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

 

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.

 

Listed at Duotrope
Listed with Poets & Writers
CLMP Member
List with Art Deadline
Follow us on MagCloud