A new collection of poetry by Dennis Camire

by

Combed by Crows

also

dennis camire

Anthology

of Awe & Wonder Poetry

Dennis Camire

published by

Deerbrook Editions

P.O. Box 542

Cumberland, ME 04021

deerbrookeditions.com preview catalog: issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edtion

© 2024 by Dennis Camire

All rights reserved

ISBN: 979-8-9903529-1-9

Book design by Jeffrey Haste

Cover photo by Greg Rakozy; available for free on unsplash.com

Anthology of Awe & Wonder

We must risk delight. —Jack Gilbert

Tran-sun-stantiation

From wonder to wonder; existence grows.

—Lao Tzu

I’ve so come to admire the lichen

Colonizing the barren rock planets

And making them fertile for moss

Then blueberries inside the cracks

That, in the last light, I gaze back and forth between the first stars and these galaxies in granite

I’ve overlooked my whole life.

Atop Peaked Mountain

Upon Hearing that “Bread is the Way Sun Enters Our Body”

I feel this need to knead on my knees

And praise this daily “tran-sun-stantiation”

Of sun into whole grain via The Holy Ghost of yeast. And kudos to each pizza

morphing into these soft solar systems

holding so many suns of pepperonis, quarter moons of onions, and the light’s epic expansion in the running cheese—

so, chewing a slice, we feel we’re ingesting nothing less than the star-stuff of Helios. And, after we caffeinate conversations, With “the solar flare espied in the éclair”

Or “the northern lights espied in marbled rye” consider the sourdough’s soul’s own second rising when musing how that same sun then beams through

The doughy body’s own celestial abode

So our neurons feel the same heat

As those distant rings of Neptune do And our membranes glow for the same reason

As any of the solar system’s marvelous moons;

And sun, bread, and body are now one Grand string-laden cosmos-in-expansion

Heeding us, surely, to feel delight’s vitamin d

As her hand, say, alights and tans our thigh

Or to know the solar radiation of a soul

So freely giving love over to our blue being Which fathoms, now, how that sacred moment

Of silence before cracking open the warm loaf is heightened by looking into one another’s eyes

And recognizing all the sunshine in disguise.

Magnifying Glass

How shame magnifies the day my older brother and friends aimed the condensed arrow of light at the bull’s eyes of ant abdomens until beady bodies smoked while re-treating along the pheromonelaced path back to underground hive. How I writhed like these innocent, incinerated insects as older peers then wrestled over control of this soulless, solar laser and pondered if beetles, frogs, or even groundhogs, could be crucified by this cruelty. But when this blacktop of a holocaust lost its charm after a dozen slaughters they pressed the primitive laser into my sweat-soaked right palm to initiate myself into the tribe of male teens where inflicting harm was the means of building bonds

as strong as that between a battle-tested army. And, though, in science, I was marveling over some ants’ evolving two stomachs to fill up and feed sisters tending the queen deep in the hive—and though I gaped over the blind species,

Still foraging and tunneling in perfect accord via the sublime pheromones wafting into my very nose, I held the lens over the blessed insects, then slowly closed the circle of light into that pinprick of nuclear fission

triggering the charred carnage I’d commit to win approval’s grins before the circle of young men was closing around my beady body and their warm pats of my back and offers to hang out Saturday night felt, for a while, like love, like the first hints of a great concentrated l i g h t.

Upon Learning that Bees Taste with their Feet

I lament the half century I failed to marvel at this one honeybee, as the book heeds, “hovering over a bloom then plumbing toes inside to divine if its nectar has already been imbibed and, thus, save precious calories for the thousand-plus flowers each gatherer touches down upon a day. ”

It’s like the time I learned butterflies navigate by ultraviolet light (we don’t see) and, suddenly, felt cheated by streetlights and road signs. Tonight, then, I porch sit until dawn so I might espy “that June, lunar moth emerging from cocoon with no mouth for the two weeks it flies and seeks mates in the feintest moonlight.”

And I dream, now, of suicide prevention week featuring those bio luminescing fish whose “glowing, worm-shaped lips attract prey to steel-trap jaws so they can survive the complete darkness of bottom.” Still, some friends think me a bit mad as, between sips

from the wine glass’s tulip, I wax poetic on” the hummingbird’s heart beating twelve-hundred times per minute from drinking half its weight in nectar each day.”

