Colorado writer finds poetry in everyday life
(Photo: Courtesy of Mike Henry)Colorado poet Michael Henry dives into everyday life to find moments that connect. Inspirations include an email from Amazon, a trip to the optometrist, or his daughters playing with dandelions.
He is executive director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver and his latest book of poetry is called "Active Gods." This poems explore different stages of life from childhood to old age.
SEAM Desires bloom and yearn like they always do. You are never satisfied, just like your father, a shark in the harbor slashing his way through all those dopey seals. How unlike your mother, who crocheted hours on end, hunched and near-sighted, sighing. You and he are seam rippers, you tear and rend. Sinews crack and separate, like when you used to brawl, when you fractured your fist and jaw, those small nickels and pins of bone. At night you ran through the drab streets howling like a wild dog. You kissed the rain-glistened sidewalk, stomped the puddles. You ground your teeth to the searing pain, made a fist of your shattered hand, glory in the feeling of hurt and the feeling that it was all so wrong, as if someone had pulled the main seam inside you, had unlooped the long junction of your body and soul, and you knew if you went fully with it, you’d fall apart, into mere bolts of cloth.
INCESSANTLY My daughters huff dandelion seeds at my face and the air is all fuzzy miniature parachutes, and so I must produce a loud fake sneeze. They love to make me do such things. They collect more and do it again, the weak stems collapsing on themselves, white milk ooze, the park made a weed bed, and when they both run away they are not the butterflies whose wings in turn will whip up a typhoon off the coast of Japan or the stomp of a polar bear that washes away the pillared legs of a house in Key West, but each girl is in this world a spirit that surely knocks me to my knees with gale force winds and tidal washes. Reprinted from Active Gods by Michael J. Henry with permission of Conundrum Press, a division of Samizdat Publishing Group LLC and Michael Henry. Copyright (c) Michael Henry, 2014. |
