Frank Ford

By Frank Ford

• Boulder Poems Nov 11, 2001

  A small collection of poems about Boulder, CO.

• Eben Fine Park, Boulder Nov 11, 2001

  Kayakers don’t like tubers, teen boys, all arms and legs joyously spun down rapids, barechested, in cutoffs or board shorts. Appropriately repellent, helmeted, these kayak guys seem to feel they’re in The Aberdeen Proving Grounds of middle-aged manhood.

• On Starbucks Patio, Boulder Nov 11, 2001

  A conversation away from the office is sluggish- ly turning personal, remaining, though, formal. The Masque of the Pro- fessional is natural- y not created here.

• She rocks Nov 11, 2001

  her platform sandals, (hearing as a dear expense) placing ONE, then the OTHER in peril- ous ankle mode. He descants, not glancing at her tilt- ing tits.

• Cruel, So? Nov 11, 2001

  Outside a Social Service Building, a fat woman waves. Her clothes, too, wave in wider interference, like tablecloths shaken.

• Miracle of Slow Nov 11, 2001

  A tri-bladed fan at the far lee of a warehouse, parting sun- shine out. Cat’s pause be- fore pouncing.

• “Paper or plastic?” Nov 11, 2001

  at Alfalfa’s Natural Foods in Boulder. Stealthily, divulge I, plastic.

• WPA Nov 11, 2001

  built the University of Colorado Library. Conservatives seared it as wasteful-- federal makework for lay- abouts, etc.

• Burnished Child Nov 11, 2001

  over the river bridge inside The Boulder Library, very near closing, holds a cookie cratered by this sun- down glow. Much proves miracle enough, and then the light.

• Connecting Light

  A collection of poems by Frank B. Ford

• Copyright and Acknowledgements

  Copyright © 1990, Frank B. Ford.

• Dedication
• Young Italian Girl Resting On Her Elbow - Cezanne

  Such indolence becomes the light encounter- ing her and him and us. What is the art of years but connecting light?

• Running to Light

  the river and the snow are taken by their shadows becoming darkness with a sound searching light: finding the moon it thrashes it to ribbons. Rewound at an eddy then revolving whole and cold.

• Clothesline Visitation

  She releases sheets to wind. They snap brilliances rowing the swollen green- blue earth to sudden Him, a nave radiating blacks a- gainst hot, belly- ing waves.

• Trio

  What has fallen? Most obviously along the wet floor of the woods, trees, but of what human sense, spirit?

• Linking the Miracles

  light sung round the chalice and round the priest thrusting up the host, sunbright her face exploding the front row.

• At The Elevation

  of the Host St Mary’s paint smell mixed with cloying cold cream + HEAT pipes HAMMERED you out of drifted sleep CLAMMY and there IT is BAD BOY and growing on 12! oh my GOD and what NOW?

• Two Met

  Each turns the glow to knife between o hold us dark cupped, sun- set-rimmed. Spin us free when we have drunk this shimmering between.

• Where

  the curve flows to become everywhere people walk in fields amid the flaring stones and trees, the grasses described by birds, and each is what touches.

• The Plan

  We go our separate ways to separate our ways to go our ways separate to separate our going to ways of separate ways of going separate we go our separate ways of going separate to our separate ways of separate going to our ways separate we go we separate we go separate to separate to go our separate ways.

• Civilization

  The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. --Wellington On the playing fields of Eton I assumed my fair turn in New Haven Yalie bells held us as in a vise, through mine fields since missing the notices haphazardly posted a- mong the swells of cricketeers and footballers, the rise of dust in dusk, cool-edged.

• Bursted

  At the library display brown ink, browner-splotched page in application for a pedlar’s license: “gun bursted” and he could thus no longer farm, that one arm hanging useless. Rushing!

• Nighthawks, after Hopper

  The world, of course, is dead. It was my father’s as this could be Nickel Charlie’s, the all-night restaurant next to Loew’s Poli in New Haven where he’d repair after the graveyard shift on the Journal-Courier.

