Norm Milstein

Come with me to Calico Beach
Where Peppy Creek runs down to the sea,
Where squawking flocking seagulls screech
And powerful pompous pelicans preach:
...

At what point life? Does life happen when the crucial carbon
falls into place, creating a molecule
with strong self-replicating tendencies, or is carbon already alive?
At what point life?
...

Plumage of a Pomo basket,
Flame of feathers blue and black,
...

The rain falls like leaves and snow.
It stutters and mutters
And bounces and flows.
...

The alligator pear is rough outside but smooth and soft and green inside,
All of which lets us discover that you can't tell an avocado by its cover.
...

I am an endless membrane, flatter than you can know.
I am thinnest, a mind wisp, metaphysical wallpaper.
If you were me, drunk with power, you'd laugh,
For I have cut Infinity in half!
...

Seize a circle, snatch a square,
Trap a zoid:
They're everywhere.
Let me know just who you am.
...

From Two Dog Trail to Maple Hollow
And up the frothing veins
Of your singing sister arroyos
I have wandered,
...

It is a quiet evening.
I listen to Andean flutes.
They sing like wise ghosts.
Becoming melody,
...

I have grabbed my fading shadow's ankle.
I have tickled its wispy ribs,
And now, I laugh with myself,
And write love letters to the world.
...

What is this magic we ceaselessly seek,
Though our thoughts like balloons fly away?
Evanescent as bubbles, they shimmer and sway:
They are flung from a wand and float through our days.
...

Sing a song of countless stars
Out in the dark so deep.
May all the heavens fill your dreams
And sing you fast asleep.
...

I have no size but by extension,
I'm the mother of dimensions.
Subtle soul of abstract form,
From me all of Space is born.
...

Beside the freeway's noisy bellow,
We did meet a merry fellow.
A purple bloom with a golden throat,
On calicoflower we did dote.
...

Like Scheherazade, you never ran out of stories.
It was comforting to know you were still alive and writing.
...

In robes of cloud with the moon for a hat,
her hair a stream of falling stars,
she rides a dreampuff all the night
through parrot plumaged seas.
...