The Birthday Gift

Light reflected off the crisp
Sleek orange yellow plastic
Splits my retina like an M-16
Click click lock and load
Faux chrome clip fits poymer dart bullet warhead
Neatly into chamber

Mop- top graces shining eyes
Laughter bursting through the scope
Orange Bakugan shirt no longer flaps loosely
One more weekend for blue shorts, summer soles
"Here comes my RPG! Gotcha, Daddy!"

Mom in Birkenstocks toddles three-year-old twins
Her eyes seek safety.
Her shoes show scorn.
The straw buyer grins and frets at once.
His tie-dye shrugs, mumbles.

Sandy Sweep

From campsite A to campsite B
Hip high holding daddy's hand
She strolls uninterrupted
No time for tired even at two
The barbeque pit beckons.

Site 161!
Quincentennial families couples buddies
A hundred cars cycles SUV's
Added to the day lot

Sated but not with solitude
We choose the black Saab stroller
For camouflage on the tar
Poured on wildflowers for access
To that sandy sweep

Cowans Gap Campsite 161

You fed us, 161.
As the August sun
Collapsed revealing fireflies and the North Star
And a partially composed tent
Two barefoot campers plunged into your margins
For firewood

Now the sky fades to black
Now the leaves erupt with color
Cast from your twigs your bark your limbs
Tent set dinner hot
Stomachs warmed
Marshmallows roasted in your yield
Our eyes shut to your
Quiet
Fading embers

A Rabbit Runs Through It

A mystery green mound
Expands intensifies
Thinks it's the universe
Hides the inflorescent butterfly bush
Raspberry chocolate heuchera
Extend earth sky podlings
To the sky

You could collect moss
In the perpetual mist of the cracked
Standpipe
And I do
Just under the shadow of the giant astilbe
In and out Dusty Millers hostas
Offer islands of normal amid the exotic

Isee. You just perceive
That green shadow of the hydrangea
That gains a new fuchsia mint grey-pink
For each day of senescence
Below, a gap-toothes row of Lilies of the Valley
More begs than promises
"Wait 'til next year"

Schuylkill Summer, 2009

Elephant ears nibbled from the Waterworks
To the picnic site at Kelly Drive and Wherever
Carrying basket wine and shoes
Ripples exit sculls on the Schuylkill
We taste the currents
The sound of the city
Overdubs even the coxswain's calls
We nod, giggle, and toss the blanket on the misty grass
You wave your hands
Coated with oil and powdered sugar
Like fingerpaint
The wine warms as I lick each finger clean

Wineberries and River Hoppers

Wineberries and River Hoppers

Packets of tart red orange
Explode crisply on our tongues
Instantly, pricks and scratches from thorns and brush
Encountered by the Wineberry Patrol
Melt in our mouths
A body away

Uniforms and badges sloughed
The Wineberry Patrol claims its booty
Clear our palate with rainwater.
The younger officer seven years wise
Perceives the thicket as a prize
Long before it yields its reward.
The older, seven times seven
Scars of hiking the single seven
When five when three when one
Wades through mud and brambles,
The Patrol Auxiliary cradled in the rearmost arm.

Long past the point of satiation
We pick our harvest clean
Three sets of footprints clasping
The footholds in the rock
Two sets hard, three sets easy
The waterfall awaits.

There one dives, one quakes, one comforts
The craggy pond extends its cold invitation
A ledge guards an ankle deep habitat.
There a sudden flash of silver
Casts forward from a tiny cave.
Freed from mossy boughs they
Leap to the surface with supple tail fins
The young patrolman flinches giggling.

Gathering our clothes our shoes I
Walk on snow barefoot in my mind
Berry scratches never penetrated the
Piercing tang of the sweet
Month
Of custody
I relive the memories in the snow wind
My toes still in mud
The bronze of my children still radiant
Radiant

July 2009

David Garcia or Garica

If this poet is David Garica, I'll find him. If he's David Garcia, hopefully he'll recognize his poem and find me. I gave it a ten on poetry.com:

A gray cover,
eternally,
grows in the sky.
Swallowing,
growing.
Bringing cold times.

A dark void,
keeps spreading inside.
Consuming, freezing, me.
Making me feel alone,
inside.

And you just stand there,
watching,
my hope,
fall,
frozen,
as snow.

Copyright ©2009 David Garica

David, you can write, dude!

Bookmark

Have you ever stepped
Over a moment, through a footprint
In and out of thought

Imagining a lens shuttering
The feeling frozen in the skin of
Your foot pads, locked in shale or
Sand, sea or sidewalk?
Touching time with your toes
Knees flexing into memory
Bouncing onward in fluid stop-time?

I wink at this sensation
Capturing it as a bookmark in a novel
A screen shot in the hologram of life

What's in a name?

The name of this blog is personal, really, being the Fisch with a C, not the fish in a sea, I didn't have to make it water-related. It feels right. Poetry is by nature fluid. It is buoyant (Archimedes' Principle), the faster it moves, the more you are uplifted (Bernoulli's Principle), and when something strikes you by triggering one image, your whole soul is affected (Pascal's Principle). Also, when you are riding a wave of poetry, the particle (you) doesn't move, but the energy is transmitter through you - especially when you share it.

I will be posting my poems here, starting from when I became active in writing them after the failure of my marriage to the things I am doing now. If you are looking for meta-analyses of the human condition, you'll probably have to look to Goethe. I'll just document my little place in it.

Ron