STIRRING UP THE BOTTOM
We have started a poetry revival in historic Shockoe bottom and shall continue to stir it here on the 
World Wide Web.

 

Sun Flower Press    1968
 
 Clippings

They surprised me taking pictures, 
wanting to know how I was when 
poems were just beginning to form in my mouth.
Why so soon, the cameras, all the concerns,  
the attention. How could I know what 
I really wanted to do? Or what was burning.
I couldn’t tell them I didn’t care about 
endangered species or the peasant struggle, 
or even Viet Nam, not then anyway.

It was early yet, 
a time to notice the trees 
Gone missing from my memories, 
the ones my boyhood ran among 
thinking I saw sprites.
Cadmium orange fire 
had not laid stroke to canvas 
nor had smoke of wild laurel colored my gaze.

What consumes me now, only smoldered.

I will have another life to explain all this, 
Stumbling into whimsy 
and purple tinted figures
In the gray. Pages more to come.

I’m not ready to be buried 
in a newspaper clipping.

Information dither is like a man who talks 
While eating a sandwich on the way to work, 
Mentioning your vita and bios offhandedly, 
A mouth full of dough and sporadic interest

My crayons and water color tins are still open.
I won’t put them away 
just so you can find out what 
I worry about late at night, 
my brand of solace.

I’m busy coming home from 
places I create and yet cannot describe, 
the party world I inspire and 
cannot control. 
They have no memory of me.

I have seen the performance of their lives, 
not mine.

Swinging on the gate 
I watch the cows stampede 
Into the future, my youth over, 
but not my youthfulness.

I am content to burn a bagel, eat eggs, 
watch a fat milk pod ripen, dry and burst, 
spreading seed, and wing across my yard, 
smell the clippings moldering 
in the compost heap, but have no desire 
To weed out a single patch of three leaf clover.

©Jimmy Warner, 2002