Sunday, October 6, 2013

from Parkway (2013)



A poem by Peter Culley, taken from the kswnet.org site. (I added possessives to the first line in the first stanza and the fifth line in the second stanza; changed a pluralized proper noun to a singular possessive in the first line of the third; and separated "monitor" and "the" in the third as well.) The poem appears in Pete's latest collection, Parkway (New Star, 2013), the third of three books in his "Hammertown" series.

A POEM FOR THE SEATTLE POETS

Blue from Player's Plain
Pharoah & Coltrane
hopped-up hummingbirds
raging on raw honey, oysters &
barnacle-scraping soul-encounters
buzz the pre-dawn Lynnwood rain

Blue from Winslow Homer
or someone with no home to go to
he wet his finger west
& traces out the weather week
his weakest hunch a sheriff's gut 
thrust out for the informer 

Blue Six's Music & Wine
was a song we heard all the time
before the macrobiotic encounter
split the silver monitor the crashing
symptoms came complete 
with waves of Om on yellow gull feet

Blue moons a passenger with no ID
& nothing solid in the dictionary
no per diem, no booking fee, 
no very convincing reason to be
alone in swollen solidarity with
the puffer, the skink & the manatee

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