Three More From Wild Once and Captured

I haven't followed through yet on setting up on-line sales for Wild Once and Captured, but I'd be happy to sell people a copy and mail it directly to them. I'll pay the postage, but you'll have to mail me a check for $16 to get the book. If I know you and you want me to inscribe the copy I send, I'd be happy to do it.

In fact, I'm really enjoying writing something personal to people I know who want a copy. It forces me to think hard about the person I'm writing to, and it turns out that there's always something in particular and individual about them that makes whoever they are special to me. It shows a little bit of the value of focusing on the people around you. (And, I find that I still have plenty of time otherwise to think about me.)

If I don't know you, but you still want me to inscribe something, tell me about yourself. We will find a point of connection that way, I'm sure.

But even if the real goal of writing Wild Once and Captured is to put a copy in as many hands as I can, I still gotta get paid. Send a check for $16 to Jeff Epton, 3735 17th Place NE, Washington, DC, 20018 and I'll send you Wild Once and Captured, which, by the way, is not a reference to some personal characteristic of me, but a reference to Justice, who was wild once, and captured, but has also broken out again (and again, as necessary).

The Courage All Around

Late-night honest

with myself

My boy shames me

The courage he shows

drumming at the Metro

Spare change pours in

Folded bills drifting like

snow covering his lap

Ten years old, first

sharing a buck

with a woman who asks,

then shooing her away

when she won’t stop

asking for more

He goes about his business,

a lionheart tending his

pride of intentions,

while I flinch at the work

before me, at stepping up

before you, at speaking my piece

But where he’s heading,

where heart and skill

and the company of others,

the company of you,

colleagues with an instinct

to be movement and reach

we can believe in,

that place, that thought, swells

my heart The world you will build

beckons and beguiles

and because the heart is

a complicated thing

I feel no shame here

I feel the courage all around

Lives In Progress

When So-and-so met her

she was already Much-the-much.

Lucky first is sweet and

So-and-so and Much-the-much

felt smiled upon and loved.

The thing got good.

Got better still.

Near peaked.

The best seemed a handhold away,

but not luck, nor will

nor providence gave boost

and So-and-so and Much-the-much

passed all the signposts going down.

But this had yet to unfold,

preceded, as it were,

by the years  when

Clear-headed and Hard-nosed

stalked fresh and deep and

sperm-spewing into the yielding

valley of the Great Green River

and the path to boys and girls was

blazed. Blazed.

And this was cause for celebration

without biblical precedent.

So here we are

10,000 years later,

give or take an Ice Age or

some geological wink, still celebrating.

Clearly this one is a party

whose guests have rooted deep

long after So-and-so and Much-the-much

have forgotten that they were and who.

For their survivors,

coming after lights-out:

Begin anew you Eve,

you Adam. It’s Friday,

and the party starts now, if you will.

But it would not hurt to keep in mind

that how you begin has much, quite much,

to do with how all this concludes.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

The surface is a lonely place.

There’s no air,

no water, nothing erodes.

The rocks are sharp.

The interior’s hot. Wet.

Air’s too thick.

Water drips, pools.

Swamps abound.

Shades and silhouettes,

weightless, multiply.

The lonely places are not private places.

Nothing’s fully realized in the hot interior.

But when the striving stops,

the clamor, the cleaving,

the thunderous dividing stops,

then the lake breeze blows,

babies cry delight,

communities spring up to dance,

and great ideas come from

all their hiding places.

More Poems from Wild Once and Captured

Boys and Men

Sinewy dreams filled

with blinding light.

Boys flexing, pulsing,

bragging, ambitious with life.

Men seeking shares of day,

shares of night.

Dreams of boys and men carry me

toward a land of dip and lift

where boys like men like me

bound and soar on good days,

and on bad days struggle to stand straight

and still.

Rocket Science

It was the different leaves

of a different tree

rustling in the wind

a millennium ago.

Or a millennium ahead,

as if now and then mattered.

I was the first woman to say no,

or the next,

as if refusing to be property

set some kind of record.

But this is my story of yes,

of laying myself down

on my cushion of gathered moss.

Of laying myself

between earth and sky

while a swell of crickets

kissed the breeze around us.

Our hearts fluttered with the rise

of a second swell and soared

with the music of different birds

in the different bushes nearby.

To this man I did say yes,

yes, as his breath feathered my thighs.

Hunting by scent, arriving at the

place of my dawning, of his awakening,

briefly converging,

the trembling dream of ancestors,

in the moment eternal.

Coming together at a bonfire

of youth and passion,

the fluid crescendo

of our merge and merge, again,

briefly forgetting she who I alone will deliver

(though she will one day launch

poems to the stars).

We sang to each other.

Applause Is Overrated

Of all the workouts,

this run down by the

river of our downbeat,

this stretching of the heart

muscle, this reaching for

who you were, for how you

are now, for the nature of your

next epiphany,

is only the beginning

of me here thinking about

you ready

to play

the game you find

yourself in now. This is how

you fill the outline of all you

meant to be,

willful and wilding,

a minute late and a step too far.

You get up, and you go,

you go girl, live this day

and fuck the

deafening silence.