But as I flit from the bloomed tomes of books rife with this life-giving-science, l’ve come to bee-lieve earth’s own looming colony collapse might be

averted if we evolve this taste to gather only the sweet distillations of light in, say, “the small, male cuttle fish shape-shifting and coloring into a female impersonator who then sashays past the fighting alpha males to mate.” And if, one day, enough of us gather and carry—into conversation—the tupelo honey

Of “the humpback’s song echoing a whole time zone In search of a mate,” maybe we’ll see wild reverence as vital to survival as bees are to our food supply

for see, already, the growing fieldtrips where kids are asked to imagine the hive’s hidden queen laying over a million eggs a lifetime; and hear how

they jostle to be the first to press ear to the wild, winter hive to hear the “soft symphony from the bees staying warm, can you imagine, by alternating being on the edge of the swarm and furiously flapping wings to keep the hive at ninety degrees while, outside it’s a whopping five below.” And think how

the teachers and chaperones—taking in the children’s’ oooohhhs and ahhhs over honeybees dancing directions to the newest lupine blooms find themselves tap dancing--heal to toe-on the bus ride home while wondering at all this long-overlooked sweetness at their very feet.

Meditation on the Guitar’s Wood

The artist who carved it knew the former tree’s grand canopy of leaves was a Carnegie Hall housing, for centuries, a symphony of blue jays, chickadees, and crows plucking the stringed instruments of their throats while crickets, in the duff’s orchestra pit, stroked their sexed wings’ cellos. Indeed—with each inspired riff— The guitar recalls the Joni Mitchell of whip o wil

Or Lou Rawls of bard owl who first crooned such blessed tunes when the tree was a sapling standing in the mosh-pit of maple groove

for each dawn’s concert. Composing, then, consider the past life memories of cardinal mating calls inspiring the chord progressions and words for

a love song which sky writes your heart’s horizon— so, soon, you see how you’re collaborating with a graduate of the Julliard of the jungle

where birds of paradise songs still resonate in her wood grains’ DNA; and, nights, you set her beside the window with you

to be inspired by the bluesman of loon echoing from moose pond; and on stage— falling into that deep flow state—you know

why you equate this wordless ecstasy with flight and feathered wings plucking the strings of moon, star, and sunlight.

Frog Theology, Seventh Grade

Skipping rocks on the spring-fed pond, the shallows suddenly frothed with frogs making such grand leaps—from tadpole to toad—that the cove literally vomited hundreds of fish-to-amphibians seeking the verdant forest’s promised land.

Then, as they ignored the predator of me and leapt, instead, through and against my own rubbery legs, I paused and thought of the old prospector claiming to feel God, communion, or cosmic purpose when caribou herded around his log cabin in the pure dark

of an Alaskan noon. Such an urge, now, to kneel and worship where Genesis burgeoned forth from the very water and dirt! Oh, but the exodus

was so mass that merely walking would’ve caused a holocaust of frogs. And so awed into catatonic, I surrendered to being

bogged down in this farm pond of God until, seeing some unseen deity’s agency literally dancing over my steel-toed boots,

caused me--more than Jesus walking on water-to make that grand leap of faith where I espied that divinity made flesh in bees tasting with feet and hummingbirds’ hearts beating two thousand times a minute while ingesting half their weight in nectar each glorious day. Oh, and one, seeking God,

could do worse than prostrating to a wood frog resurrecting in spring after their stopped, hibernated heart re-starts by some sublime

anti-freeze-producing gene. And one could fare worse in their quest for heavenly solace than pondering the spring peepers’ gospels

echoing from the monastery of bog and morphing one into a St. John Baptist of frogs as you plunge into waters to absorb sonorous psalms

sonnogramming your flesh and bone until you emerge born again to the beauty and wonder of all creatures great and small no matter how long

your faith’s own ponderous pauses, between the lovely leaps.

Ode to Radishes, A Love Poem of Sorts

Appreciate everything, even the ordinary . . . especially the ordinary.

