Poems (Mostly)

By James Wheeler

Collection of poems, many of which are love poems, as well as haiku-like poems and eleven children stories, mostly in jaunty humorous verse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Wheeler
• Release date: Jul 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463492383

Book preview

Poems (Mostly)

James Wheeler

Includes The Angela Poems

Selected Lowku

Eleven Children’s Stories

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ISBN: 9780463492383

copyright 2014, 2018 by James Wheeler

Distributed by Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Poems

The Angela Poems

Selected Lowku

Children’s Stories

One Final One

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V

While you sleep I wonder at

This mind at rest upon my arm

Product of four billion years

And atoms from exploding stars

Center of a universe

Which it creates, then contemplates

Cave dwelling of a primitive god

In birth-throes of its self-creation

Incomprehensible complexity

Of matter mind-infused

That takes this time from its rush toward Being

To rest upon my arm

I reach to touch your cheek

But hand draws back in fearful awe

As ape before the Monolith

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fat old buzzard

picking away at a body on

the sand taking its time because there's no

competition and it's not especially

hungry just eating out of habit and in

contemplation of sparse pickings in the future so

on it goes about its noble business bit by tasty bit until

at last the frame that formed me, clean and white,

sparkles and glows in the pure desert light.

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Northern Fall

Old windy air

with a touch of cold

bobs and dips

clusters of blue

deserted asters

in three-quarter time

as a faithless sun sets off

to kiss and flirt

with another

hemisphere

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Birth Day Acrostic

Late the whip of will calls

Awake in the swamp of mind

Until the dark sky splits

Red in cream at the eastern

Edge and the white soul rises

Light over still gray waters.

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In the Compost

Fertile wormings, dank rites, dark digestings,

Mouths by the thousands, legs by the millions,

Bugs beyond number, squirming and chewing,

Eating the dead, eating each other,

Gnawing and sucking, osmosing, secreting,

On through the day, on through the night,

Down there where life eats life and death,

Down there life’s all ingest,

Down in the compost.

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Bright Sun

Bright sun, would I knew the turmoil in your heart,

Or felt your anger at that binding force,

That hand which will not let you burst apart,

Or burned with heat could melt a million worlds,

Or knew the way to that love's source

Which can each second bear a billion births.

But these I seek are in one eyeblink sought,

For instantly this insanity of atoms bubbling

Incinerates the image, evaporates all thought

Of what kind of thing, of awesome awful thing--

None but Shiva could conceive

In this place of roiling pain

Where is born the food of fruit and grain

The violence on which we feed.

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First Frosts and After

Winter slides a warning wind

From northern ice across our fields

And blasts the blossoms with a backhand nonchalance

Of flowers I worked all spring and summer to inspire.

It settles down like powdered bone.

Birds leave.

Deer starve.

Philosophies are altered.

Winter, color of all colors

That melt into your time,

Will you let me feel

The slow heartbeat beneath your blanket?

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In Vermont

Buds thrust out, begging for the sun's caressing

Fingertips of warming gold, and rivulets trickle

Down the dark of hidden earth.

Spring comes like the first coming of a frozen love.

The first moist heaves of a green heat,

Now the fear of cold is gone,

Animate all summer's growing pleasures

And, when golden light's suffused each cell,

Send calm through fall's exhaled content.

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Malinsong

With sapphire eyes on silver wings

I sail, circling down a pale haze