ROBIN HOOD

Study my focus,

my steady bow, as I aim

to split the arrow.

                          

FEROCIOUS CURIOSITY

I survey your eyes,

sense stories of ancient lives,

feel my cells explode.

GHOSTS

cloudy-sky fragments

edging through tree leaves: hazy

screens of memory

OLIVIER READS DAVID’S PSALMS

Birthday sonnet

for William Packard

I hear your clear voice these five years later:

“David’s psalms are the greatest collection

of verses.” As if on elevators,

we huddled in silence, blank reflections

on faces, left mute by your legend.

Stout-bodied, heavy-bearded, unoffended,

you with searchlight eyes refused to pretend

we had heard: “I’ll repeat that.” And you did.

Now, listening alone to Olivier’s

sharp consonants crack like crisp lettuce,

I wonder how you’d respond to his ways

of altering tone from lisping softness

to shouts. Still, I pray for what David sees:

“…he shall give his angels charge over thee…”

Roger Armbrust               

September 2, 1999

BODY ELECTRIC

Don’t sugarcoat it,

my love. Cauterize the wound

and French kiss my scream.

FOREST INTO CITYSCAPES

for Gabriel Solis

You call your acrylic painting “Forest

Glen.” Yet I perceive in your impression

two cityscapes viewed from distance: Myth’s blessed

Emerald City to our right, vision

of shadowed buildings caped in jade, circled

by an emerald river suddenly

morphing to burnished gold as current curls

and surrounds our hazed sister entity:

Metropolis. There our Man of Steel waits

to answer our Wizard’s call, solemn vow

to save who they can—their citizens great

with brush and pen, with solemn prayer followed

by meditation—they who search within.

Can you see them? Will our daughters see them?

Roger Armbrust

July 6, 2014