The Marking of Years

Aleathia says:

From the alley it's clear
that summer is fading.

Tomatoes hang heavy and over ripe,
neglected on the vine from gardeners
giving up on their bounty.

Pools sit half empty, collecting leaves
and late flowers,
some have deflated
and look forlorn without tiny bodies
in colorful suits splashing about.

The temperature is better for walking,
the sun still warming the skin
between clouds and high country winds.

The night whispers a chill
and sweatshirts find their way
onto arms and in backpacks.

It is the time for all things to settle in,
to take stock of their future
and smile on the past.

We are winding down,
we are becoming silent and fragile.
Our years marked with another season.

Aleathia Drehmer 2016

Every Road Has An Ending, poem

Every Road Has An Ending

Early morning rain spreads a sheen
over the new blacktop the city laid down
this summer after digging gas lines
through the neighborhood.

It smells of wet leaves
and mushrooms,
of endings and church bells,
of memories best left in the ground.

My legs move me up the hill,
heavy and tired, but still finding
the electrical impulses to fly one foot
ahead of the other. I feel all my years
on this earth in the bones of my grinding right hip.

I'm surrounded by gold leaves
and the sun warms the back of my head
without asking. The hills come alive for a minute,
surfacing beneath clouds that threaten
more rain and this makes me think of you.

You who've I've not consciously brought to mind in months,
you who I can't find in my heart to forgive for both living and dying,
for you who has left me in limbo one last time.

My nose runs and my eyes water
captured here, sun warmed and heart cold,
waiting for the winter gray that will swallow me
whole
again
and keep me from living in the moments
that matter most.

Aleathia Drehmer 2015

Lit Bits-10/22/2014 Frank O'Hara

Aleathia says:

Yes.  Winter is coming and through the summer I longed for this time when the world gets crisp and cool; when everything turns on its true nature to somehow work against you.  Like a reflex this weather makes me long for spring.  I love the in-between times.  I love the palpable feeling of change that tips the scales so slightly.  So in light of that feeling you will receive a poem by Frank O'Hara.

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from Jazz, Surrealism, Abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and in content and described as reading "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends".O'Hara's writing "sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.

(bio from Wikipedia)


Aus Einem April

                       We dust the walls.
                       And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
      Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
          and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
              isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
              It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.