Merrimack Electroweak

Supersymmetry Breaking

Individual divisions
separate the singular
partitions in the river ice
with fissures running from one side
to somewhere on the other side,
for some unearthly reason known
to only water, winter, and
the wind, the long northwestern wind,
that continental absolutist
monarchy of global movement
spinning still from some forgotten
ricochet of bang, big bang,
the nicest round that ever rang,
a bang that breaks sound ice in two.

~Son Rivers 2007

White Out

Yesterday the cold was like some northern raider laying claim to everything outdoors. The little snow that fell on Saturday effectively convinced the land that it was larger than all life itself. Blowing in white whirlwinds across the frozen river, it joined forces with the winter’s arctic onslaught, dimming the sight of eastern pines upon the other shore. That was the last greenery to meet my sight before I turned the wheel towards home.

~Son Rivers 2007

I Saw Lon Chaney Walking With the Queen

We are born to western witchcraft, technological black magic, spells increasing motion faster than the speed of sound and entertainment like a laser. What else could we need? Last evening saw the full moon rise above the river ice like our own third eye looking coldly on accomplishments and seeing no reflection. Trust nothing but emotions. Listen to the winter wolf that howls within your own luxurious enchantments. All is just distraction meant to play some three card monty with your soul while selling you a cure for something that you never had until you paid in full for previous alleviations. Like the full wolf moon, it’s all a vicious cycle.

~Son Rivers 2007

I Shall Be Telling This With a Sigh

There’s nothing like a quiet morning by an iced-over unmoving river when even your thoughts are still and the sky is spreading its rosy-fingered dawn upon this classical New England landscape and nothing moves you to question the grace of it all. It is what it is and you are who you are and there’s not a single fabricated moment in the mix. Even when you’re driving on an interstate and headed for the static of the city, you still remain right there. Your blood is flowing silent and alive like the river running strong below the surface of that steel and frozen glass. Every word you speak from that instant on is some eternal whirlpool deep beneath the mystery of its current. You’ve fallen though the ice and that is making all the difference.

~Son Rivers 2007

Oh I Wish I Had a Story I Could Skate Away On

River ice.

I really don’t think that one word can make a poem. But two!

Every word we hold within our mind is like a vessel filled with passengers. Each one has a story that it wants to tell. If not a ship of fools, it’s most certainly a boatload of motley characters.

River. Where can one begin to list associations this one joins inside my personal community of memories and education? Begin with Huckleberry Finn rafting down the muddy Mississippi with Jim before his reckoning to light out for the territories, and open up on an infant Moses found within a basket upon the banks of the River Nile and still I’ve only just begun. What about that January morning more than thirteen years ago while riding along the Merrimack and thinking to myself my marriage growing cold and lifeless was a little like that self same river, frozen.

Ice.

~Son Rivers 2007

DNR-4: Living Inside a Clue

Broth Without Bread

He lived inside his soul
although four score and twenty
blackboards theorized

its nonexistence still
existed. Housework persisted,
days devised, but thrills

each day from Milky Way
to Virgo Stellar Stream
insisted on this dream.

~Greg Perry 2007

L6 - replaced 'meals were made' with 'days devised'
L9 - replaced 'that's their' with 'on this'

A New Old Poem

Touched
as told by Beverly

She talked, if not exactly through me,
then past me to a place far in
the past. And so I had the time
to study her appearance, and
especially her face, so free
from wrinkles that the only sign
of ninety-seven years was framed
by hair as white as wedding lace:
her soft and faded well-worn eyes.
And it was through that thin and holy
substance that she saw a world
inhabited by ghosts she knew
to be as solid as electrons
playing on the television
always on nearby. Not knowing
what to do, I softly touched
her hand and slowly pressed my fingers
to her palm. And suddenly
the room turned silent by some untold
decibels. And turning to
my sight, she said, “And wouldn’t you
agree it’s wonderful to be
so soundly touched by someone else?”

~Greg Perry 2007

Dreaming Nursery Rhyme #3

Gaining the Hill

Over the rainbow and riddle
the sky with bulleted points,
light moments, and conclusions,

Johnny B. Better would scale
a jillion hills to make
a pile of disillusion-

ment. Not for nothing we deal
in hearts and minds and want
for not but soul transfusions.

~Greg Perry 2007

A Dreaming Nursery Rhyme 2

The Wizard of Mudville

An apple fell as far
as Friday afternoon—
before the clock struck out.

And that's when Casey set
his sails to engineer
the dark without a doubt.

He angled dreams—but knots
within his casting turned
true rainbows into trout.

~Greg Perry 2007

Mother Goose Meets Father Time: Their Poem

A Dreaming Nursery Rhyme

In the beginning there was go
as green as water seen
without the light of sky.

It energized the ground
and soon monopolized
an emanating eye.

