s Tongue,” she sent a photo of a piece we collaborated on when I was the curator of the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center in Ben Lomond, CA. I used that title for a show that involved artists and poets collaborating on pieces. Either the artist showed the poet a work of art they had created and the poet wrote a poem to go along with it or the poet presented a poem for the artist to make a piece to go with. In this case, I gave her the poem and the illustration above is the cardboard and paper sculpture she made. The ripped-out pieces of poetry on the desk are the words of the poem above.

That show reoccured on a yearly basis for a number of years after I left and Linda assumed the curatorship. Can’t believe that was twenty years ago and SCMAC is still going strong. Long story short, when Jesus asked me to do a show with him in his gallery, since both of us are writers and artists, I thought the title would work well for our show, so I resurrected it. Thanks, Linda, for the memories.

Poem by jdb Sculpture  and photo by Linda Levy

Here is another photo of the lid of the box just sent to me by Linda:


Bipartite

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Bipartate

Pelted by the details of the busy world,
I lie within with half of me comfortably furled.
That flawless part that stays within, that flawed part I let out.
Trying to synchronize the two is what life is about.

 

Prompt words today are pelt, synchronize, flawless and bipartite. Also, Shining Your Light. for OctPoWriMo.

Hide-and-go-seek

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One often used technique is to take your photo in the bathroom mirror, but oops.. remember not to put the camera in front of your face.

Hide-and-go-seek

She enters my hideout and calls it her own.
Now I’ll have to move on, for my cover is blown.
I try to go deeper into my lair
but still she follows, finding me there.
I cannot escape her. She has all my keys.
She blows through my memory like a fine breeze,
usurping my details to make them her own
so I can’t reclaim them, wherever they’ve blown.
From a full-body mirror, she stares back at me.
My elbow’s her elbow. My knee is her knee.
She alters my hairdo and rouges my cheeks.
She searches my memory, looking for leaks,
then piles the lost parts up in her poems,
through her underground railroad, gives them new homes.
When I see myself spread out here in these pages,
some private part of me protests and rages,
but she doesn’t listen. She finds me too fussy.
She leaves herself open, the ungrateful hussy.
Does she not realize that it is me
who has made her whatever she’s turned out to be?
She should listen more closely when I say to stop.
Allow me to be her poetry cop.
But she doesn’t mind. She says what she wishes.
She dines out on me and leaves me with the dishes!

The prompt word today was “hideout.”