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At The Beach Poem by Doug Tanoury

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Musings and Other Poems by Doug Tanoury
________________________________________
 
Musing
 
Lying awake in
A hammock, I study the sky,
The patterns
Of high altitude clouds
Wispy and insubstantial,
In light brush strokes
Across the upper atmosphere.
 
There is a cardinal singing
From somewhere unseen,
High in the maple
Or deep in the ash
And starlings fly from west to east
In early evening, just as they fly
From east to west each morning.
 
In these small details
Of my day, as I lay weightless,
Suspended somewhere between
Earth and sky, I somehow feel
The absence of you,
A space unfilled,
A bird not singing,
A word unspoken.
________________________________________
 


________________________________________
 
August
 
This afternoon
The day lily's
Abundant blooms
Of canary and crimson,
Leave me mute and unmoved,
 
And the hammock
Hanging weightless
Between greenness of grass
And blueness of sky
Lulls me to silence,
 
And in the night,
In the darkness, under the trees,
Where the branches
Of the ash meet the maple,
I sit quiet,
 
For the night sky
On summer nights
Glowing purple in the West,
Translucent and backlit,
Leaves me wordless.
________________________________________
 
Image In The Mirror
 
I look critically at your image
Framed in the bathroom mirror
As you stand behind me
Absorbed in some small detail
Of an everyday task
That is so mundane
It is meaningless to me.
Quite unaware that I am watching,
Studying your face,
How much like your mother
You look at this moment,
With all your energy and attention
Focused on the minuteness of
I don't know what.
 
I think, perhaps before we die,
We are punished in the most perverted
And onerous way
By taking on the spirit and form
Of our least favorite parent,
And I will say to you now,
On this day of past reflection
And quiet remembrance,
That in so much as
I have become my father,
In action and inaction,
In thought and thoughtlessness,
In word and wordlessness,
That I, more than anyone,
Truly regret it
And am deeply sorry.
________________________________________
 
May 2004
 
Spring comes to me now
Like either a green hiatus
Or an abrupt scene change
In the surrealistic landscape of some dream
And I am neither fully awake
Nor completely aware
Of all its meaning and import.
 
The willows awaken
In wisps of pale and subtle growth
That forms around their branches like a mist,
A nimbus of color,
That sways in the breeze on May mornings
In ways that reminds me of the soft movement of air
In a woman's hair.
 
I walk through the day,
A somnambulist's unconscious journey,
Seeing, but not seeing,
Hearing, but not hearing,
Feeling, but not feeling,
Perceiving, but not perceiving.
 
And when I talk, it is the one sided
Soliloquy of a sleeper's dialoged
Where each word I whisper
Has the visible substance of the vapor
Exhaled with each breath
Onto the frozen air of a January morning.
 
I dream of spring,
Of soft breezes and mild mornings
And of the sycamores
That awaken ever so slowly
And will not show a hint of foliage
Until the first days of June.
________________________________________
 
About Doug Tanoury
 
Doug Tanoury is primarily a poet of the Internet with the majority of his work
never leaving electronic form. His verse can be read at electronic magazines and
journals across the world. Collections of poetry by Doug Tanoury can be found
at Athens Avenue
This and other ebook collections of poetry by Doug Tanoury can be read and
downloaded at: http://home.comcast.net/~dtanoury1/Tanoury.html
Doug grew up in Detroit, Michigan and still lives in the area.
Doug Tanoury credits his 7th grade poetry anthology from Sister Debra's English class,
Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse, (Stephen Dunning,
Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c) 1966 by Scott Foresman & Company) as exerting the
greatest influence on his work. He still keeps a copy of
it at his writing desk.


Background art by Carrie Macon


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