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Best Poems Written by Eric Ashford

Below are the all-time best Eric Ashford poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Not Dead

It was reported that she had died,
but I saw her
months after the obituary.

She came to me in a dream naturally,
the mind has to be as relaxed
as a three-toed-sloth
before it can report any intelligence to us.

I knew her, the way a distant relative
knows you from an old black and white photo.

Anastasia: a crazy name for an Irish woman,
but actually quite common
in the long buried book of Celtic Memories.

I was hanging-out under my eyelids,
the way a winter sun hangs under a winter tree,
or a sloth hangs from a moist lichen reverie
maybe.

When Anastasia - her 80 year old hair
flying on countless dove-gray moonbeams 
came to me,
a pitter-pattering of soft rain
falling onto my big, round, brown,
dreaming eyes.

“I am not dead, and you are not dead.”
She said.

I should have been afraid
but fear takes much more energy
than I had at that moment.

I heard myself answer:
“Then you are alive”?

The soft rain continued to speak:
“Did I say that”? 

That’s all I remember.

Later, just for we big thinkers,
I commenced to rummage
through the long buried book
of Celtic Memories.

It was then that, ever so slowly,
I remembered.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

A Landscape of Her Own

After the funeral,
the town changed its street maps,
old houses were relocated. new shops opened
in long emptied malls.

They had never shared their likes or interests,
they had not even shared an equitable life;
now she understood the changing landscape.

Before his death, the town was seen
through his own lens only;
he was ever determined
to shape her view, make her see things his way.

After this post-mortem revelation,
She recalibrated her car’s GPS:
It takes her now
to the as yet
unseen.

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Replanted

He was airlifted to another place.
The heaths, the dales,
the high ridges,
all began to slip away
under throbbing wings.

(When you are unearthed,
roots still wriggle,
flecks of native mud
cling to your senses
and come with you.
A sediment makes its way
inside wrinkles and pockets.
Places you have slept on,
waded across,
had breezy sex over,
tether your turf).

He began to plant.
He left lichen trails
on the faux marble floors of shopping malls.
he placed moss under plastic rocks.
In time he discovered good clay in a new land.
If asked:
to what country he belonged?
He would show the dirt
under his fingernails.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

Fine Dining On Air France

We’re monopolized by the Saran-wrapped food,
the plastic cutlery,
absorbed by the clutter of the food tray.

Numbed by hours of jiggling,
the carting of torpid bodies through interminable distance,
we’re wedged now into boredom, uncomfortably numb.

Anesthetized – we fear nothing.
If the aircraft stalls, few will scream.
We’ll keep decanting small bottles of vin de table,
butter buns.

As the aircraft plummets
and drops like a stone to certain death
we’ll still be struggling with condiment sachets,
coffee creamers, with small, molded cruets

oblivious now to anything less important.

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A Rural Station

A former place this, a patch where roots rattle,
where stubble has a ferrous frizzle.
A long truncated railroad stop
humming still within a surrogate reality.
As dry voices on the wind, they return
- the homesteaders and journeymen,
the harnessed horses.
Pants' cuffs carry kernels
long planted elsewhere.
Caps, coats, and carts
employed again by the magnetic
echos of an iron labor.
The brown weeds are talkative.
Brown boots seem to shuffle.
A hollow clock clacks,
its guts a nest for ticking birds.
Dandelions anticipate
a faraway flight,
A mid-day heat 
thrums fragmented rails.
The station seems almost ready
to receive
as if its world
had not disembarked forever.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

Fire On the Ohio River

My boat rocks gently under a reddening sun,
is it wrong to wish for a Viking burial,
to ponder a last journey West
into the dying light?

Strangers have always been my friends,
they intuit
the liquid and inflammable nature
of this thing we do.

I could rest my soul here in this skiff
on this one long warm wave of evening;
let the wooded lands and sloping meadows,
the dredged, smoke-stacked barge brimming ports,
the patched up river towns slip on by
under the kindling sails of evening clouds.

I am laid out like a homeless person
bundled up in my rags and tinder,
a shadow in a small boat, drifting.
Night falls to the water
the words of strangers flame high
fire starters and their poems gleaming
as the dark rushes in.

I hitch the boat to a stump of land,
still imagining a Viking funeral,
but also resigned to a tomorrow -
yet another strange place
to play with this fire.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

Her Life As a Poem

She was big-boned.  Her spirit
a fine-spun sprouting of prairie brome
threaded through moss and engine block.
Her home was a pine and beatboard camp
for wayward cats.
She would discourse from her tangled porch
where poems grew in small pots
muddled with Ramen noodle and Maui Wowie.
Her life often vacationed to a studio apartment
on the east bank of her right eye.
She wrote on the back of her mouth
with cigarette smoke.
Her poems were the rain-filled footprints,
of Jack Kerouac.
She had pronouns before and after her name.
She wore a local fame, made legendary
by the gaps in her thoughts,
thoughts she shrewdly refused to fill in.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

Strange Things Found In the Lost Tomb of Zarathustra

It was never exactly pinpointed
for only the African Crowned Eagles knew of the twisting paths
to its misplaced place.

In that crystalline chamber, upon that gold dusted floor
were found much thumbed volumes of all Nietzsche’s
works,
a penguin in a glass bell,
a twig cut from the tree of Life one million years from now'
A windblown leaf but only the wind that blew it.
a silver cuspidor, a ancient helmet made of Pittsburgh steel,
a Neolithic moonshine still,
a copy of the illustrated Karma Sutra,
several debunked words of wisdom from Aristotle,
an Olmec Letter Opener.
and a stuffed tufted rat.

The find has been carefully transported to the Smithsonian
where neuroscientists are trying
to solder together all these missing links.

The NYT has declared these odd finds
to be ‘Russian disinformation,’
but ‘Bokonon’ the mythical poet-sage of the Republic
of Never-Never Land
has blessed each artifact and declared them
to be far too strange not to be absolutely true.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

Following

Following the tumor blooms
that muted my throat and gut,
I duct taped my mind
to the wordless, I put my head down 
charging at daggers, and
thanks to pain bullets and cancer bombs
my thoughts are catching a little headwind.

I'm looking at a sea otter floating on its back
agilely playing with stones,
it’s definitely working the crowd.
I'm looking at a lion staring into a camera,
under its heavy paw a gazelle is also staring into a lens;
are they waiting for applause?
I'm looking through a shop window 
at televisions that are 
revealing all this, plus my gazing reflection.

We can all do better, more rehearsals	
will eventually take our perfect picture,
meanwhile it’s important to look good
as time stops, then continues to drain away
in its usual hazardous way.

Details | Eric Ashford Poem

Star On the Brink

The anorexia is not conspicuous,
being half-submerged, just
breaking through.
She’s a powdered mirage.
Her skin a hyaline shear
drawn over a necklace
of clavicle bones.
She knows her chest
is returning to childhood,
she wants to shelter there,
to be her own child.
Small breasts bob under
burgundy nipples,
buds made more prominent,
anchored as they are
to shipwrecked ribs.
Designer bling distracts.
Cameras whir, she poses,
one hand on a denuded hip,
not resting there,
but stealthily carrying
an ounce of flesh,
toward a spotlight.
We collude with her,
applaud the way
she decorates a condition.
We all know her emaciated beauty
is a mutual hoodwink.
We know that the closer to death
sexuality becomes,
the more rapacious our appetite,
the more we will wail,
as she slips
through our hungry hands.