Poetry above the Roar

At the moment this site will serve to host the lyrics to the songs in the forthcoming CD Poetry above the Roar–the lyrics being ten of my poems that appeared in my 2009 collection Fallow, published with the support of the Tacoma Arts Commission.  (Thank you, Tacoma Arts Commission, for encouraging artists of many genres).  I’ve been fortunate to work with two very talented and generous collaborators since Poetry above the Roar first got underway: composer Gregory Youtz, who initiated the project and whose score for the ten songs covers a range of styles that continues to amaze me; and mezzo-soprano Erin Calata, who interprets the poem-songs with such grace and sensitivity.

In the future, I hope to share some more current writing on this blog, but for now, I’m going to work on getting the poems in Poetry above the Roar online.  

Thanks for stopping by.  

All poems © 2009, 2014, William Kupinse 

After the Flood

I slide the patio door shut
and emerge for the first time this year
barefoot. I run my toe across
the bristling moss that mortars the wet brick.
The air holds everything.
With one damp breath I taste warm tea
swirling with milk and sugar.
The next breath brings an acrid whiff
of nineteenth-century lacquered
museum bones. I close my eyes
and see the dance of paper leaves
on a schoolroom window,
an oaktag choreography
I never could follow. 

I turn to see the river, high but ebbing.
Yesterday I watched it rise to meet the road
and told myself to think about it later—how it bathed
the birches’ swollen knees, how it widened before the road,
how it tried everything before spilling over.
Now, this morning, the sun’s not breaking through,
though it might. Beyond the river, a fallow field
luxuriates in its muddy stubble, cradling chance seeds.
What will the summer bring? Club mosses edging the path,
grassy stretches salted with dandelions.
What joy those days will be,
now that worry nearly has left me.

Fallow

All’s at rest, nothing is happening here.
Yellow grasses crows carried
laze and shimmer in the animated
still life of a disused wheatfield. 

All’s at rest, except the red worms
weaving their lattice work,
the pill bugs scattering the soil,
curling like armadillos at any small threat. 

Nothing’s happening here, but the red and white clover
stitching the ground, fixing
nitrogen with a saint’s patience:
Clover, trifolium, trinity; rhizobium, root of life. 

All’s at rest, except the ant scout’s curved antennae
ground-bent, divining intelligence.
Inches and a world above, the bees
hum and dance, skim data of their own. 

Nothing is happening, as the nuthatch
plucks the pokeweed’s acrid berry:
the land is dreaming with even breaths,
its mind washed in the milk of sleep.

All’s at rest; nothing is happening,
but the earth fixing its memories
of touch taste smell sound sight
and of all the other senses not yet named.

Ferment

drove through the host
of ground apples, each a fistful
yellowgreen halfglobe facing
skyward, spring hue razzing
the heavens’ impermeable grey 

but the earthward hemispheres
would be pulpy brown
worm-stitched and mealy
liquefied past sugar
cider aged in the rind’s winesack

weekly yardsweeps taught me this
balancing three or four boozy
apples in each gloved hand I’d
stumble a dozen clowning
trips to the compost bin

I thought of tales of elephants
drunk on spoiled fruit and
musth charging villages
but my backyard fauna teetotaled
raccoons nibbled only the good side up 

then December I saw into the tree itself
which held a lone apple decayed
to soil’s verge but dangling still
on stem defiant drunk
still on his feet refusing
against advice to call it quits

Slug

Plump stuffed sack of guts
and sundry fluids,
eyeless mystic ever
questing for that perfect
homeostasis.
(A drop is never enough;
a flood, a curse of riches.) 

In the backporch gloom, I struggle
to sort you from your size:
apple twig the wind
brought, clump
of sodden grass cast
in a shoe cleat, careless
cigarette end. 

Abstemiousness
could never serve you whose
hermaphroditic accoutrements
you pack along against
apocalypse or the odd dry spell.

Drink deep but not too deeply
at life’s wells, you teach us,
your flesh a humped
finger of muscle, fleeing
with exquisite leisure
the groundwater’s swell.

A Curse upon Leaf Blowers and the Men who Love Them

In all their zeal for smoke and rattle,
the Futurists never envisioned your leaf blowers
pounding the geometry of row houses.
Yesterday, I cast a spell to charm
the throatwhistlers’ roar
to silence if not wonder,
but once more this morning I hear
their tintinnabulation. 

If not a charm, a curse then:
To all who handle leaf blowers,
may dust enter your eyes
in ounces not in motes.
May you blast away wanted objects,
family photos, bills of medium denomination,
W-9 forms, eyeglass prescriptions,
cards addressed to grandmothers and elderly aunts. 

May the allied evil of lawn trimmers
flay your calves like the self-scourges
of an ascetic monk. May humus turn to ashes,
your golf shorts to sackcloth. May the starter
cord wrap around your neck in dreams.
May your dinner reek of gasoline.
May you some day learn
the meaning of rake.

The Scientist and the Poet

paddle their kayak in reverse unison;
from above they are dragonflies mating in flight,
from below a sea-mammal’s blubbered white keel. 

The scientist has not finished her dissertation,
but in her mind she takes the world apart
and replaces the pieces carelessly lost,
so she is a scientist. The poet
has not finished his book, but he scribbles
on scraps of paper all day, mouthing
the words to the air, so a poet he is nonetheless. 

She reads the temporal maps of tides
while he steers with his feet and spots bald eagles.
They both dream of whales they won’t see. 

Cabbage Island is best approached in a manner
other than the route they take, scraping
the fiberglass hull, cutting their feet on sea rocks. 

