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Ars Poetica
Ah! Those fresh, plush seeds, the last
of fall's globed fruit, sweet, fist-sized;
call it berry, pomegranate, whose pulp
is perfectly rowed and red and ready
to more than moisten a greedy mouth
desirous of the deep. Thus, I can wait
awhile, though its lushness almost
makes me leap, pull apart each pod
with a rollicking tongue, though
to eat it now would be a killjoy.
Let me look at it a little longer,
to see inside its halved self, shelved stories
relieving me of this urge to feast, to reduce
its rare beauty to bile, mere waste. But no,
say that I am vile; say that I lack taste,
to refuse such fruit would be a disgrace.
Complaint
The beating thorax
of a bird, the cricket's
chitin; how come they
are not competing?
Silence will not slide
in edgewise this side
of summer, perhaps not
until long after controlled
burning's done with, and
quail and crows have
long taken the farmer's
spilled grain he himself
intended to haul home, all,
before he ended his harvest,
and set his fields on fire.
I Want A Poem
Prussian blue is pretty
but I don't want to read
about it in another poem;
I am fed-up with fuchsia
too, as well as aquamarine,
anything thought
exotic, pristine.
Give me a drinking gourd
mottled from too many
mouths, 'possum turds
packed with persimmon
seeds upon a path;
or, buzzards circling
above a fetid carcass
they are eager to glean
from the earth's ephemeral
hold. I want things that are useful,
dutiful, even sweetened by death;
a young capon fattened for company
whose name I don't have to know.
I want the kind of poem
that takes me someplace,
a place I never knew
I needed to go.
Life Parallels Life
It was mid-July when
that salivating coon came
staggering in from those
brittle, summer-scorched
rows of corn and limped
onto my back porch where
it prowled and pranced
like a newly caged puma,
until it saw its own re-
flection, grinning against
the French door's glaring
glass; it took to pecking
at those panes with fierce
anger, until it fell into a
rolling blot of fur and blood.
I couldn't hit it upon its
rabid head as I had
intended
to with my hoe. Soon
its dazed eyes became epi-
leptic-like, grey black with gloss
from its own claws, self-
inflicted, as it was doing
to itself what I didn't
have in my heart to do.
It was dying, the way an
old friend of mine did one
night, when drinking had
become just short of enough.
Willie James King has published Wooden Windows with a foreward by Yusef Komunyakaa.
He has studied with Robert Polito, who directs the writing courses at the New School, New York.
Email: Willie James King
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