Thanks for these, Mark: a fitting way to remember...
He was for some time & fine presence here, & certainly then on FB...
Always praising & printing others....
Doug
On 2011-09-28, at 10:31 AM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> When I saw Frank last winter he seemed fine, though the cancer had been brewing in him for a long time. We thought it had left his body. I spoke to him last week. He really loved the morphine. He told me that he might with luck have a couple of years left. I think he said that to make me feel better--he didn't need his friends to mourn while he was there to hear it.
>
> Here are three untitled poems from Frank's 2009 chapbook "zig-zag journeys."
>
>
> Almost out of the sky, half of the moon
> Makes a cross of mourning between my eyes
> Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything
>
> Your breast is enough for my heart
> I have said that you sang in the wind
> You gather things to you like an old road
>
> I have gone marking the atlas of your body
> Stories to tell you on the shore of evening
> I who live in a harbor between the lips and the voice
>
>
>
> A full moon in the birdbath, a perfect circle of
> ice blunting sparrow beaks. Cold stings the
> first knuckle of each finger breaking pieces of
> bread from a slice now half its original size. I
> laugh out loud at the morning headlines, "St.
> Francis of Tucson, Bread Man to the birds,
> found wanting for nothing ever again, a freeze
> in a cactus garden of the Tucson Basin."
>
>
>
> what wind blows the Mexican Palo Verde
> the cactus wren
>
> my footsteps confess
> no special talent
>
> one sneaker follows the other
> into a brilliant make believe I know I know
>
> Mother Father Sun and Moon
> Hi O Silver and away
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
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Why poetry? And why not, I asked,
my right brain humming sedition.
Phyllis Webb
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