East of Java
My first real taste of the day
Is bittersweet
I simply mean my morning cup of coffee
To which, yes, I add
Something sugary,
Which means I set it up
The contradiction and the paradox
First thing
First need
C L Couch
Coffee berries with insect bites.
Jyppe Quidores – Own work
Five, Sixty-Two, and More
We are getting on
I want God to be simple
But the cosmos is made with
Such small things
Nuclei, electrons
Unless we have it wrong
And atoms are huge
But we don’t know the context
We’ve barely started searching out
The story of the universe
We see, we listen
We know the sounds of space
So far
Maybe when we know the taste
And touch more than moon rocks
(which I did not at the museum,
thank you very much)
Maybe when know the scent of galaxies
We’ll understand something of
The process of creation
The scale of something like
The hand of God
The eye, the nose, the ear
The tongue
Everything that gave us
Anything
And then how to understand it
In the morning of discovery, of greeting
Face to face
And sense to sense
The one who saw, who heard, who smelled, who
Tasted, and who touched us first
C L Couch
Lubo Kristek: Monument to the Five Senses, 1991, metal sculpture, 450 cm, collection of the Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech
By Info-kultur – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20245863
Well, Go Upstairs and Write Something
I hope it’s true, this story
We were told by the poet:
There was a christening,
All the family there
They arrived, and it was only
Upon entry that these two understood
That everyone had brought
A gift but, sigh, them
They had nothing but attendance,
Which maybe should have
Been enough
But she leaned into him
And said, Well, go upstairs
And write something!
He did, a lyric for a child just
Entering the world with a
Name and little else
But the gifts and now some
Brand-new words
C L Couch
(Seamus Heaney in a talk at school, given in the late eighties)
Picture of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney at the University College Dublin, February 11, 2009.
Sean O’Connor, cropped by Sabahrat – File:Seamus Heaney.jpg
I Want to be a Real Boy
I want to be a real boy
For the telling of one story, then another
We were beautiful once
Then chips and lines
A crack
Evidence of erosion
The strings need replacing
There should be more paint
And maybe I could have more writing
For the show
We were lean
But then came dessication
We thought we knew better
Than Gepetto,
Went out on our own
For metamorphosis
With the final threads
Last ligaments
We crawl home
To beg the crafter use some skill
Toward our repentance
Being in the world
Has not made us real
The question presses into
All the places that were open,
Bleeding
To the sky
What might happen
Once I’m better
Tears would warp fine lines
Now fixed
But if I might split open
As lightning opens night,
I must do something
Maybe I could talk with the maker
For allowance
Then gather experience
And evidence more carefully
Little do I know
A shark, big enough for two or three
Or maybe more,
Is on the way
C L Couch
Escultura articulada de Pinotxo, Museu Internacional de Titelles d’Albaida (MITA).
Joanbanjo – Own work
The Adventures of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi
(1883)
Corollary Written Late into the Magic Book
In an ancient chamber,
He was locked to a device
And made to drink a potion;
Then she began
An interrogation
His answers were halting,
Brief, and
Unsatisfying
She grew angry, threatened him
With turns of wheels to
Bring down spikes
He cried out
He could do no better—
For he had deceived himself so long
That the truth was not in him
To tell,
It having been tried and tried again
For such a time
That finally it fled
The eldritch liquid moved inside
As if it dripped into
Another empty vessel
She drew back
And thought about
The habitation of the tiger
C L Couch
https://pixabay.com/en/bottle-glass-bottle-old-root-tree-3942225/
Mister Sanders Speaks
I may not know much
But I can wonder
Why the sky is blue
And my balloon is green
And will I reach the tree
With all the honey
Why there is a name on my home
Of someone I don’t know
Who counted out
The hundred acres of our wood
And why does Piglet
Help me in all the plans I make
Despite the fact that
I am of small brain
He is so good, my human friend
He could come by more often
Maybe find a way to keep
The tail on the donkey
So that we could
Hunt the Heffalump
And play
And find more honey
And better still,
Eat more honey
Christopher Robin Couch
(Pixabay)
Evidence Unsee
God
Our hope
Our refuge
We need to say
We need to sing
Because the world-storm rages
All about
And we believe ourselves adrift
So easily, so often
Every day
Because we are only, well, you know
And in the way we do
We must
Rely on what is, like perjured
Testimony, inadmissible
In human courts
C L Couch
(image from Pixabay)
(in the title, I left off the n to make a new word in the Old-English, English way)
(congratulations to the groundhog Phil from Punxsutawney, who did not see his shadow today, auguring an early spring)
A (Classic) Comedy Tonight
It’s a cinematic day
When I will look too closely
At items on the corner of
The table
Or on the kitchen counter
As a cut
A camera angle
A quick shot in a movie
A montage
Of textures, surfaces, light
And shadow:
Of orange peelings in a paper towel
A clear, squat square canister of cottonballs
By the bathroom sink
Winter sunshine slanting over the tabletop
Illuminating piles of books
I mean to read
There’s a setting
And a set
And how it’s dressed
Maybe I’ll find something
On television
Maybe in a book
I mean to read
Something with good guys, maybe
Bad guys
Characters
Easily identified
So that I know who’s who
Whom to cheer on
To celebrate
(could be everyone)
When the final conflicts are resolved
Cue catharsis
C L Couch
https://shakespeare.emory.edu/as-you-like-it/
https://shakespeare.emory.edu/
caption: Miss Lily Brayton./As “Rosalind” in “As You Like It.” [sic]
The Artist of the Beautiful
When I was a child
My oldest brother gave me a plastic car
He had a model kit
And applied blue and paint
And his ingenuity
To make it beautiful
Why he gave it to me, I don’t know
I was not known for being careful
And he told to take care with it
To keep it whole and as it was
I did not
Maybe if he hadn’t said anything
I’d have done better
But in a while, not so little while, it
Was ruined
And now five decades later
I still feel badly
It’s possible, though I doubt I will inquire,
He doesn’t remember any
Of this
C L Couch
notes
title a title of a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne
http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/124/, one place to find it
(image)
Bill Abbott – Beautiful 1/24 Ford Thunderbird above, port quarter fancy paint
clcouch123 
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