‘Today's Words’, ‘The Songbirds of Descargarmaria’ & ‘The Scoreboard Never Tells the Whole Story’
Rosemary Kimble is a self-taught photographer whose journey began while volunteering with wildlife abroad. Moved by the stillness and wisdom of nature, she began capturing the spirit of animals, cultures, and landscapes across the globe. A spiritual seeker and an intuitive by trade, Rosemary uses her sensitivity to subtle energies as a guide in her photographic exploration. Her images serve as portals into the unseen—where the veil between worlds is thin and the sacred reveals itself. Through her lens, she invites viewers to experience these realms and spiritual connections for themselves. www.visionsandreflections.com/photography/ rosemarykimble@gmail.com
Today's Words
include washing dishes, which I'm assuming
Keats never did, though maybe not,
a positive capability adjusting the water temp
without any irritable reaching after disinfectant
and resin. This utensil is often useless
going by in the fine penetralium of the kitchen
and Keats was unlucky but good.
The harder I write, the unluckier
I get was posted on his gym wall,
Keats a welterweight in some areas
but a light heavy moving up rapidly in class
in the ones that count to ten, a light welter
of unheard melodies in his very bones
and now ours or mine near the fridge
where I have beers that I may cease to drink.
So there, John Keats, and the shouting teenagers
upstairs soiling the dishes I have and do not have
to wash in this storm of allusion and wobble
with words I can't remember but the endurance
I sincerely hope will feather and father
this dish-washing nest. Do I dare
to buy a dishwasher, obsessed with appliance
and penury because no one listens to jazz anymore
nor at least buys it nor the farm in Vermont,
my last stop, this boo hooing ruining even that,
like torn comedy of the ordinary death
that is nothing for anyone to sneeze at.
The Songbirds of Descargarmaria
I’m always wearing the wrong pants,
panting after—what?—the right syllables
and ignoring the metrics,
tuned ill-tempered to a broken melody, ha.
The church bell is e flat below middle c
(the river too) and the green of this chirping
has been bought out by international
cartels you can’t fight with rhymes
nor cents. The stone walls of orchards,
these gardens right here,
cast their old shadows and the cats
stare up Juliet’s nightgown in the balcony
scene; O that I were the fur upon that paw,
that I might purr that cheekily.
The medieval buckwheat grows in the night
and the plague doctors tied thyme in their masks
because bloodletting was too much fun
for the leeches. The search for the perfect
olive tree goes bust, nothing for the marriage bed
nor the vinaigrette, but coarse salt
endures, licking us all up the bloody wall
no matter what kind of shoes you wear
or where you put your commas. This this
this this this tsee-tsee-tsee-chu-chu-chu
trills at least one species to survive us
in the rhythm of all this groaning.
Why must everything be so dark?
The Scoreboard Never Tells the Whole Story
Although the Hudson runs both ways at once
the authorities insist we leave the stones
in a cairn with cookies and milk for the Dutch
and their chocolates, tulips, goalkeepers,
strikers and views of Delft. It would be decades
before the Swiss army knife, but those
were other country matters and besides,
ding dong, the wench is dead
who just rang your bell in a late round
with a crisp cross. Advice from the corner:
keep your left upright. You have so many keys—
to blue shadows, to magic, to democracy,
to my tragic heart—you don’t know
who/how you are, though your sentences
grow like triffids. If there’s hair
on your philtrum and phalanges
it doesn’t make you a falangist
(though millions of gulls are),
it just means you’re a prophet or petri dish
of lab slime, whichever comes first. No, in answer
to several stupid questions in the post-game,
you don’t think this is funny though you look funny
with that hat, those knees and (have I said?)
that tragic heart, buckling. Reading
from the wacko prompter will get you
only so far, and look out! You just blindly
chose black or white and you’re already
down a pawn, like the rest of us.
Harry Bauld was twice first-team All-Ivy shortstop at Columbia and broke Lou Gehrig’s records. (Unfortunately his academic records.) A writer, painter, translator and teacher in the Bronx, he has won awards for work that has appeared in numerous journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included by Matthew Dickman in the anthology Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and has performed in New York and elsewhere as a magician and jazz pianist.
