Therefore, a Poem

From “Morning Flowers” by Alex Liu:

“This morning I met some beautiful Hydrangea Macrophylla on the roadside and I asked Hey beautiful how did you get there?"

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Dear Alex,

Something fun & silly I’ve just thought about last night to gift to my daughter for her upcoming birthday:

Whistler, Spring 2018

In snow and beauty you move as turbine

Dimpled dough of a face swells to mischief

Your skis soar, swerve, slope down iced mountain spine.

How have you come with Spring to Whistler’s peak? 

Past the melancholy twigs and gut block

You slosh on puddles of play past the bleak.

The noon sun may not thaw your fears frozen

High wind slaps on skin too young to resist 

Flight in fantasy on dreams half-broken.

Roam, run, roll on, my Love, till glaciers melt

Give up free and fast your heart to this land 

Of people, trees, with prayers on knees knelt.

Yours, Kate 

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Dear Kate,

So I got your poem for your daughter.  Lovely, truly.

Usually we don't share with each other our writing until finally posting.  We'd just go by the quote and breed our own brew of brooding and at last force them to be friends, at gunpoint, the tip of our pens...fingers?

So I take that as your leading me on to respond with a poem of my own?

Well, it doesn't work for me this way.  A poem comes to you, I think, and you can't force it out of you.  There is nothing in me to will it out of my guts if my guts aren't churning.

John McCabe (the Warren Beatty character) in one of my favorite movies "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," cried out, "I got poetry in me!"  He has the ambition to open in a bad land a new frontier of saloon and brothel, and maybe in between breed a strange brew of brooding called intimacy.  He was yelling at a whore with whom he partners and hopefully in more ways than one.

(Digression: the movie was shot in and around West Vancouver and features three Leonard Cohen songs.  LOVE!)

I would like to say I have poetry in me, too.  I crow my ambitions in prose and if there are rhymes and reasons to be found please excuse the accidents.

"'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know."  I think André Gide said that.

Yours, Alex