I Saw A Woman
The trees continue
recycling their timely poems
year after wind-blown year.
Soon the tenement glow
is shadowed with ice.
The bare limbs of timber
click and knock
in the windy woods
like two bucks
locked-up and tangling
over the deepest hunger.
This room is silent
and the wind is deaf.
Kids walk the ridges
carrying sticks
owners of imagination
on small wooded acres.
At the first scent of woodsmoke,
residents of alleyways,
speakers to animals,
converse between the lonely
and the gravel-bound.
Tonight the sunset
reminds me of someone.
I had never seen a face like that.
She possessed the room.
It had a special glow.
My stomach leaped to my chest.
Her red choker was a song
her hair a field. And that face.
I could barely stand to look,
I couldn’t bear not to.
Now the trees go blind
with shadow
and the pumpkins take on
the spirit of the sunset,
while I dream the dreams
of love and death.
The Poetry Room
There is a man
walking slowly
in a dark field.
He enters an empty room
closing the door behind him.
There are no windows.
He lies down on his back
detaches his face in the darkness
and places it on the floor.
The spot
where his face had been
begins to glow.
A blue luminous liquid
pours rapidly outward
filling the room.
He is completely submerged
in a translucent pool of blue
gradually darkening.
Muffled bubbling pleas
that sound like questions
catch his ears on fire.
The darkened room
thickens and burns
turning to sand.
The walls of the room
(now a sand filled vault)
become heavy iron grates.
A small boy
can be seen
kneeling on a beach.
He brushes sand away
from engraved lettering
on one of the grates.
He cannot read.
A constant breeze
turns his attention toward the ocean.
It is almost dark.
Where the water meets the sky
there is a strange glow.
February
one needn’t be
caught in the density
of canyon river eddies
to learn of impossible currents
of dark cold depths
a day passed in seclusion
winter’s stiff-armed oppression
unnamed and desolate
as an old abandoned warehouse
rotting in the rust-belt
soon the sun
sets in motion its oral tradition
translated and transmuted
by the poet and the priest
before the cold orange aura
tucks the trees away
under a blanket of night
whose certain temperament
moves toward everyone
everywhere at all times
Barry Yeoman was educated at Bowling Green State Univ., The Univ. of Cincinnati, and The McGregor School of Antioch Univ., in creative writing, world classics, and the humanities. He is originally from Springfield, Ohio and lives currently in London, Ohio. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Red Booth Review, Futures Trading, Danse Macabre, Harbinger Asylum, Red Fez, The Wayfarer and Two Hawks Quarterly.
