Two Poems by Lee Herrick

I can't resist. Here are a couple of poems from my manuscript (under consideration at a few presses) called This Many Miles from Desire.

ARS POETICA

Yes, the ocean is Buddhist. And the foam
scrambling onto the beach is a symphony
of cymbals, small and caring like mothers
whispering to their children in the front pew,
sssshhh. Perhaps then the trees should
believe in God. Of course. How they reach
straight up after all those years like the Chinese
grandmothers rising at dusk, when the air's
cleanest, an orchestra of their own, stretching
toward the sun. None of this is true. The ocean
is only Buddhist beacuse a poet writes of it
that way--just like the grandmothers who keep
surfacing in his poems, usually dancing
somewhere near a body of water, blissfully.



Published in The Peralta Press, Spring 2004.


ADOPTION MUSIC

I am learning to play the taiko, to feel
how leaves reappear in the trees with such ease.
One monk says this will teach me to hear
the variations of my name:
how my lover sighs it,
how a teacher grinded it out like a curse,
how your mother says it, drowning in a lake
before she leaves you. How it means somewhere
between mothers, not quite the rose
but not quite the roots. Like the woman
who finds you says, Lee, like a discovery--
one more child found in the world's history
of found children. How she said it like the echo
of one plucked E string, a clear pang of delight.



Published in The Willow Review, Spring 2004.