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While kicking at the falling leaves
We stumbled on a yearling doe
Who pinned us with a startled stare
Then vanished into brush so dense
We lost her brilliant flashing tail
As quickly as she raised it.
The still that followed checked us,
Leaves suspended over apples
As if their fall would break the spell
Cast by her crashing exit.
When the world came to again
And found us reckless on the ground
Among the leaves and apple bait
I shook your still stopped heart awake.
You, who saw the good in both
The startled and the unaware.
As for me, full of holes,
Searing shut my open places
With noise and buzzing kisses
I soon grew unimpressed with yearling does.
And tired of November snows I left,
A fool who didn’t know himself at all.
Who took to wasting love and time
Who gathered gold while spinning dross
Who tripped and scattered all he’d gained
From the lost, unlucky girls
Who tapped their feet to the songs he sang.
My God, to know the whole of it!
The worth of what we were and had,
The startled doe,
What the crashing silence brings,
How best to spend an autumn day.
I’d give all and more my friend
To walk the yearling’s field again
Kicking leaves and scattered apples.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
There once was a man
Who left small pieces of himself
Everywhere he went.
In shadows, echoes, traces of laughter
In promises broken and promises kept
He left bits and pieces of who he was
And who he meant to be.
Though they never told him
And though he never knew
His friends picked up those pieces
And without a word
Placed them for safekeeping
In cedar chests and quiet chambers
Within the certain shelter of their hearts.
When the day came
That there were no more pieces to drop
And the man looked down
Only to find he had disappeared
One by one they came to him
Returning the pieces they had saved
And made him whole again.
What they didn’t know
Was that with those fragments
Came small pieces of their own
Distant echoes and traces of laughter
Held in cedar chests and quiet chambers
Filling the gaps that still remained
From the gold hoards of their hearts.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Within minutes of our meeting
We both know I’ve missed my cue
Confusing the acrid tang on my tongue
With the peppery scent of attraction.
Curious, I stand beside myself
My rictus smile matching my desiccation
As I rut through my clothes
Racked by an obscene thirst
Like the drying skin of some tropical fruit
Neither of us is quite sure how to eat.
Believe me, these herk jerky
Complements
Sliding like a string of false pearls
From lips dripping saliva,
Draping your curves and careful
Small feet,
Disturb me too.
You, such a soft thing of soft
Selfish motives
Eyeing that chitin carapace mugging to
My left.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
There once was a man
Who left small pieces of himself
Everywhere he went.
In shadows, echoes, traces of laughter
In promises broken and promises kept
He left bits and pieces of who he was
And who he meant to be.
Though they never told him
And though he never knew
His friends picked up those pieces
And without a word
Placed them for safekeeping
In cedar chests and quiet chambers
Within the certain shelter of their hearts.
When the day came
That there were no more pieces to drop
And the man looked down
Only to find he had disappeared
One by one they came to him
Returning the pieces they had saved
And made him whole again.
What they didn’t know
Was that with those fragments
Came small pieces of their own
Distant echoes and traces of laughter
Held in cedar chests and quiet chambers
Filling the gaps that still remained
From the gold hoards of their hearts.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Within minutes of our meeting
We both know I’ve missed my cue
Confusing the acrid tang on my tongue
With the peppery scent of attraction.
Curious, I stand beside myself
My rictus smile matching my desiccation
As I rut through my clothes
Racked by an obscene thirst
Like the drying skin of some tropical fruit
Neither of us is quite sure how to eat.
Believe me, these herk jerky
Complements
Sliding like a string of false pearls
From lips dripping saliva,
Draping your curves and careful
Small feet,
Disturb me too.
You, such a soft thing of soft
Selfish motives
Eyeing that chitin carapace mugging to
My left.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
I can’t stand on the particular
Jumping from point to point
In thick soled boots
Never losing my balance
Seeing every hard sharp thing
For just what it is and no more.
One misstep and the floor rises up
To jar my teeth to order.
When all the things that pierce and sting
Are all that is
I stumble even on the soft gentle
That whines and wags and follows
Room to room at inconvenient times.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
I show my Grief to a kitchen chair
Place her yarns, needles, skeins of wool
On the counter
And return to the party
Where, in the living room,
Guests drink, circle, banter
Uttering caterpillar quips
They misperceive as butterflies.
A tall blond man is drunk
Plays tall blond man music
Swirls, staggers
Fills the room with tall blond man.
Someone slips by, brushing my knee
Spiking color, trailing perfume.
She’s a ‘slips by woman’
So unlike my girl Grief,
Rigid in her kitchen chair.
