The Book with the Yellow Cover

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John Moncure Wetterau
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Title: The Book With The Yellow Cover
Author: John Moncure Wetterau
Release Date: February 9, 2004 [eBook #11006]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
BOOK WITH THE YELLOW COVER***
Copyright (c) 2003 by John Moncure Wetterau
The Book With
The Yellow Cover
John Moncure Wetterau
(c) copyright 2003 by John Moncure Wetterau.
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559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, California
94305, USA.
ISBN #: 0-9729587-0-3
Published by:
Fox Print Books
137 Emery Street
Portland, ME
04102
[email protected]

207.775.6860
Some of these poems first appeared in: Poetry East-West, The Maine
Sunday Telegram, The Maine Times, Nostoc, Backwoods Broadsides,
H.O.M.E., Headcheese, Chants, Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series,
Café Review, and To Keep You Company.
for w.cat
I had a book of Chinese and Japanese poems that I gave to a friend on
the west coast. It was a very small book with a yellow cover, stapled
together. No adornments. Just the poems, alive after hundreds of years.
J.M.W.
The Japanese Mason
Without haste, gathering
scrape of the trowel,
slap of cement,

reaching for a block,
setting and tapping it level,
turning with the
wheelbarrow,
graceful, sweating,
freed
of every moment.
Kauai
Sweet Hawaii
Even if somebody did steal
my battery, generator, oil cap,
visegrips
last night,
I passed the test to be a taxi driver,
and even if I don't
have the money
to buy a Charley's Taxi shirt,
congratulations to me.


I'll figure something out.
I'll have coffee in Everybody's Bake Shop;

I'll write Varve and Finn,
tell them I love them,
tell them sweet
Hawaii
going to be our new home.
Honolulu
Bus Stop
14, eyes of a deer
in bamboo.
16, heavier, going to school
without her books.
King Street
Honolulu

For Rob
Handsome Rob.
Half the women hate you;
the other half
will give
you anything.
Deep in Nam:
your buddy shot, tracheotomy.
"He
died happy," you told me,
"he believed I was going to
save him."

Perhaps he knew
he would lie in your arms
forever.
Too Big
Listening to Schubert
while Great-Aunt Hannah
embroiders on the
wall,
and darkness closes--
what have we come to?
We've gone
wrong,
too big
to find our way by song,
light
falling on a face

and handkerchief,
illumination
in the manner
of Rembrandt.
Peter's Answer
Little Blue Heron, young, still white,
by the north causeway bridge--

stick legs, too thin
for the swelling body,
the visual weight of

feathers,
stepping slowly in shallow water,
long toes trailing limply,
then
extending, three splayed forward,
one back. Brilliant neck

curving, poised. Dagger beak
the same gray as legs and toes.
Why
is nature beautiful?
The lust for pattern, Peter said.
The heron's
head rose and twisted,
circular eye, light brown, orange
rimmed,
ancient intelligence
asking a different question.
I was unmoving,
not dangerous.
The heron turned to hunt,
brush, a cloud above the
river.
New Smyrna Beach,
Florida
Wally's Poem
Dolphins surge up and under.
Mozart's soprano
stitches the heart
together.
Washes for a watercolor.
An ant crosses my foot.
Wallace Klitgaard;
Epitome of Splendor--

ants, sun, one's lot.
He typed it himself,
showed it to me on the
bus
38 years ago.
He was grinning,
the glad no age
that we
become, bent
to making clumsy prayer.
Morning, Maine Honolulu
Early mist breaking
on low tide, mud smell.
Ducks, the small birds,

the rooster down the road
begin to sing the air,
the light, the
whole
enormous chance
grateful as the old people
reclaiming Pauahi Street,
seeing each
other in doorways
after the night.
I Would
In 1948
I walked all the way

to 14th Street
to buy a bow and
arrow.
It was 30 cents; I had 29.
The woman sold it to me anyway
and I was free and happy
on Sixth

Avenue
as any Indian.
If I could find her tonight,
I would keep death far away.
For Anita Bartlett,
Too Late
Why cannot blue be enough?
Light in the sky, dark in the sea,
the
shades between.
The green of fields,
red clover, buttercups.
Bridal
white of apple blossoms,
burial earth, hawk's feather, snakeskin.

Monarchs, Anita,
feeding on purple aster,
fluttering up,
sun
glowing orange, brown, bronze
through black edged wings, twenty

joining twenty joining a hundred,
down, up, over, from
color to
color
to Mexico.
Clouds booming over
the washed woods,
blue sun, Finn eats
chop
suey from a pot
while I shave.
Six months to dismantle
the dead
rooms of a marriage,
down to a borrowed tent,
patches of snow, and
invisibly,
all around us,