• Viewed as Drama

  the war’s a disappointment thus said D. W.

• Way It’s
• To Tamzen On Her Fortieth Birthday

  Undoubtedly you’ll get this crap from others: Life begins @ 40 etc... you’re not getting older you’re getting better - yeah all the Hallmark cliches showering down to spice the big day up.

• Stream
• The Matter With Us

  It is cold we have made once more narrowing the blaze to this still point to turn and to ponder dispassionately concentrating grains of fire-sung ice keen as the much folded tip of a Japanese sword.

• From dark the floating

  voice where I had gone to feel more alone, thinking I was, and then our sergeant’s words, the straining wind off ropes outside the tent. “You okay now?

• The German Lesson

  The women in one camp fucked the guards for toilet paper. (To what base uses do we all etc.?

• Human Potential

  We want the language as a friend who’ll tell a gentle joke We’ll always go out for coffee forgetting to eye the gauges: The leaders must hold this engraved. Well, our own friend’s actual head is gone.

• Kamikazie

  means divine wind. On trains the young men carried a ball of rice in leaves, they headlong, reverent, would have the shit blown out of them, war being this sort of capital concern as now a drink by the same name by the same name.

• Prayer To My Daughter

  What I’d like to have for you is a good liar only he can tell the truth with conviction since evidently he knows what it is as contrasted to his obvious duplicity refusing to lie to himself. So therefore when you have him you really got something true and more solid than an alleged good man like your father who unfortunately doesn’t have a daughter.

• The Peach Boy

  I bring my GI Orient and Paul, 4, his dubbed cartoon of Saturday morn- ing monsters in outer space yet he hasn’t much to lose as I exclude Sigmund’s and Carl’s inner-space hardware store cause the play opens with the father discovering this great peach in a stream, and once home the old couple uncover a baby inside as samisens bridge my life in sound back to a small dim room of a Tokyo club where a guy picks a tune from this white baby grand and I’m in raw company alone then, with my girl better and worse I’m tearing at a steak and throwing back Nip- pon beer. Cocksure, but she’s hushing me now, because the guy composes, the pale lid floating inclined on his smoky progressions in my sliding mind the Peach Boy has grown up, is prowling the audience when from his silk, peach light widens over little Paul beautifully glow meets glow.

• Black Frost

  The kiss among diving trees as from the jack-o-lantern house the dread- ful speeches of our other out- wreathing in a cone. Shadows harrowing the stones, we dream ourselves in breath.

• Against the Deck

  she was thin in ways ay she was as thin in places aces were wider, snide reluctant queens and fat jacks held their spots; lots of pain rained on hands and has.

• Living Nonsense

  Who can treat the meaning- lessness? No doctor or priest telling you you’re not the first, thrusting whatever text through emptiness of air, that air where you are indeed first: Alpha in the hollows whistling your name.

• Mineral Baths - Bursa, Turkey

  Steam lifts to the rotunda, its art of running arabesques around windows thick and old, aswarm with aurioles. Down here the men soon draw apart, spurning visionary air for modesty.

• Sung To the Tune of Anything At All

  The sailor danced the whole insinuated night, went along home, hers, to his dismay. Her apparatus like his own, though greater, he beat to death this epicine coquette.

• Using Air

  of a buttered morning a coed in legwarmers bound for Poly Sci and yet they signal rasping practice boards be- neath an icy glow, ad- junct not to art but pain splayed out after a rag doll flop. The newest anything jives sweaty trial and its impure collapse.

• Reply

  You said I was pretty that evening of a thousand birds, their wings beat darkly up from your soft mouth, sweeping the moon away. The few who come here now drop at odds.

• Departure at Twilight

  Soft airs raise the women, each face a swinging blaze, their earrings swaying glimmers into cars suspended in a cold liquidity. Sinking to a knee, a gold surrounded man, struck through this first time to his heart of hearts.

• At Sounion

  of a morning woven over stone I bump camera then smock. We share a mist wherein I must refuse, no dreamy photographs desired: my- self and nothing.

