Three Poems by Barry Spacks: Dream-Masters, On a Photograph by Barbara Parmet, Trumpet Vine

Dream-Masters

In this dream called life at times those loved
must leave us, moving into darkness,
among them celebrants specially blessed
who spent their strength in mothering others.

Death, we're told, is perfectly safe,
but these, who'd dreamed their days so well,
they teach us a comfort even more vast:
how to dream a diamond's dream.

On a Photograph by Barbara Parmet

The title is "Woman."
On a pedestal, slim arms, heart-stopping breasts,
a cat’s head, staring.

She holds at her crotch
in casual fingers
an enormous black rose.

Trumpet Vine

Cut at the root by the men re-roofing
a remnant still greens the coping’s edge,

still with its swirls ennobles the trellis,
yet to receive the news of decay

as underground the mother-stock
again starts the long climb toward the rooftop.

Barry Spacks has taught writing and literature for many years at M.I.T. and UCSB. He’s published individual poems widely, plus stories, two novels, eleven poetry collections, and three CDs of selected work. His first novel The Sophomore has just been brought back into print in the Faber & Faber Finds series. His most recent poetry collection (Cherry Grove, 2012) presents a selection from ten years of e-mail exchanges with his friend Lawrence E. Leone. It's called A Bounty of 84s (84 being a stanza limited exactly to 84 characters, echoing the traditional notion that the Buddha left us 84,000 different teachings because humans have so many different needs and all of us so differently the same). Over the years his poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and hundreds of other journals.

Copyright 2013 © Barry Spacks. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.