POEM - My Garden and I

My garden has this tired look
In fawning light that crooks
Through arborvitae and quiet tones
Of earthy tissue and tree-limbed bone,
These rounded humps of dirt
Now drawn and slumped and so inert;
Become this kind of gray-brown earth
Like a woman after giving birth
Weak, but joy tints what she has done;
Sweaty, her willingness has run
Its course, she reclines in muted glory:
Shouting in one great whisper this circle story.
The mound of saddening leaves remain
To celebrate this holiday of fruit and pain;
This flag that honors majestic loss
To the white full lipped kiss of frost.

My garden and I have this worn down heart -
Let winter now step up and do its part.

M C Biegner
11/2005

POEM - You Begin

This is how it happens:
How a dog-eared evening
With a long, sad face
And wrinkled clothes
Reminds us that temporary things
Must be temporary.

How boulders are turned into stones;
How comedy and tragedy become history;
How we become strangers all over again.

It feels like tiredness;
It stretches on and on like insomnia;
It is as relentless as absence
Yet, oh how it transfigures everything!

First: It does so without malice.
Second: It does so without conspiracy.
Third: It does so without blaming anyone.

So rake the leaves back onto the trees
If it helps you;
Buck up and stiffen the soft horizon;
Push back the killing frost
And hold the hunter moon at abeyance:
The trees and the plants and the farmers
Will not mind one bit.

But I swear, this is how it happens,
This is how it starts
And where would I be in you otherwise?

M C Biegner
11/2005

POEM - Yes

Yes,
Because the word begins like open arms;
Yes,
Because it is soft and curvy at the end
Where I need softness and curviness the most;
Yes,
Because I can say it with a mouthful of crack brownies
Or Halloween candy;
Yes,
Because I can send it with a nod, a look,
Or an “OK” gesture;
Yes,
Because, it is what you are made of to me;
And
Yes,
Because despite everything I say and do
It is what I am made of too.

POEM - Holes

Holes

My scar must be communicating
With your scar tonight;
It is twitching like a rabbit’s heart
And that is just like sending an email
And this,
From muscle fiber which has no cerebral cortex function
Or memory
Or soul
Of any kind;

There are wounds everywhere we look.

You could look at it as there
Are holes everywhere that you want
Some piece of solid ground
Hence, proof of the
Great emptiness of things.

Or

You could look at it as the stitching
Of all that empty space together
Closing large gaping things
Into that one thing
That eludes us.