I’m not one to plead at parties
Though I’d love to say to Grief,
“Don’t walk about,
Don’t ask for me by name.
Stay seated in the kitchen,
Sharing blood oranges and chocolate
With some awkward party refugee
Feigning interest in your twisted
Skeins of wool.
Then make a plausible excuse
And find your own way home.”
Lost in this reverie, I allow myself
To dream.
“It just might work!
This party of tall blond man,
Caterpillar quips,
Slips by woman,
A slight of hand with canapes
To amuse and distract.”
But then I turn my head in time
To catch her rising silhouette,
The twitch, twitch of pale wrists
Against the kitchen’s stucco arch.
My Grief, my girl,
Reaching for her needles
Salting strands of colored yarn
With shards of glass
Knitting a clever banded scarf
A party favor just for me.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
To walk the metes and bounds of things
Resetting every toppled stone
On this side, us
On that side, them.
To bite with your teeth
Cry with your eyes
Wake each morning
To the kisses of your mouth.
To ripple and bend with you
Like blades of grass in the rain.
To keep each lacerating sidelong glance
Secure in its eyelid sheath.
To map desire in your direction
Trace hills, flatlands, the hollows of
Your cheeks,
Cup your hips in my hands.
To refrain from solving puzzles uninvited.
Acknowledge your mastery of spices.
Swim with you across sunless pools.
To keep the sacraments of our faith,
The rituals of vacuums and folded linen,
Affirming the binding grace
Of shared daily tasks.
To coin a language of hints,
Allusion, arcane references,
A private code for a too public world.
To neither profane nor preach
The Gospel of Us in the marketplace
But leave our good news unshared
A tongue we take to our graves.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Comes paint on a pony.
Comes bowfin refracting light in the morning.
Comes ore to iron
And iron to rust.
Comes together, apart, with instructions
Assembled, clean, to my attention.
Comes the raven that worries not carrion.
That has no worries
That comes to pieces
That cannot contain herself
Under raven’s ardent shearing caress.
Comes something aflame
From the lacquer red Sun
Turning clouds nacreous,
Bottle flies green
Stone irritations to iridescent pearl sheen.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
To walk the metes and bounds of things
Resetting every toppled stone
On this side, us
On that side, them.
To bite with your teeth
Cry with your eyes
Wake each morning
To the kisses of your mouth.
To ripple and bend with you
Like blades of grass in the rain.
To keep each lacerating sidelong glance
Secure in its eyelid sheath.
To map desire in your direction
Trace hills, flatlands, the hollows of
Your cheeks,
Cup your hips in my hands.
To refrain from solving puzzles uninvited.
Acknowledge your mastery of spices.
Swim with you across sunless pools.
To keep the sacraments of our faith
The rituals of vacuums and folded linen
Affirming the binding grace
Of shared daily tasks.
To coin a language of hints,
Allusion, arcane references,
A private code for a too public world.
To neither profane nor preach
The Gospel of Us in the marketplace
But leave our good news unshared
A tongue we take to our graves.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Comes paint on a pony.
Comes bowfin refracting light in the morning.
Comes ore to iron
And iron to rust.
Comes together, apart, with instructions
Assembled, clean, to my attention.
Comes the raven that worries not carrion
That has no worries
That comes to pieces
That cannot contain herself
Under raven’s ardent shearing caress.
Comes something aflame
From the lacquer red Sun
Turning clouds nacreous,
Bottle flies green
Stone irritations to iridescent pearl sheen.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
So many poems akin to bread
In the hands of novice bakers.
So little leavening,
So many arriving doughy
Like loaves pulled unrisen from the oven.
Which grain is called for now?
A hearty pumpernickel
To form a rounded heel
The sort you break
With hands denied your face
And distant dying friend.
A chunk of bitter darkness
To dip in salty soup
Of slitted, barley eyes.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
These are the clouds, these,
Not others in some other sky.
And these are the dogs, these,
At play among their tethered masters.
And this is the day, this,
All you know and all you ever will.
The wind stings the rushes
The crow worries the grackle
The day breaks round you like glass.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
When I was a child we spent every summer
At the cottage our grandfather built of wet oak
To be schooled by wasps in practical wisdom
In the rootless wild between cottage and shore.
There we learned asphalt puddled in heat
Sending vultures rising in ragged black spirals
While we scuffed barefoot through gravel and dune grass
Before our feet softened and learned to fear ivy.
We would fly the down path past skittering lizards
To the houses of boats where gleaming green sunlight
Welled up from the water
And baitfish hung wary in the shadows of hulls.
