Uncle Mike's Favorites
Collections of Short Poems
Collection #4
West Coast USA Male Poets
Cellphone Poetry Series II
Compiled by
Michael P. Garofalo
West Coast USA Male Poets
Short poems by
Gary Snyder,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dana Gioia,
Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth,
William Everson, William Stafford,
Lew Welch, Jack Hirschman,
etc.
Uncle Mike's Cellphone Poetry Series 2
"The shack and a few trees
float in the blowing fog
I pull out your blouse,
warm my cold hands
on your breasts.
you laugh and shudder
peeling garlic by the
hot iron stove.
bring in the axe, the rake,
the wood
we'll lean on the wall
against each other
stew simmering on the fire
as it grows dark
drinking wine."
- Gary Snyder
"A thing unknown for years,
Rain falls heavily in June,
On the ripe cherries, and on
The half cut hay.
Above the glittering
Grey water of the inlet,
In the driving, light filled mist,
A blue heron
Catches mice in the green
And copper and citron swathes.
I walk on the rainy hills.
It is enough."
- Kenneth Rexroth
"All the young summer the jay breed prospered.
The new brood, fledged early and growing apace,
Took over the canyon, a stellar triumph.
Bright, black-crested, sporting the razor-sharp profile,
They probed every cranny. Whatever accosted
Must pass inspection else suffer abuse.
Scolding, truculent, cunning, vindictive,
They strutted about the canyon, and we endured them.
Downstream by the meadow our creekside neighbors
Shot them with guns, then hung
the skewed bodies in the apple trees
To scare off robbers. Here, under the towering
Canopy of redwoods, we let them live
And suffer their gall.
And indeed their very abrasion
Bespeaks them: after the the gloomy tree-sodden winter
That jaybird bravura fills a definite need.
I have, in fact, gone so far in complicity
As to scatter crumbs on an old stump to lure them in,
Swooping, blue iridescent streaks,
Angling through slant shafts of the sun
Between columned redwoods, their raucous bravado
My guiltful delight."
- William Everson
"Long long I lay in the sands
Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean's speakers
world's voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all life's voices lost in night
And the tape of it
someow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light"
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon—no one.
Now our trees are safer than the stars,
and only other people's neglect
is our precious and abiding shell,
pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone.
From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.
This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere—
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.
Burn this."
- William Stafford
"After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do."
- Gary Snyder
"Above the gray-mouthed Pacific,
cottages and a thick-walled tower,
all made of rough sea rock
And Portland cement.
I imagine, fifty years from now,
A mist-gray ghostly figure moping about this place
in mad moonlight, examining the mortar-joints,
pawing the Parasite ivy:
"Does the place stand?
How did it take that last earthquake?"
Then someone comes
From the house-door,
taking a poodle for his bedtime walk.
The dog snarls and retreats; the man
Stands rigid, saying "Who are you?
What are you doing here?"
"Nothing to hurt you," it answers,
"I am just looking
At the walls that I built.
I see that you have played hell
With the trees that I planted."
"There has to be room for people," he answers.
"My God," he says, "That still!"
- Robinson Jeffers
"If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."
- William Stafford
"Night closed my windows and
The sky became a crystal house
The crystal windows glowed
The moon
shown through them
through the whole house of crystal
A single star beamed down
its crystal cable
and drew a plough through the earth
unearthing bodies clasped together
couples embracing
around the earth
They clung together everywhere
emitting small cries
that did not reach the stars
The crystal earth turned
and the bodies with it
And the sky did not turn
nor the stars with it
The stars remained fixed
each with its crystal cable
beamed to earth
each attached to the immense plough
furrowing our lives"
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"It is spring once more in the Coast Range
Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon.
The flowers are back in their places.
The birds are back in their usual trees.
The winter stars set in the ocean.
The summer stars rise from the mountains.
The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver.
Resurrection envelops the earth.
Goemetrical, blazing, deathless,
Animals and men march through heaven,
Pacing their secret ceremony.
The Lion gives the moon to the Virgin.
She stands at the crossroads of heaven,
Holding the full moon in her right hand,
A glittering wheat ear in her left.
The climax of the rite of rebirth
Has ascended from the underworld
Is proclaimed in light from the zenith.
In the underworld the sun swims
Between the fish called Yes and No."
- Kenneth Rexroth
"Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In coice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things."
- Gary Snyder
"SPRING, COAST RANGE
The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless,
The circle of white ash widens around it.
I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time
I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller.
Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw;
The moon has come before them, the light
Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees.
It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish,
Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons;
The foetid adder's tongue lolls by the waterfall.
There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now.
There were sheep here after the farm, and fire
Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch,
The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil
Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat
And plate the surface like scales.
Twenty years ago the spreading gully
Toppled the big oak over onto the house.
Now there is nothing left but the foundations
Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge,
Six lonely, ominous fenceposts;
The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge
Over the deep waterless creek bed;
The hills are covered with wild oats
Dry and white by midsummer.
I walk in the random survivals of the orchard.
In a patch of moonlight a mole
Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein;
Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean;
Leo crouches under the zenith.
There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees.
The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible.
As the wind dies down their fragrance
Clusters around them like thick smoke.
All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight
They are silent and immaculate."
- Kenneth Rexroth
"Snow on the headland,
The strangely beautiful
Oblique concurrence,
The strangely beautiful
Setting of death.
The great tongue
Dries in the mouth. I told you.
The voiceless throat
Cools silence. And the sea-granite eyes.
Washed the sibilant waters
That stretched lips kiss peace.
The poet is dead.
Nor will ever again hear the sea lions
Grunt in the kelp at Point Lobos.
Nor look to the south when the grunion
Run the Pacific, and the plunging
Shearwaters, insatiable,
Stun themselves in the sea."
- William Everson
"In the beginning I was soused with words,
the page wasn't wide
enough to hold my spillover, I ran and ran
and the puns and
brashbrandy flew out of my mouth slantrhymed.
In time I looked at her. The lines
broke. Look at mine, look at hers.
And neither died of it.
That Irishman, they say, sang best
at seventy-seven.
It isn't easy
to write the word, love,
and mean it
to speak open."
- Jack Hirshman
"You won't remember the apple orchard
We wandered through one April afternoon,
Climbing the hill behind the empty farm.
A city boy, I’d never seen a grove
Burst in full flower or breathed the bittersweet
Perfume of blossoms mingled with the dust.
A quarter mile of trees in fragrant rows
Arching above us. We walked the aisle,
Alone in spring’s ephemeral cathedral.
We had the luck, if you can call it that,
Of having been in love but never lovers—
The bright flame burning, fed by pure desire.
Nothing consumed, such secrets brought to light!
There was a moment when I stood behind you,
Reached out to spin you toward me— but I stopped.
What more could I have wanted from that day?
Everything, of course. Perhaps that was the point—
To learn that what we will not grasp is lost."
- Dana Gioia
"The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five nightherons
Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.
The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The
ebb whispers.
Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the
evening
Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience."
- Robinson Jeffers
!! UNDER CONSTRUCTION !!
!! Completion Date: 1 August 2022 !!
Cuttings: Haiku and Short Poems
Pulling Onions: Over 1,000 One-Liners
Green Way Research Subject Index
Uncle Mike's Cellphone Poetry Series #11
Text, graphics, photos, and webpage design
by Michael P. Garofalo.
Updated: July 7, 2022
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