• Three Shortstops

  Feat you’ve gotten the intellectual shove: reasons for everything and no love. Corona River You a- nother.

• Scoring
• From the Fishing Pier (Nam Decade)

  Far out the surfers start their ride. The day is gloss and wind and wide And I have come to get a rest From Time and Kodachromes of death.

• Generation

  Joe and Madeline graduated Cornell & went on to Ph (got married) Ds @ NYU. gestured intensively as they rapped a concept till it, surrounded, surrendered.

• The Terrorist

  I wait as have others. You strike at your wish or may not I know your demands and have al- ways.

• The Plain Answer

  The logic of a dream is in it, you learn but needn’t then. The walking life cannot play fair with its burden of desire.

• At the University

  Strutting memorial stones a pigeon fantails between boy scholars untrue to anything might take looking into, girls aswing with a something nothing can propound, bi- cyclists boring under the latest shit on man falling out the window.

• Farce Averted

  Will she live with her little panties here? Walk around in her underwear?

• Those Two Again

  Snow is crystalgeometrics fused to hood a knobby world. In art things turned are fired to glaze, perfect, caught there right before a crazed drunk wrecks the shop, must be dealt with, giv- en booze and meat to keep his unkempt soul till snow confides once more outside the window, sticks around to smooth hung- over light.

• Calling It a Day

  The Surrender to the Fools was effected with mimimum pomp - to their sheerest miff for they had arrived in fool regalia: gowns and suits and hoods and badges, bright chains of office. Instead their capitulators gave wry, exhausted speeches...

• Home

  Where I come from we never really lived (so we said and did) and here I’m stranger still for some place won’t answer. There’s pleasure on paths that birds blur ahead.

• Coastal Graveyard in Branford, Connecticut

  The frugal spaces as if Yankees embraced the dirt down un- to them. Above, salt-scoured markers rippling in exhaust from DATSUN & McDONALDS.

• 4th of July

  Ketchup Corvette cradling this winking blonde bangs at the light with my shuddering Dart hey big wink for real? mid shimmers of SUN- OCO & EXXON & GULF & WESTERN CLOTHING SOLD HERE PIZZA KING BEER BURGER BOY WENDYS the para- bolic piss of those Golden Arches & ARBYS fries onions busting through these coarse grains my A- merican Blonde shouldering diesels hiss in stinks of asphalt oil & grease glossy ex- plosions of a thousand cars in shiny black parking lots puddling suns O my America & O my new girl quick inside your own raw wave hey America I’m your native son hanging in there hard in army pants neon-nylon jacket rocking my self-destructing motor in a ***ROUTE 1 ECSTASY*** she’s off @ spectral green stands on the brakes then lays down rubber fishtailing into BUSTERS WATER HOLE her hair snaps acetylene.

• Beer and Sandwich On the Road

  I’M THE GREATEST POLACK EVER INVENTED WHAT’RE YOU? American.

• Overheard

  I aint no CHURCH person you know what I MEAN? All that STUFF!

• Language and the Marketplace

  If the particular whore enjoys an icecream cone why blame her? O see can you say she should rather essay honest work for her coin, but’s lacking the mere what?

• There’ll Always Be Us

  Eat beans AMERICA needs the gas, and in the event of nuclear attack, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye. The people’ll save us, yes after all the politicians’ twirling lies, their suck- ing dry the public tit, it’s the love of the people makes light of the world.

• The Chance

  FEW TIMES I CAN AFFORD DELTA I WATCH PARTS OF MY FATHER’S DYING IN HOLLYWOOD FLORIDA CAUSE BIG C GOT HIM OH YEAH NO APPEAL & HE ASKS ME TO FIX UP THE DART GET IT INSPECTED YOU KNOW SO HE CAN DRIVE WHEN HE KNEW HE NEVER WOULD & THEN THE MECHANIC TELLING ME THE ONE EDGEY THING. WASN’T SURE BRAKES’D PASS.

