A Gringo’s Paradise

Poetry by Ted Boughter-Dornfeld Copyright © 2009

A black puppy chases
His mestizo mother up the beach.
A few adults sit sipping Corona Extra,
In lazy hammocks.

Down below, lithe legs
Scramble for solid ground
Along the supple, dark, surface,
Chasing a mini black-and-white ball,
Until it finds a home between
Two pieces of driftwood.

The pull of the sea is strong.
You can almost feel it from
The tables above the shoreline.

The coast seems chancy,
But beauty hides the beast, and
The waves get their chance to throw
The crimson-burned bodies
Around for a time.

Black sand covers all, as we lay,
In a melted pool of jade,
Of perfect temperature.
A one-legged Civil War vet stands peering out
At the ocean, perhaps wondering why

The sky is gray.
Two nuns wander into the horizon.
The vet doesn’t move his focus from the sea,
And the nuns keep to their path.
Did I remember my camera?

Lazy Bird (Blue Train)

Poetry by Ted Boughter-Dornfeld Copyright © 2009

Below Orion’s belt
He will fly.

Sailing in on the evening breeze,
Through a clustered cloud of E’s.
To the timbre of a stammer,
Above the cedar trees.
 
A wish for lips to seize the soul is filled,
Without tongue, or a love-stoned kiss.
No, this moonlight drifter need not sneak
To steal your attentiveness.

Raspy cool, birthed on a cool train, a Coltrane,
Flickering inside a steel blue horizon.
A stray bolt of lightning
in a darkening jar.
Did you see it?
 
Condensed droplets of jive crystallize
As sight spreads with a cock-crow sunrise.
Shadows yield to spots of sunshine, and
The hum knifes through atoms of air,
Awakening the Early Ears.
 
A fulfillment, furnished.
A drip, a drop,
A drip and a drop,

Arranged in pairs of sinking threes –
The details of an ensemble’s dream
Infuse the day’s reality.

And with one last vertical dance,
Time slips back to a simpered trance,
As basso continuo leads you home,
Through a lonely mountain pass.

A zephyr is crowned,
Sitting atop a morning cloud,
To culminate, an unfettered kite,
A lazy bird in flight.

Belly (The Path of the Sea)

Getting farther
and farther away
from the shore.
Past the coral shelf,
Where a young boy
absorbs the warmth
of a peach cobbler sky.

With small feet kicking,
tiny bronzed toes momentarily
meet the tangerine sky-line;
Until the horizon cools
to a blueberry hue,
dusted by drops
of indigo dew.

Below the surface,
rocks, boneless creatures,
and bacteria seem so simple,
lining the bottom of a
soundless cerulean world;
They need only hydrogen
sulfide to survive.

Inside, mute and alive,
parallel forms of symbiosis lie,
in a microcosm and macrocosm
of biorhythms which might never
be fully discovered, or recovered.

A nature of smooth,
yet callous motions
swirl and calm.
Too infinite to know compassion,
a place where one predator strikes
through a layer of dark at its prey,
while another chokes on a piece of plastic.

At times, it’s difficult for the boy to see,
through the veil of the deep blue drink,
where a gulp of air and a gasp in brine,
leaves him floating amid the liquid line.

Still, he seeks – the constant baptism within his reach,
And with the torpid flow of the tide to teach – he knows,
Evolution and Being exist together, at his sandy feet.

Poetry by Ted Boughter-Dornfeld Copyright © 2009

Plans

“And it came to me then, that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.” – Death Cab For Cutie