One summer while seining some hidden thing cut me
Water blushing red that before had flowed blameless
‘Til men with large voices gathered me up
Rushed me to stitches and a fine grinning scar.
What jays at the mailbox were eager to tell us
In stammers and shouts
We had to untangle from doves and their mourning
In small velvet voices
The gull we found injured and put to its end.
I learned to regret the gigging of frogs
The importance of down putting toads
That some snakes have rattles though all shed their skin
Thin and brown like the paper of bakers.
So the summers clipped by
‘Til the wisdom of wasps papered the wide world.
And little remains of the rootless wild
But that faded white scar
And the ache of this longing
For what was left cresting
Among the far shadows.
Something troughing and cresting
Beyond the green shallows.
Impossible billfish on that freshwater sea
Billfish and like fish of earthy raw umber
The color of clay in the rain.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
I wake to hot coffee poured on my grave
At a sidewalk café, light golden, falling.
Life tossed and weary
You’ve conjured me here
To find what I’ve learned
From the arc of my life.
Before risking an answer,
I ask in my quiet,
“What’s the worst that can happen
At this street side café?
Soft gazes and coffee,
One luminous evening
Reflecting on the seasons I wasted,
Each singing with meanings
I could never unravel.
Days better spent sailing
Straight into my madness
Than attending to storms and distractions
So long did I take
On my own crabbled way.”
But here, now, you offer me time
In the dappling dun light
In exchange for what little I know
Then it’s back to my somber dark habits,
Alone.
After a moment’s reflection blinking dust
And days from my eyes
So little to lose, so willing to share,
I stammer this answer;
“For even a moment above the slant
Ground
I’d bronze, if I could, an unerring compass
Provide soundings and charts you’d take
On your travels.
Though given a choice I’d stall and stay
Longer
Catch the Sun rising, buff the waxing
Moon.”
So we sip coffee outside this café
– light fading, falling –
Share stories and laughter, compare scars
‘Til you rise, lean into the long fetch of
Sidewalk
That strides to the corner,
Your image a nimbus backlit by the Sun.
Then, our bargain concluded, earth rises
Around me
And my blistered tongue wanders in
Search of your name
Pushing poems and teeth
This way and that.
And I’m left here to wonder,
Why am I trembling as you slip by the
Table?
Is it the final rush of black coffee?
The pitch dropping prayers of distancing
Sirens unsettling?
My eyes losing sense in the dying
Sunlight?
Or is it you, your smile leaking sadness,
The autumn splash of your eyes,
Your afterimage elbowing tables, chairs,
Street lights,
Everything else, out of my sight
That leaves me here reeling
As you find your way home?
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Have you ever noticed a working
backhoe is a nightmare?
That nothing in nature moves like that
All squares, insistentcies,
And jerking angles?
That it draws everything to itself?
That men tend it with shovels
Ride it like parasites
Astride only when aroused
To move what’s already in place,
Somewhere else?
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
My ears abuzz with silicon gossip,
With music, with motion,
With doors, borders, and poetry
Slamming shut.
My children transfixed
Fingers aquiver, eyes aglaze,
Throats dumb,
Make virtual of necessity.
Proud of ignorance, disdainful of fact
Leering and Learlike
Jealous of power and prerogative
Yearning to breathe free of obligation
Yet smug and self-righteous.
Blind juggler
Sojourner of truths
Certain nothing is certain
Empathetic to a fault
The fault lies in my selves.
My hands like pumice
I slough away the body politic
An aggregate of walls, portals,
Nowhere bridges,
Streets of gold,
Of beanstalk magic,
Wielder of sticks,
Runner of gauntlets,
Thirst, river, throat,
I stand outside myself
My song of data eclectic
A hymn to bootstraps, tunnels and
Drones.
Now locked and loaded
In a house of mirrors,
A buyer and seller of dream catchers,
I cannot sleep.
I gaze inward and the world
Falls toward me.
Builder of pedestals,
Idol toppler,
Agoogle for Starbucks,
Aggrieved and aghast,
A Crackerbarrel baking by the interstate,
Mother of Lazarus!
Still, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
From the riverbank I plucked a stone
A balanced blue green oval of perfect heft
Ground smooth beneath a mile or more
Of ice
Exposed at last by some recent flood.
I had the urge to take that stone and
Bending
Match the river’s plane, to fling it
Skipping
Just to count each separate bounce
Before it sank into the pooling dark.
