In this freckled dark I confide
to sending moon to arch your tide.
I am not bothered if my light
is only one in constellation’s night.
So long as mine is the one
that to the stars, is the Sun.
Joseph Byron Bennett
For J.B.
Catalpa leaves are gone.
Found worms in the piled dirt because
Cold wasn’t enough for the lake to freeze
It was morning and I did not catch a thing.
His hounds know and bray as it comes:
It is night now and I do not sleep a wink.
Night isn’t enough for train whistles to stop
Around the hole in the earth where
Black geese huddle.
Joseph Byron Bennett
Clocks
How my ears are vexed by the ticking clock;
That two-faced smiling toll a wind-up trick.
Face the first which all human deeds does mock,
Face the second: heavenly hope turned sick.
Once around His hands offer every gift;
Again around His hands demand the cost:
For eager Spring that seed to fruit does lift,
Winter plucks blossoms with fingers of frost.
And His stiffest drink He serves to sip
From a cup ever filling to the top,
As an ejected tire’s rounding trip,
Till I am stomach sick and beg it stop.
Yet I confess on still, dark nights I fear
The climax of the clocks will someday near.
Joseph Byron Bennett
Barnacled hulls passing that clouded night
Barnacled hulls passing that clouded night
Illuminated only in the passing fire of broadsides;
The incoherenced barks of men;
The wet solidarity of our drowned.
In the yards, coarse stevedores remake us
Board by board, wounded and weathered alike replaced:
The captain as well as the cooper,
The surgeon as well as the cook.
If we mates spied each other again today
It would be as fellow admirers of admirals’ monuments;
As port-bound whalers rowing to a gam;
As a squadron in the commodore’s harbor parade.
Joseph Byron Bennett
There is Still
There is still
a birth
of sorts.
There is still
a pain
of sorts.
There is still
a hospital
And none of the doctors are allowed to cry at all.
Joseph Byron Bennett
Summer Rain
The wood murmurs
receives forceful kisses
and her bashful moans are the river in
Absentia. Afterwards,
they speak of Rain.
Sky’s prolonged rend.
Burning Manzanita:
“Some supersonic machine come to gift
us our Bomb,” knowingly
to Cotton-tail.
The striking of
the towhees, the wild sage,
the quail hen hurrying her brood, furtive
Coyote, black bugs; All
us tiny drums.
Joseph Byron Bennett
Air is their Father and sings like a mute
A son named Dawn (who sings sweet)
Exudes until she is a mouse’s tiny gate
And he hears a sad voice return to him
(Air is their Father and sings like a mute)
And she hears a sweet voice return to her
Subsumes until he is a far-off window light
A daughter named Dusk (who sings sad)
Joseph Byron Bennett
Upon the bank of a trail coils she
Upon the bank of a trail coils she
In the rising light gleaming bronze and white.
She betrays no warning; A compass her,
Attuned to knowings pulling point to pole.
All aligned into astrolabe angles,
Her tongue tastes what the scrub whispers hotly,
And her head turns east; approaching are
footsteps.
Joseph Byron Bennett
“Six more weeks of winter still”
“Six more weeks of winter still”
Sighs Grandpa Groundhog
As he does
Every.
Six.
Weeks.
My, he must be warm in his hidey-hole
While we shiver in the blizzard of his proclamations
But Spring’s trembling light strikes yet
And the first green shoot pierces
His house.
Joseph Byron Bennett
That a man can be strewn about Santa Monica Boulevard
That a man can be strewn about Santa Monica Boulevard
and the Angelinos divert in the elemental mode of
water circling a stone.
Then the hostess calls for me with a stenciled smile:
I am at the front of the line
And should forget the broken ride.
Joseph Byron Bennett
Bennett Diction 