• Dentist

  He explains decay in morning light, I phrase colors of the corrugated shed three stories down, changing the language as light changes and when it stops, the words must continue in order to save us. We say too much and yet at a still point are graced.

• The Territory

  A current phrase or two having to do with finding oneself. What acquire?

• Shy
• Defining Hope

  Let your veins drink where other veins were let. Kneel on stones from whence blood was almost scoured.

• Ay

  There is and is not a rub. It has acquired your wearing thin.

• The Moment

  Evening is a river of shadows rushing the trees un- till you hear water and are not sure that it is wind or that dark itself can run. Knowing that you can’t be sure of anything alone then, breathe your question.

• In Our Cold Stars

  An old car waits in the terrific sun. We turn away a moment to adjust our shapeless clothes and stand for it, the camera, dreaming and haste in our mouths.

• The Hand In the Future

  We are composing ourselves as the photographer composes. Our being guided and guiding him and each solely directing such limited chaos making us free in a way of the result.

• Directing The Scene

  This night river breaks the grasses. I touch air enough to hear children in the fragrances, in the river-wind woods holding seige, their voices fire against the trees.

• The Grove

  Those leaning pines with sparse and floating branches, the sea behind thinned here and there by light: A Japanese print before I’d seen one. Does the scene exist before the artist makes it so?

• Visions of the Yale Library

  where a sari insinuates scholars, in hunches, eyes above blond glasses diving then to proof as she is by and by the checker, dour enthroned: both subsumed as the doorway widens to mercury noon. At lunch she’ll laugh away a junior’s suave ennui at George and Harry’s, nod on cue, wring teabag a- gainst spoon.

• Who Cares?

  Stories mercifully short

• Amerika by M.

  Times melt together. There were lights but I puzzled as to whether they were of the Christmas variety.

• Big A

  Man: Can you help me? DJ: In which regard?

• BASIC Program For Capitalism

  10 PRINT “I don’t want to hear you’ve been cut back to only half-time! I want a FULL days work out of your lazy ass.

• Future Dialog

  DOCTOR: They’ll say what they wish. Always.

• All a Dither

  We all started avoiding him because he made us nervous. I had never thought of how to label his actions until my secretary says “This new printer dithers; I mean it’s supposed to, fills out each little individual letter better that way.

• A Tragedy Anent The International Phonetic Alphabet

  A couple who pronounced. Everything perfectly, American with a whiff of British.

• Measure For Measure

  Excuse me, but you don’t look the part, no bandoliers, holsters, more of a guy most at home in an athletic jacket, have a beer with at the local Elks. Right, with banker at one elbow and welder at the other etc.

• The Experiment

  She is given an entire life in four hours though programming with accelerated hormones, will die of lung cancer at equivalent thirty-one. I arrive, late, missing the birth and more, but get to observe her gangly first kiss.

• Revelation

  He: Fuckin feathers! Feathers!

• Two Documents

  Well, Diary, these are the human problems. H.

• Chapters 1 and 2

  The final disgust of the evening: he shows how his head is fastened with velcro straps. She rips it off his shoulders and locks herself in the bathroom, performing indignities.

• The Premium

  As mostly everybody knows by now, The Hoeing Zollerns portrays a German farm family which settles in Ireland, uh... inevitable mixups which prove to be so very very funny.

• Tug

  Sees her in a construction bucket being hoisted up against the sun to a traffic light outside the dental school. Her darkly yellow helmet.

• Introduction

  I’m writing a short story. Fine, written a hundred or so, but having just read a critical work on deconstructionism, I need to change something, although my feeling is that I’ve always deconstructed - smashed up the calcified bourgeois everything, or tried to.

• The Surprise

  Man: What the bleedin’ hell! Cyclist: Oh I’m so sorry!

• The Medium

  A Robin Leach interviewing a something called a Morgan or Tiffany Something. Great breasts plus the worship of rattan furniture.

• Executive Decision

  a: The one they call Jinky, from Accounting? He okayed his early retirement package.