Recalling then how other stones I’d flung
Fought hard to stay above the chill stream
Each skip short, shorter, more desperate
Than the last
I left it there uncovered and uncast.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
My ears abuzz with silicon gossip,
With music, with motion,
With doors, borders, and poetry
Slamming shut
My children transfixed
Fingers aquiver, eyes aglaze,
Throats dumb
Make virtual of necessity.
Proud of ignorance, disdainful of fact
Leering and Learlike
Jealous of power and prerogative
Yearning to breathe free of obligation
Yet smug and self-righteous.
Blind juggler
Sojourner of truths
Certain nothing is certain
Empathetic to a fault
The fault lies in my selves.
My hands like pumice
I slough away the body politic
An aggregate of walls, portals,
Nowhere bridges,
Streets of gold,
Of beanstalk magic,
Wielder of sticks,
Runner of gauntlets,
Thirst, river, throat
I stand outside myself
My song of data eclectic
A hymn to bootstraps, tunnels and
Drones.
Now locked and loaded
In a house of mirrors,
A buyer and seller of dream catchers
I cannot sleep.
I gaze inward and the world
Falls toward me.
Builder of pedestals,
Idol toppler,
Agoogle for Starbucks,
Aggrieved and aghast,
A Crackerbarrel baking by the interstate,
Mother of Lazarus,
Still, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
From the riverbank I plucked a stone
A balanced blue green oval of perfect heft
Ground smooth beneath a mile or more
Of ice
Exposed at last by some recent flood.
I had the urge to take that stone and
Bending
Match the river’s plane, to fling it
Skipping
Just to count each separate bounce
Before it sank into the pooling dark.
Recalling then how other stones I’d flung
Fought hard to stay above the chill stream
Each skip short, shorter, more desperate
Than the last
I left it there uncovered and uncast.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
1. Looking For You
I woke from a dream
Reaching for you in a darkened room
Looking for you on traffic strewn streets
Hard to cross, harder to bear.
2. Abandon
Abandon cut a housekey
And made herself at home
The night you moved out.
We do everything together now.
Launder clothes, wash dishes,
Stare into screens,
Listen as silence consumes the world,
You know, everyday things like that.
3. You Are Miles From Me and Years
You are miles from me and years
Yet you speak as if the Moon had never
Waned
And promises we made still rattled in
Our pockets.
4. Between You and Me
I stumble with half closed eyes
You stare at things I’ll never see.
There, on the far side of this canyon
Receding unreachable into the distance.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Chests rise and fall,
Pages turn, heads loll
As a few determined selves
Browsing near the ordered shelves
Stake their claims to personal space
Arranging limbs and poses as if to say,
“Come this close…but no closer.”
Carts in place,
A scattering of books,
The room half full at best,
They see no reason to tolerate intrusions,
Responding to trespasses with anxious
Nods and glances
As though a single touch
Might carry some contagion.
We sit, it seems, behind a fence of frowns
And try our best to catalogue
The I and thou of circumstance,
Words being all we know of wisdom.
We put our faith in misremembered
Things.
Recall instead that even now
Like lines of blue ink
Lifted from a brilliant draft by Escher,
The swirling emanations of our dreams,
Manias,
Memories of longing and regret,
Our twisting prayers and curses
Braid a rope we can’t unravel
Chord a dense harmonic music
The white noise of every note played,
Love cherished, hope abandoned,
Enough to crowd ten thousand
Quiet rooms.
For the hum of our hearts
Mocks the distance between us
As we hurdle unaware
Each torsion and sphere
Of the wide heedless world
Unfolding in great heaving arcs
Through the floors and walls
Fusing with our threaded blue lines lifted
‘Til three times thirty three
Dimensions can’t contain us
Here, within these ordered
Stacks of wisdom
And scattered heaps of folly.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
I’ll never turn a page of the book she writes as she walks.
I’m writing my own as she passes, in which I’m the protagonist,
Though she plays a prominent role in this chapter
With her long brown legs and unbound book.
I wonder if I appear in hers,
A non-descript man on a bench with his dog
Watching a woman whose book he’ll never read
Whose long brown legs and searching heart he’ll never touch
Except in blank verse penned in his head
Certain even one word would burn him to the ground
If only she’d ask him to read the book she writes as she walks.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse
Who cut the flower, cut my heart
And placed it in the waiting room
Among her many gathered things
While she still lived, was young, and we
Were dancing to her desperate whims
And thought she all alone could sing
The one world to its sleep.
Who wouldn’t swim, wished to drown
And told us in her thousand ways
That we were meant for greater things
But not so great as she.
Who cut the flower, cut my heart
And kept among her garnet rings
I knew I was the greater thing
But not so great as she.
© 2020 Dana Newhouse