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The Poetry

CLOVES

A little girl thin year
with some grass amid the house
and dark vegetables getting
further away in the year
for a green thought.
In the spare time,
in the house next
to the spruce and the wheat.

In the urgent house,
the house of cleaning,
the house in the trees
in the time of the heart
amid the fish.

In that place is
a good trip
on this paper.

--Alice

It would see the curves in your fingers,
It would see the wrinkles in your hand
And the rings on your fingers.

It would tell you, maybe, how long you're
married.

It would see the scar you got when
You were in the first grade and had permission

To go through the neighbor's yard to get
to your yard Where the lady had a bunch of cats
And the cats were turned loose
And would come into your yard
Usually if you had something in your yard
That they could eat.

No, the cat didn't scratch me.
The lady died a long time ago
And it seemed to me
They'd already written the story about it.

--Ida

Hornets are like red and purple,
pale purple and white
yellow to bring out the motherly qualities of it --

lemon moon hats of gold,
hornets look like winter's meteors,
kites, clouds and snow.

(UNSIGNED)

I am seeing pink
louvered windows and baskets
of plants hanging from
wrought iron, slow fans and
the dim yellow light on bodies
drawn with sweat.

I think how watery it is
to work with them . . . so many
loose connections, loping
around, catching at one
another in my head . . . to
describe being with them
alters it and that is what
it is like to be with them
To get altered, fluid leaping
loosing threads, leaping and
loosing until the very notion
of loss is altered. It is
What is.

I think I have fallen
in love with that crotchety old coot.

--Tracy Trefethen, one of the ASU poets who ran a workshop