—Pema Chodron

It’s the magic

Of you, radish, Fattening from lithe youthful root to portly fruit overnight that so ingratiates you with the overweight and lonesome middle-aged For, in the morning, you don’t drably balance on the scale then envy the Still slender hips Of mature Parsnips-Or bemoan

This dreadful belly emerging in middle age Despite your Modest diet of compost, water, and the Dandelion wine

Of June sunshine. But rather, radish, your Burlesque, bulbous being roots even deeper into your life as, growing portly as sweet beets,

causes your social circle to expand until You’re faceTo face with So many lovely, Buxom neighbors Whose like rosy cheeks you kiss before spooning with one or two through the night until splitting open with delight. Oh, it’s the self-acceptance

We long for, radish, as growing midriffs (And chubby thighs)

Decrease our likeLihood of loving Our own bodies

Enough to bravely expand into the lives of others searching, in kind, for intimacy’s warm, raised bed; or it’s the fact that fat, for you, isn’t a pathology but, rather, increases your allure

At farmer’s markets

Where lovely Shoppers pause in awe of your Dynamite daikon Proportions before taking you home

to dinner that same night. And so, radish, Though we sentence Ourselves to salads And the solitary Confinement

Of all things wheat, the sight of you atop lettuce Reminds us to Love our own lushness rife with the same water retention as flesh peeks through The leaves of our Shirts and jeans. And if some of us—

Growing a like opulence-also believe

We’re still Ravishing enough

To be harvested By a famished Heart across The market or bar, radish, let the first dinner date commence with the big bosomed you Topping arugula sparking a chat on shifting Cultural notions

Of beauty allowing The plump to Plumb the waters

Of Eros. And letting our imaginations fatten to envision Our love handles

Increasing the Pleasure of the One we love, May we recall how happiness sometimes rhymes with fat-or how portly is a port we can dock our bodies from the storm of trying to conform to the magazine photos-- so this lingering taste of you

Mixed with the Wine’s earth tones And chicken stock is what inspires that first kiss swelling the heart, radish-like, overnight as we realize how, returning us to love, radish, you’ve planted us, back into our lives.

Upon Learning that Half my Body’s Atoms Formed Beyond the Milky Way and Traveled to our Solar System on Intergalactic Winds Driven by Exploding Stars.

Though I know the science linking full moons to emergency rooms and meteor showers to dreams,

such a learning curve to imagine my essence is literally from the Greek ethers and how burning supernovas were celestial storks, of sorts, delivering me to earth. Now quantum entanglement— (across time and space)—explains why those break-ups, decades ago, ache like a black hole of desolation….

No wonder, this alien, cone head upon emerging from birth’s mother ship of hips! No wonder this body’s awkward space suit inhibiting the walking of happiness’s own gravity-free surface

often sprinkled, too, with the moon-dust of lust! Instead, to grasp my origin I’ll have to Fed ex my genes

to some Astrology.com in cyberspace to fathom how many light years back my extended star-cluster clan migrated to earth’s open, blue portal. Or, better yet, I’ll take a course in Human Astronomy and Physiology

to discover constellations like Zeus and Thor are more like Ex-rays than projected wishes and myths

of the primitive. But, oh, what a space mission awaits where knowing thyself requires gazing into those

celestial sonograms of nebula bathing in the amniotic fluid of swirling, light galaxies!

Mornings, now, I emerge from sleep’s space shuttle to, possibly, make some giant leap by singing

of my ten billion miles of DNA spiraling inside not like galaxies nineteen-thousand light years wide!

And already it feels like some breakthrough for humanity to see our revised family tree’s primates preceded by bright profiles of planets from the Pleiades…. Until adapting to being the very stuff of the stars

maybe we’ll evolve beyond the genocide that seems to be in our genes; and it might all be moon-landing reverie

if we muse, exclusively, on our mortal dust being from solar systems that worshipped suns; and if we meditate on these interstellar atoms of the body over our atom bomb creations; and if

we can create the like urgency to finally colonize the heart’s still too-distant, red planet of Mars.

One low bush blueberry In bloom when I reach The peak so less time Marveling at the sun

Slowly closing her eye as I celebrate this sweet fruit’s seed rooting in the duff blown into crack of granite after a bird (filling up On blueberries below)

Shat the seed perfectly Into this half square Foot patch where I, too, For a brief time, fruited, As I couldn’t turn My gaze from this beauty burgeoning between boulders

Even to look at the First stars ripening In the high bush blueBerry field of night sky.

