I cannot do justice to Tim’s many interests and careers here even if it were not late at night. Farmer, businessman; poet and student of poetry, vigorous with unfashionable rhyme and meter (it was said that under the tutelage of his Yale mentor, Robert Penn Warren, he memorized 30,000 lines of Greek and English poetry); adventurer, …
Tag: Poetry
Wild Poem
From a wild poet friend, Tim Murphy, as he fights his cancer battle… The Four H’s Again for Steve Bodio Last night I dreamed I flew an eagle-owl, her wing span just six feet, the talons of her feet clutching my fist, horned ears above her cowl. We hunted high, hard scrabble Kazakhstan, my barrel-chested …
Good Bones
Several people have sent me links to Nora Krug’s Washington Post essay on Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”- you know, the one that begins “Life is short/ Though we keep it from our children” (sorry, no link- still hypertext challenged). Although I agree with everything she says, and recommend the essay, which also features Smith …
Rock and Hawk
“This gray rock, standing tall On the headland, where the seawind Lets no tree grow, Earthquake-proved, and signatured By ages of storms: on its peak A falcon has perched. I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive, But this; bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness …
Rockabilly Poetry!
I finally got Effigies II, the London- published collection of five Native female poets that includes Ungie Davila; Most are dutiful to OK, but Ungelbah’s are brilliant, partially because she draws upon the cultural history of New Mexico as seen through the rhinestone – studded red sunglasses and sensibilties of a talented cowpunk artist and …
New Tim Murphy
Enjoy these- they will only be up for a month… September, an Ode Song for the Sandhills Forested shoulders sloping down its valley, the Sheyenne carves its way through North Dakota to Agassiz, lakebed of the Red River. I pass a timber truck to prove that logging endures far east of our Montana mountains. Certainly …
A Poem for the New Dogs
Margory Cohen sent this, by the late, great, and much- missed Vicki Hearne: The New Hound Puppy Now it is time for her name – Start the call. The time may comeFor her job, which is to runHoles in the palpable wind Hallowed by world and the worldWill collapse, follow this houndThrough meteoric valleys. Wolf-shag …
New Poems from Tim Murphy
To Stephen Bodio I dreamed I was striding beside your horse, dogs coursing in the mist, the falcon on your fist husbanding her inconceivable force. Shahin, hoping that we were hunting quail, spiraled aloft to hover as we quartered her cover. Over the brush we saw a single sail, then broke …
Harrison Poem
They used to say we’re living on borrowed time but even when young I wondered who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent, his four sons gathered, his papery hand grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing. Now the four sons have all run …
Another Wind River Poem
From Tim: Wind River Justice Alan riding his first horse from Big Sandy to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday: his mare reared in the lodgepoles when a spruce grouse flushed and nearly pitched him down a switchback. My own gelding stampeded through a meadow, and our young wrangler called those ponies “gentled.” We braved Pyramid’s boulders, …