Guy A. Perkins

  Guy first thanks Poetry Magazine for allowing him to hang his work on the wall. He has written over 130 poems (that he's kept), 30 short stories, two one act plays (one of them produced at Lake Tahoe as the winner of a one-act contest), two versions of a children's book and one novella. He is currently seeking a publisher for his novel, LOYAL, and is well into a second book entitled, SKIN WEEKEND.

E-Mail Guy at GperkLake@AOL.com

Green

Trees.
Thousands of green skies
and ground under rain.

How is it with you?
Do your pure white limbs
uproot like chickweed or thyme
and cover thought with lightning
like a dove lonely on telephone wire?

I open this green heart for miles
so you will see the exalting seam
quietly growing older than anything
and swallowing health,
expecting you to touch my shoulder
as if you were here
inside me inside you,
as if poetry could do something.

Drowned by sun spreading this color,
comes my flesh but not the meaning,
its power misplaced,
lifelong relinquished to symbols
that take frail willing ignorance.

Green my hand,
green the tongue that speaks love
over the electric distance
believing every word you spoke
but not saved by the end at last.

Formal Mimesis

Dirt prettier than people, soft loam country, rock hard shells tilting,
    nearly airless lichen. All change those
    who, like massing gods, dwell intolerant by depositions
    on loaded toad stools and dotted strands.
    Anything not human forms science fiction:
    crisscrossing gods'-human with that which we would make human
    like corn flakes into energy into champions into drug pushers.
    This way, the way of political gods and their foreseen opportunities
    around, stands capable beyond any patient chimpanzee
    on Africa's West Coast.
    Nothing surpasses the blades of the all greater selves. Extinguished
    fronds come to undusted history; wind follows scaled dimensions;
    the god leaves land parcels hard as skin, as the
    following winter moon's ignored attraction.
    FORMAL grit is music and drawing and dance, the beat
    of feet upon birthing clay, upon the round ball.

Moonlight, long garments of moonlight lake and speaking cords,
    beauty of beauty. Lustrous Stars and moon travel giant blueblack
    high water to the shimmered spread water.
    These are the words, patent being worlds
    remember or imagine or wish for by indeterminate
    remembering. They are this, escorted and interested,
    inserted improvident under their might.
    They are ample and tarry to reward effortlessness.
    They are moonlight's past flooding the surface
    light from the bottom continuing the explanation.
    Observe the pine followed waves for anything as accurate.
    Check for light words on the water, unexplicable past
    illumined, suckled past,
    drawn it to the watery mouth.
    It says that's what is unmistakable to
    uncertainty made clear for whole words old light deep chilled by
    time: pure simple complications and few sheer numbers.

Past makes the stage present. These link
    furthered words not yet floating the imagined future,
    just as confusing as light,
    until old surfaces list believable memories.
    Sweet. Sad. Connections. Sweet, sad in the shivery air,
    night's unlit water around a shimmering moon. Words as big
    as stars lying on the sky.

Morning,

sometimes you wash me
like an ocean
before I know what's happened,
wonderfully saying
I might happily be a gardener.

In those intervals
without imagined God,
you paint big pictures on everything,
from the red velveteen angel food cake
across the bottom of your clouds
to me,
often an unnecessary inconvenience
between you there and here.

Increase these blessings
as I try to understand why
seven adolescent girls sitting on a curb
talk incessantly
while waiting for their breasts to erupt.

Shapes
Jeannette
Nick's

37
Rapidly, shadows wend
mountain and foothill silhouetting
as if unmanaged by change.
"It's just the passing sun
tilting North and towing South,"
not misunderstood hurtling expansion.
The same shadow's life
delivers inches bouncing
distant towered monoliths --
sun stretched or cloud smothered
to night's touchless light,
bright but broken, too small
for rendering.

107
The salon woman's flat glow
shortened, concedes a foreign helix
circumscribed by falling lacquered vanities.
It knows neither mountain nor jetting aural energy.
It fixes the next unknown dollar.
It bears ignorance and disregard,
subjugating fashion's tour de force, cynic and wit
to employed shades.
It aspires and attaches to
what sits above uncasted, a corresponding shape
grotesque to the visible and invisible
silent ambition
middle classified, one dimensional, spurious, exclusive.

119
Toned downtown headlight people
swing buildings and concrete walks
exposed by the converted pizza joint,
a hard place for shadows desperately textured
crossing or walking the highway street.
Long to short, frozen jumping,
conspiratorially under raw foot:
true people business
upon people results
passing charted light
without tinted mountain suggestions,
without closed designing
the planned, parsimonious futures
of miss light's realm.

Untitled

the world closes so
i read you faster:
your 1954 metaphoric
rising, your 1989
affliction for ripe verse,
obscurity and intact ambivalence,
the doublespeak anger
that tied firm
commonality
and low networks
to the crowding, rising,
ugly, collective man
who voted his humor
and followed greed around
as a coming of christ with obvious board feet.

i creased
your 1967 recollection
of a best friend's wife
keeping grape shingles
and paramilitary best wishes,
your 1960 draft of his
sister standing on the rain barrel
in her sunday school weekend chore
clothes,
and 1961 revision
of her
when she died
without a breath of sunday in her.

this is the paste
and clutching that compressed me
delivered
from the pale middle air.

you told me wash the
stones and matching feet
i found -
in material words
and with adjusting poets,
lie on soaked pages
mushed and slid, factual and eminent
in regarding hands.

you will not see
these speckled ants,
as in the beginning,
unqualified remnants.
i did them around an
incoming world
with hopes of lying
beside you
and not missing
our traveling disparate speeds,
inconsonant equilibrium
thrust and drag.

(to the postmodern american poets for doing it.)