Peaked Mountain Lowbush Blueberry

Post-Stroke Star Gazing

Resting my light sensitive eyes on the night sky’s flat screen shooting stars suddenly bleed through Andromeda’s gray matter of brain

So, tonight, a heavenly body seems to be suffering her own mini stroke while meteor showers, possibly, are the galaxy’s grand mal seizures in damaging Thor and Zeus’s auras. For a while, as I gaze at the Pleiades, I’m slowly MRI-ing the mind of God—or Nature’s sublime

evolutionary design--to espy Mar’s emerging mind of light blurred, sometimes, by the asteroids That clot her orbit. Oh, what delight

to Cat scan Cassiopeia to espy the seizures of shooting stars burning a Godly, celestial body to her demise! And what divine

consolation in ex-raying, with telescope, Sirius’s occipital lobe of distant galaxy for the aneurysms of exploding supernovas proving my stroke-dimmed galaxy of neurons doesn’t mean I’m out of harmony with some grand celestial order! But, yes, there’s still grief over

The eye pain from a bright screen and the rings from power lines returning that bewitching high pitch before

the pop and brief numbness of my nose. But now, I return inside, shut lights, and feel my mind northern light with delight over the tiny particle of plaque

loosed into my occipital lobe’s solar system so like those rogue comets fated to crash into blue-green planets and illumed temporal lobes of moons.

Still, I will let the fleeting light of these thoughts flash across the cosmos of my consciousness even though the heart’s star will soon

dim and smolder into the black hole of death or not knowing for see, now, how the firmaments affirm there’s no border between head and heaven—

consciousness and cosmos—so if I don’t go gently into that good night, I’ll still be consoled knowing, like those heavenly bodies, that I’m dying by giving away my last light.

Acknowledgements:

Alluvium: Mediation on Two Old Growth Stumps in Robert’s Preserve, Norway, Maine

Amethyst Review: Upon Learning that Bees Taste with Their Feet, Bees and Goldenrod

Café Review: Mediation on the Guitar’s Wood

Canary: When One Has Walled a Long Time All Alone, part 1

Frost Meadow Review: When One Has Walled a Long Time All Alone, part 2

Good Fat(The Portsmouth Poet Laureate Project): The Fire Tower Lookout in the Wake of His Separation from His Wife

Lothlorien Review: Upon Learning Her Husband Only Has a Few Months to Live, The Bread Baker’s Conjoined Twins, After Her Ex Commits Suicide She Adopts His Cat, For the Black Bear Biologist

Maine Public Radio, Poems from Here: Upon Learning Her Husband Only Has a Few Months to Live, Some Words on Birds and Borders

Our Poetry Archive: Magnifying Glass, The Landscape Lexicographer Laments, The Hatchery Worker in the Wake of His Broken Engagement, The City Under Siege for Years Suddenly Realizes that Birds have Abandoned Her Borders, First Whitetail Deer

Portland Press Herald, Deep Water Column: Upon Hearing that Bread is the Way Sun Enters the Body, Atop Peaked Mountain, First Loon

Raven’s Perch: Dead Uncle Joe’s Dodge Goes Unsold, Atop Peaked Mountain, , Peaked Mountain Low-Bush Blueberries

Red River Review: The Retired Dog Catcher Loses His Wife

Rise-Up Review: The Prison Gardener

Speckled Trout Review: The Deceased fly Fisherman Addressing His Surviving Loved Ones

12 Mile Review: For the Birds We Can’t Name

3 Nations Anthology: Observations of the Garden, Fourth of July

Anthology, Read Me Some Poem, on Longfellow: Upon Hearing Bread is the Way Sun Enters the Body

Bio-luminescing, Sheltering Pines Press: An Homage for My Doctor’s Receptionist with a Lisp

Combed by Crows: Some Words on Birds and Borders, Upon Hearing that Bread is the Way Sun Enters the Body, , Observations of the Garden, Fourth of July

Thanks to my blurbers/sirens: Michelle Lewis, Marita O’Neil, Claire Hersom, Michael Tarabilda, and XJ Kennedy.

Thanks, especially, to Michael Tarabilda whose friendship and mentorship for over two decades made me a better person and, I hope, a better poet.