The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Book With The Yellow Cover, by John Moncure Wetterau

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below ** ** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. **

Title: The Book With The Yellow Cover

Author: John Moncure Wetterau

Release Date: February 9, 2004 [eBook #11006]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK WITH THE YELLOW COVER***

Copyright (c) 2003 by John Moncure Wetterau

The Book With

The Yellow Cover

John Moncure Wetterau

(c) copyright 2003 by John Moncure Wetterau.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. Essentially, anyone is free to copy, distribute, or perform this copyrighted work for non-commercial uses only, so long as the work is preserved verbatim and is attributed to the author. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to: Creative Commons 559 Nathan Abbott Way Stanford, California 94305, USA.

ISBN #: 0-9729587-0-3

Published by:
Fox Print Books
137 Emery Street
Portland, ME 04102

[email protected] 207.775.6860

Some of these poems first appeared in: Poetry East-West, The Maine
Sunday Telegram, The Maine Times, Nostoc, Backwoods Broadsides,
H.O.M.E., Headcheese, Chants, Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series, Café
Review, and To Keep You Company.

for w.cat

I had a book of Chinese and Japanese poems that I gave to a friend on the west coast. It was a very small book with a yellow cover, stapled together. No adornments. Just the poems, alive after hundreds of years. J.M.W.

The Japanese Mason

Without haste, gathering scrape of the trowel, slap of cement, reaching for a block, setting and tapping it level, turning with the wheelbarrow, graceful, sweating, freed of every moment.

Kauai

Sweet Hawaii

Even if somebody did steal my battery, generator, oil cap, visegrips last night, I passed the test to be a taxi driver, and even if I don't have the money to buy a Charley's Taxi shirt, congratulations to me. I'll figure something out. I'll have coffee in Everybody's Bake Shop; I'll write Varve and Finn, tell them I love them, tell them sweet Hawaii going to be our new home.

Honolulu

Bus Stop

14, eyes of a deer
       in bamboo.

16, heavier, going to school
       without her books.

                  King Street
                  Honolulu

For Rob

Handsome Rob. Half the women hate you; the other half will give you anything. Deep in Nam: your buddy shot, tracheotomy. "He died happy," you told me, "he believed I was going to save him." Perhaps he knew he would lie in your arms forever.

Too Big

Listening to Schubert while Great-Aunt Hannah embroiders on the wall, and darkness closes— what have we come to? We've gone wrong, too big to find our way by song, light falling on a face and handkerchief, illumination in the manner of Rembrandt.

Peter's Answer

Little Blue Heron, young, still white, by the north causeway bridge— stick legs, too thin for the swelling body, the visual weight of feathers, stepping slowly in shallow water, long toes trailing limply, then extending, three splayed forward, one back. Brilliant neck curving, poised. Dagger beak the same gray as legs and toes. Why is nature beautiful? The lust for pattern, Peter said. The heron's head rose and twisted, circular eye, light brown, orange rimmed, ancient intelligence asking a different question. I was unmoving, not dangerous. The heron turned to hunt, brush, a cloud above the river.

       New Smyrna Beach,
       Florida

Wally's Poem

Dolphins surge up and under.
Mozart's soprano
stitches the heart together.
Washes for a watercolor.

An ant crosses my foot. Wallace Klitgaard; Epitome of Splendor— ants, sun, one's lot. He typed it himself, showed it to me on the bus 38 years ago. He was grinning, the glad no age that we become, bent to making clumsy prayer.

Morning, Maine Honolulu

Early mist breaking on low tide, mud smell. Ducks, the small birds, the rooster down the road begin to sing the air, the light, the whole enormous chance

grateful as the old people reclaiming Pauahi Street, seeing each other in doorways after the night.

I Would

In 1948 I walked all the way to 14th Street to buy a bow and arrow. It was 30 cents; I had 29.

The woman sold it to me anyway and I was free and happy on Sixth Avenue as any Indian.

If I could find her tonight,
I would keep death far away.

For Anita Bartlett,
Too Late

Why cannot blue be enough? Light in the sky, dark in the sea, the shades between. The green of fields, red clover, buttercups. Bridal white of apple blossoms, burial earth, hawk's feather, snakeskin. Monarchs, Anita, feeding on purple aster, fluttering up, sun glowing orange, brown, bronze through black edged wings, twenty joining twenty joining a hundred, down, up, over, from color to color to Mexico.

Clouds booming over the washed woods, blue sun, Finn eats chop suey from a pot while I shave. Six months to dismantle the dead rooms of a marriage, down to a borrowed tent, patches of snow, and invisibly, all around us, sap rising in its own sweet time.

April, Maine

Alexis

Icons, coal mines, Ten Mile Creek, the Monongahela, a long way to this house by the Kennebec, sitting erect, brushing your hair, fire and peace in your cheeks, preparing for the further steppes of feeling.

Back In Town

Billy Frailly's got a new shirt, shaved and walking down the road ready for anything. When I was in fifth grade Billy powered his bike up Church Hill (black Stetson, yellow kerchief). I helped him shovel out Mrs. Cowell's parking place. He did most of the work, but he split the money fifty-fifty. He's an outcast now; no frontier he can reach. But he's not crying, and we know there is no virtue, only consequence and the sometimes music of a new shirt.

Woodstock

Bluejay