Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Haiku While Walking My Dog, poems by John Philip Drury.
Haiku While Walking My Dog
Ginkgos wave their fans.
Come Fall, their slot machines pour
jackpots of gold coins.
Yard sign for the judge who married us. House sparrows campaign: vote, vote, vote!
Boundary markers,
crumbling, nicked by mowers, hide
summerlong in vines.
Our Golden Retriever rolls over, kicking on slick lawns, then swimming.
A two-toned squirrel,
red with gray tail, climbs a tree
half in leaf, half not.
A white chihuahua makes a tiny whirring growl—electric toothbrush.
Red maple swaying—
pool of dropped leaves—flamingo
mirrored on one leg.
Our dog belongs to a cargo cult, searching on the shore for flotsam.
Neighborhood fireworks
pop and fizzle behind trees—
lightning bugs light up.
Guinevere halts, won’t budge or go on, turns to rush back, towing me home.
Laps after Midnight
Slipping from the party’s glow,
we step over garden wickets and find
a leafy swimming pool.
She dips her bare feet in dark water and places
my drink on wet tiles. Behind us
ice cubes clink and giggles mix
with arguments between guests.
She doesn’t mind me stripping
and hopping in the pool, treading water
among the flotilla of leaves.
It’s all deep end. When I ask
for a sip of brandy, she tells me, Swim
a lap first. When I crawl back,
she laughs and gives me a sip. Now do a backstroke,
and I’m off again. Opening
my arms to stars I can’t name,
I hear the ocean booming
through groves. Another sip.
Now butterfly. And I kowtow through the dark
below overhanging oaks.
Everything blurs but her round eyes
half-hidden by bangs. Even in the dark, their fire
catches light from somewhere: distant torches
or the rising moon. Now,
she croons, a breast stroke. I spread
apart the waters, the curling leaves.
And when I return this time, she kicks up a wave
and whispers, Now the deadman’s float.
I try it, face down, arms and legs loose, until
I come up gasping. I’m surprised how far
I’ve drifted. Across the pool,
she’s a shadow with a cigarette, her scarf rippling,
a single empty snifter
on the pool’s edge, an enormous moon
hunched like a gibbon in the leafy branches.
Ghazal of the Kraken
This nautical monster never haunted ancient Greece: the Kraken.
Scour texts and myths. Zeus never cried, “Release the Kraken!”
That’s Hollywood, Laurence Olivier, a prompt for Ray
Harryhausen’s stop-motion masterpiece, the Kraken.
The source is Norse, but Tennyson gets the blame
for his swollen sonnet of a sleeping beast, “The Kraken.”
Really, though, it’s a giant squid with “enormous polypi”
that haunts the poet, making plausible, at least, the Kraken.
Mantle, eight arms with toothy suckers, two tentacles, lots of ink:
a wonder in its reality, enough to cease the Kraken.
Student of awe, which of the following does not belong?
□ Perseus, □ Poseidon, □ Medusa, □ Golden Fleece, □ the Kraken.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.