Poetry from Brian Michael Barbeito

Long grasses that have gone to seed with a blue flower stalk in the foreground. Blue sky with a few white clouds.
Closeup of yellow flowers with a caterpillar in focus.
Bush with green leaves and light pink flowers.
Light purple and white lupines up close.
Dry grass that has gone to seed that's brown with green stalks.
Blades of grass up close, one red and black ladybug in the top left corner.
Long stalks of grass and white and pink flowers. Sky is blue with white clouds.
Field of green shrubs and a few flowers with tall leafy green trees in the distance and white clouds in a blue sky.

Summer Scenes Sanguine

There is the sky and the clouds, a long and straight passageway below, beside a hill. It’s dark and shaded but not so much that one can’t see. Wind visits and makes the branches to sway back and forth. Previous storms have strewn leaves and branches around on the earth. Back and back, far and far, the largest mushroom waits untouched and unknown on a broken tree surrounded by reeds tall and then still. Just outside the trees is the open place, and on the feral summer growths are butterflies, spiders, and dragonflies. There are ants and grasshoppers. Blooms yellow, blue, and the open air is cleansing, refreshing. A pastoral scene. What is beyond the end of that place, where there is no passageway and the trees, the shrubs and chaparral become too thick? What would William Golding or Joseph Conrad think of that place? In the winter the snow is like infinite tiny crystals or other-worldly grains of sands. Agate, chaga, a large snake looks at me. Kundalini symbol and sign. I pause and it goes away at which point I look to the sky. I want to understand the clouds. I vaguely remember dreams of the night where I was in the desert and walked to a city at night with metropolitan lights and infrastructure and populace. But I wanted to go back to the desert. I couldn’t remember the rest. Something runs in the tall grasses. Fast. Determined. Magical. I see clover, bee, ladybug. Whitman wrote, -You road I enter and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe much unseen is also here.- Whitman only travelled far and far once, to Canada, to visit his friend a doctor interested in consciousness. I breathe as deeply as possible. I’d say there is a bird but there is no bird then. But the clouds are enough. They are something, colloquially speaking…they are really something then beautifully bloated, numerous, each a little different and content in their difference. The clouds are confident then.