Pooh watches the clouds

Is there a book of secrets?
Hidden in a tree hollow,
tucked under a grassy
pillow.

We'll lean back easily
on the ground, learn
about the afterlife
of bees.

Say we die (like bees),
do we get to eat honey
in a roomy forest just
like this?

Tell me, Piglet, is that a pie,
or a bicycle, or a face,
the clouds have made?
My, I think it's a gorilla!

On reading Erica Jong

Ruby lips unzipping, show teeth,
what’s it mean,
a woman’s mouth,

does it say, bite hard
with candour,

nude of face, bare of torso,
rolled up female impersonator
on the marriage bed,

as a gold coin fell, continues
the bliss somewhere, insatiable.

Fear of flying no more.

Process notes: The prompt from Poetry Tow Truck is http://djvorreyer.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/poetry-tow-truck-11-the-books-the-thing/ "The Book's The Thing". I took the cover picture of a lipsticked mouth from Erica Jong's "Fear of Fifty" and took off from there. 

You are a writer, which means you are also a reader. So grab a book – and let’s get started.

Choose a book, any book. (Kristin brought old, used books when we tried this prompt.)  The book itself is your prompt. This could mean the words found on its pages, but it could also mean any of the following:

1. The cover (image or leather or embossed)
2. The front pages (cities, dates, other titles by the author.)
3. Illustrations (including author photos, center inserts, etc.)
4. Table of Contents/Index/Appendices
5. Marginalia, bookstore markings.

Horseman

I haven't been to the valley

but the prophet says I will

someday.

  

So does the battered book,

which had predicted the moors,

green lumps of rolling earth,

I wish I could say it was like

finding the needle in the saddlebag.

  

I am certain, till reason becomes

my jailor. Who is more wise,

the scientist or the preacher?

  

Both, it’s hard to say.

  

Physics tries to explain miracles,

how the world came to be,

till the next cataclysm.

  

You are defined by what I am not,

like everything turned inside out,

so the windmills gyrate.

  

And it’s the horseman who will ride

over the rolling moors.

  

Process notes: A poem whose landscape took off from Gorden Lightfoot’s “Don Quixote” with borrowed words, “saddlebag”, “battered book”, “prophet”, “moor”, “earth”, “jailor”, “needle”, “preacher”, “horseman”, “windmills”. As a reader, you may infer meanings from the poem, but really it’s as much your construct as my poem is one. Borrowing from physics, we are each “pocket universes” in a megaverse of diversity. In other words, there is not just one universe (as it seems) but multiple universes, and as “pocket universes” we’re each in our own valley in the cosmic landscape. I’m not sure if my process notes illuminates the poem. If it does not then it’s fine. Because the universe is a mystery and a paradox, and you know, each universe has its own law of physics anyway.

Poem for We Write Poems prompt: Make Your Own Wordle based upon self selected words from Gorden Lightfoot’s “Don Quixote” lyrics.