Were the meadow more rich with blooms, blooms would be too fey a word for the colors of the Rimsky-Korsakov windblown rumbling thunderhead we reclined in, sketching. If you wade in a reedy pond, you worry about things alien to the forty-two steps between walk-up & Red Apple. Can a bassoon make a cadenza-choked spiral or is that an oboe? “I’ve already stocked the pears,” said the new stock boy, so this must be the age
of roller-skates clamped to P.F. Flyers. Then again, L’s thigh is cold & the nothing she almost wears vaporizes the future. She’s a comic heroine, what with that silver streak in her kinky hair, assuming a heroine can lisp & still be so. The Alexander Technique, camping mishaps & grave doubts about whiskey made for a gemütlich meal that night.
Sweet
methane bouquet my shrieking boy fanned forth at long,
crow-pecked, hyena-chewed, plague-ridden, Job-boiled last-- 3:37 a.m. his second morning home
How Bear Our Child
How bear our child dropping for the last time the stuffed dog he toted through griefs & joys so fierce?
We bear so much & so will he & that weighs far too much.
John Repp's most recent collections are Music Over the Water, a chapbook from Alice Greene & Co., and Fat Jersey Blues, the 2013 winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, February, 2014).