03/26/2018
Grace Marie Grafton is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently 'Jester' from Hip Pocket Press. Her themes range from lyrical sonnets to sestinas to experimental prose poems, with a concentration on response to fine art. Her poems have won honors from The Bellingham Review, Sycamore Review, Keats Soul Making contest, The National Womens Book Association, and Poetic Matrix Press. Poems recently appear in Fifth Wednesday, The Cortland Review, Ambush Review, Sin Fronteras, Basalt, Mezzo Cammin and Canary, among others. Through her work with CA Poets in the Schools and the CA Arts Council, she has taught thousands of children to write poetry.
The knell of winter
At 4 pm on a Tuesday, air almost bite-able,
you think maybe you could play with it, invisible
man-of-air or un-see-able woman singing her
sharp cold note, tickles you down your neck. You
wish you knew the words in the dark colors pulled
up out of the pit where the days are stored. The
draftsman of the future down there, drawing the plans
in his blind state, feeling his way, trained from his
birth to do this each year as the light grows
wan and the chill undresses the trees, the waters
forget their underground ancestors boiled
by fundamental lava. The future's plans all there
in his unreadable notebooks. And now the council
of the creators will spend ninety long nights
arguing about details and which of them must
roll naked in the snow to bring the future into being.
For Roy De Forest, 'Dogcart From Hell'
How black is the jest,
how red-wheeled the cart,
earth-brown the driver who doesn't
know right from wrong but,
like a passionate pilgrim, drives on
smiling ignorantly, just happy
to have a job and a dog to help.
If help is what this trip can be called.
Do we want to call it anything?
Can labels do any good?
The tree, passed by, is in disguise
as a famous actor, the Devil presents
a facsimile moon as prize to
the acting-tree who, we know,
has sold his soul. It's a reunion
of sorts: the beans of life sorted
to one side (the right, the wrong?),
the stones of death to the other.
They talk, the driver, the acting-tree
and the Devil with the moon prize
but they can neither be heard nor
understood.
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