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Best Poems Written by Douglas Lawder

Below are the all-time best Douglas Lawder poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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The Couple(S)

The poem as novel

Small grapes of the morning like poetry,
cold water pulsing deep in the well,
a bag of bright nails in the yard,
the smell of cut wood wet in the sun,
the mild bite of pain put on everything
and everything still to be done
-- when love's first sting buckles them to the ground.

The long melons of the afternoon like prose
and by the poolside the gin drinks and the sun,
the new car bright
as a jelly bean on the lawn,
a glaze of clean order put on everything
yet everything looking to be done
--when love has rubbed them smooth as a stone.

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

The Blue Car

Last month's hurricane ripped down dunes, re-
scalloped the shore, snatched away a car.
 Now there's a smooth spread
 of waves again where sandpipers scoot
 across wet sand, their enigma of glyph tracks
washed away with the hush of each wave,
and what the ocean's taken away it now gives back:
excavations of a sneaker, two candles, a torn vest.
 But of the relics of human lives, a blue car
in the sea gloom gathers to itself its own pale light
rocking with sea-time, medallioned with shells,
parked miles below on the ocean's floor,
and under the layered centuries, among the midden,
 who will seek to know the story
--poetry's anthropology--
of the lost emerald ring under the front seat,
the ebony dope pipe, vial of cognac,
the half-rusted key to someone's door?

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

Living With Mountains ... Waterlight

With first light mountains begin to fill
the pool where its water´s been quiet all night,
and now where swimming´s climbing through water,
climbing the shining escarpments, over alpine meadows
towards the heights of sleep
-- what still water had held-- until,
while having gone to bed in the darkening valley,
sun splashes the last of its light
on mountains overhead.

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

What Happened At the Beginning of May --- For K

When she fell
she fell through
all of April.

Blue evenings
bruised her hips.

She lay for a long while
and when she got up
there was no face,
she had no face at all.

Blue, she cried blue
but love is what she meant.

What happened that she´s locked
in April twilight?
We of sunny May whisper
outside her door.

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

Tools

The curious dormant nature of tools
becoming more than themselves in their quick
and singular way of performing:
Snowshoes making the body's weight a lie
over twenty foot drifts-web-footed
again I get to the river
where the fishing rod asleep in its limber
length jumps suddenly alive when the fish´s strike
leaps right into my hands.

Idle on the back porch the shovel´s
angle is to the point in its way
of getting under the surface. Through use
its handle is turning to harder wood
from layers of petrified sweat
and the bridle hangs stiff on a nail
saving the shape of the mare´s head,
remembering a mouth.

Red and silver rainbow trout freeze
on the snow as the sun goes down and the hot-
tempered ax head caught in the tightening grip
of the cold finally gets its crack
at a tree limb. Later the castiron woodstove
gathers to itself all the heat it can handle.
Smoke rises up to the cold night´s crisp stars,
impalpable almost as words
but which in their right use still have their way
of getting us through to the world
alive for a moment.

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

Mountain Light

The Beautiful Changes
                                         Wilbur

Each morning sunlight scrolls down peaks
to the flat valley floor.
Just as each instant light climbing down´s
what wasn´t there before--a rubble of rock
becoming a smooth escarpment--

So each day´s recanting. What yesterday was
a blackened ravine, this morning´s
a green gorge, glintings of a stream far below.
Under sunlight´s realignment a small dent pocked
in shadow becomes a park filled with fern
and their only just-this-day´s latticing of shade, until

Cultivated valley light tracks
the ordered rows of apple trees and plotted wheat,
the coaxed-green march of corn,
where day will resolve itself finite and complete.

                                                              Alamos,  Mexico

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

Summer Snow

Forever, comes to mind and peaks where the snow stays.
                                                                              James Galvin

From the mountain that seemed to rise straight up
at the end of the city street´s racket, its heat
and black- laced carbon, a wedge of snow
lodged in a ravine:

White as a skull chunk, but,
as the right clock might
--giving the wrong time--white
as this morning´ milk.

And then, this evening, from our bedroom window,
I swear, you could see it whitely pulsing,
still holding all the day´s light in
--would not give it up--
white as a bleached brain
scrubbed of all thought,
of what this white paper might be
but for being marred by thought.

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

Late Summer, Long Distance

The hour early on the lawn
the heat not yet a shrill saw sound
and the day not shaped into a Saturday plan
against a burning, climbing sun.

Then shards of ice in a shaded room
and a voice of red flowers blooming --
screams that stitch into late afternoon
and all night sprinklers bead the lawn.

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

Living With Mountains

Under Mt. Alamos


Its monstrous, featureless head looking down
through scarves of swirling mist,
massive vault where what´s packed deep within
are scapulae, claw, fur and femur,
 a midden warehouse of the fired clay
of shards, broken pipe and flute,
stratas of ashes, fire-blackened rocks.

Evening and its shadow inch by inch
crosses the bedroom floor
--second shadow over night´s--
and he who lays down his head
begins to take up what´s just
outside the bedroom window:
the mountain´s cache of dream scraps,
stuttering shapes, a host of strangers,
their strangely familiar stories seen.


                                              Alamos, Mexico

Details | Douglas Lawder Poem

The Stranger

Even the red neon from town glowing
through the snowy woods seems right.
As I step out the back porch the last
mantle of clouds lifts from
a new covering of snow on Sangre Mountain.
A final flake drops with a small hiss
into my cup of black coffee
and I wave back to a stranger
who´s come out around the bend
of the white road.