Cabbageless, the island shelters everything else:
puffballs, bandit raccoons, thicket-fringed oaks,
deer with sapling legs. And the remains
of exiled Salish men, BC Parks’ sore oversight.

The waves patiently unpack the land,
loosen bones that bring the sleepers strange dreams:
the poet opens a door in the earth; the scientist
sees raccoon people cleaning skulls.

The visions stay with them as they cross,
barely, Boiling Reef, where they shout
above the spray and learn to trust
their arms all the way to Narvaez Bay.

At Saturna Island, poet and scientist moor
their kayak by the brass fittings of forty-foot sloop.
They slick back their saltspray hair, trudge past
sloping vineyards, photograph their winery lunch.

Purple starfish mottle Pender Island’s passage
where the two uncork new bottles
across from the tony docks of Poets Cove Resort. 

Lets go there, pirate-style, the poet says
at dusk, demand a sonnet or make them
walk the plank. She replies, I’m glad
it’s not called Scientists Cove. 

In the morning they float past far rocks
where birthing seals heave sprawling.
The scientist sees genes unfolding,
the poet stanzas shaping themselves.
With their paddle each makes a farewell sign.

Love, the seals answer in expectation;
love the finch sings, as it flits branch to branch; love
the hummingbirds sign in a barnstorm of wooing;
from his eyrie the eagle surveys his prey with love;
the raccoon pair dream of beloved
night when they clam in the bay; love
rubs velvet from the deer’s startling antlers.

A Naturalist’s Prayer

That Francis Galton ran the numbers
and found those names the laity whispered
when they bowed in nightly prayer
—the Royal family, Archbishop of Canterbury—
fared no better than the masses
(so sad when thinkers we despise
conceive an idea that delights)
says nothing: we need prayer
more than prayer needs us. 

A life-spark animates all things,
charged Bergson. Counterswirls
in matter’s wasting breeze, we
organize ineluctably
(so sad when thinkers we admire
sift to historical footnote).
But who’s to say what’s tidier,
windblown ridge or Temple Mount?

Be honest; no pure thought
will move those whose living
is moving mountains. Valuable
by tons, something’s surely hidden
beneath the upright pines’
penetrating roots, or houses
could be stilted on the slope.

Faith never made us kneel,
we kneel to court belief,
and murmuring mouth our intent.
On your knees, then. Praise
all untouched by human hands
(or even the lightly handled);
praise our oversight, our scraps
and leavings—even what the fire
may take before we desecrate
the mapped and calculated acres.

Or, better yet, confirm
that bent close, the needled bough
still trembles when you hold your breath.

Coincidence

Life is so full of coincidence,
its coincidences coincide.
It is coincidental that we live on temperate Earth,
not steamy Venus or vagabond Pluto,
outlier rock and no longer a planet. 

Coincidental ice freezes down not up,
that we exhale CO2, trees oxygen
(despite what Ronald Reagan said),
that lightning struck amino soup, not tomato,
that gravity makes things stick.

Coincidental we grow old, not younger,
that we are mostly larger than our pets,
that rot makes soil, not diamonds,
that wiener dogs are shaped like frankfurters. 

Coincidental dinosaurs are gone
to fill the tanks of thirsty automobiles
in which we drive a numbered country road
threaded through the forest that remains. 

Coincidental I should find two socks
seemingly my size, with cushioned heel
a Van Gogh study lying on the shale
when, in haste, I’ve left mine at home.

Coincidental I should leave them there
sprawled on the stones in sky burial,
and walk sockless to a nameless waterfall
where we shout poetry above the roar.

A Stirring

When the world begins to stir again, these
highways will be the first to go.
Grass will mortar their fine seams, trees
buckle their crust. By the time snow
has leavened our handiwork beyond reproach,
some sad, human part of me imagines
that our retreat to modest hearths was willed, each
mindful of the heft even children’s
boots bear. But I deceive myself;
when the world begins to stir again, it mixes
from scratch, borrows nothing from the shelf
of our concern, our breathlessness, our sexes’
desperate alchemy. Grasp tight
the iron ladle, stir us into night.

Point Defiance

When I visit her, I find
a sea widow scanning the bay,
hair of braided epiphytes
askew, the blast of wind
across the bay
her keening. 

Footpaths cross her heart:
ligatures suture
rags of tissue, strain
against arrhythmia.

In her secret embrace
anomalous snow gathers,
fistfuls of confetti, forgotten
or illswept. Here
breathing calms.

A tree stump older
than the steam engine
strikes, for a second, sunlight
in its mossy hollow. Where rot
succeeds to loam, a splintered branch
of windfall jabs.
Flagless pole, it quivers,
marking a coordinate
which now mostly bores. 

ASARCO’s airborne plume
casts a century’s tumorous shadow
—copper cadmium arsenic—
from Ruston’s clavicle to Vashon’s chin.
More than we, the Greeks understood
a poison that might linger,
but here no Machaon will salve
Philoktetes’ festering wound. 

Orcas passing through the bay,
half your heroes gone,
circle widely, when the seas
diminish, emulate
the octopus, whose
arms grasp the Narrows bridge:
seek out the secret places. 

Leaning back, I descend
a driftwood colossus,
wavetorn taproots flailing —
how long they served, how hard
to relinquish one’s defense. 

The tang of ocean drops
frozen from the air. 

On sand, I turn and see the giant,
angled toward the sea, now
unremarkable; dozens
so fashioned test water. And I 

cannot decide if they are winter sunbathers
or skiffs readying themselves for the sea.