Conceptualizing to
no end, it baked the tree
that ate an apple pie.

~Greg Perry 2007

Calvin's Sacrosanct Pastel and Holy Sonnet Five

The Lord’s Prayer Revised

I’m a bloody star!
My photosynthesis
belongs to Jupiter.
Tectonic oxygen
defibrillates the lesser
Antilles of my soul—
and I ate Milky Ways
for breakfast way before
the Surgeon General said so.
Nothing could be finer
than my Carolina
to my Massachusetts.
I love that cauliflower
lights my candle power.

Son Rivers V 2006

Calvin's Classical Pastel and Sonnet Number Four

The Good, The Bad, and Whatever

Salamander certainly
sells assertively
in San Diego, no?
Then why the sandman makes
spaghetti geographic
fails my better angels.
Not just that but this.
It’s nicotine and ink
beyond the demographic
happenstance that trumpets
day old calendars
like saxophones and what
pretends to be the south.
An ear is not a mouth.

~Son Rivers IV 2006

Calvin's Pastel Three

Pentecostal Transcendental Crying In Your Beer

Listen to the whiskey
speak in tongues. It glosses
meaningful romance
with vanishing precision.
Love the oak or love
the spruced-up hypertension,
dancing doesn’t dine
alone and doesn’t name
the liver. Emerson
alleviates the flame
in something that he ate
in unison with double
disobedience.
Wine wants ingredients.

~Son Rivers III 2006

Calvin's Classic Poems in Pastel Number Two

Viceroyalty

Haliburton spoke
to red Elizabeth
today. The whooping cranes
are in the willows. Send
the pillows softly and
forget the coffee stains
completely; I will need
the old Mercator maps
as soon as you discover
Argentina. Turn
your wheel around and face
the mirror in the sea.
It looks like Queen Anne’s lace
in sensitivity.

~Son Rivers Jr. 2006

Calvin's Classic Poems in Pastel Number One

Moby Reverie in Sea Sonnet Minor

An orange jalopy is peeling
citric aloe rubber
near the breakfast shadow.
The newspaper slowly turns
a photograph of bacon
bitter road signs and
the sun is up. What dawn
is this we wash the dishes
with in water made
from whale oil? Dreams resist
such revolution. Power
to the daylight! Remember
the waves of sudden Maine!
We live this weathervane.

~Son Rivers 2006

Truckin' (Got My Chips Cashed In Sonnet) Poem

Accidental Wonder

The truck, an eighteen wheeler, barrel-assed
beyond the limits of an exit ramp
and through the legal curtain of its yield
sign with the presence of a spirit built
to break all technological enchantments
designed by engineers intent on style.
Inside the cabin of the SUV,
the occupant could only watch the air-
suspended cab, a Vision Sleeper Mack,
continue through the polarizing glass
to meet his old philosophies of life
with something quite exhilarating. Death
confronted him with freedom like he never
knew before. It took away his breath.

~Greg Perry 2006

Political Compassion Poem

We Cannot Rest Until We Win

His name is George. Although not curious
as some prefer, he’s turned intelligence
around so that it works for something more
innately fundamental. Alcohol
withdrawal has created voids that draw
his world within its war of deadening pain,
until he’s now convinced himself Iraq
withdrawal’s like a double-shot of Jack
and he’s not going there again. He stays
the course for other reasons he can’t face:
three thousand senseless dead, no resting place.

~G Perry 2006

Love Poem Take Two

A Nineteen Line Tetrameter Poem Written For My True Love Beverly AKA That Skye Who Not So Coincidentally Was Born On The Nineteenth Day Of The Same Month As Me, And So A Seventy-Six Beat Poem Like The Seventy-Six Trombones Which Led The Big Parade, And Our Hearts Like Copper Bottom Tympani In Horse Platoons Thundering, Thundering All Along The Way And Loving A Full Octave Higher Than The Score

I love your cells, especially
the ones that dwell within your blood,
the white, the red, the never-ending
wine I taste each time I sip
the love within your lovely lips.
Its sweet bouquet, your DNA,
is similar to mine in oh
so many ways, but in those ways
that differ, oh they differ in
a way I know is different in
a way I’ve known before I knew
myself. I love the fact that you
are love itself—I love the love
we make when making love, I love
the you I love, I love the love
we love, I love the love of love,
and most of all, I love the way
we love to help each other love
to say: “I love I love I love.”

~Son Rivers 2006

Love Poem Take One

A Ten Line Poem In Dimeter Which Is The First Part Of A Possibly Longer Poem But Could Be The One And Only Part Of A Shorter Poem That Simply Says That Love Is Neither Doris Day Nor Gladys Knight But Not Madonna Either

Love begins
in one’s awareness
of one’s local
universal
coalition
with the one
some title God
but I’ll call Love
for lack of any
better one.

~Son Rivers 2006