Stuart Blazer, RI Poet

Dive from leaves to root.
Rise to taste the branch's fruit.
Books let us be birds.

-Stuart Blazer


Dig into earth
just by standing still,
deep spaces open
where air is diamond-hard,
the purest gem you can own.

-Stuart Blazer, A Paper Life


A leaf is that part of wood
that gets away, botanical
bird, a
grain in air.
* *
* *
Trees are their own understudies
whose silence gathers force,
unfolds yet more leaves
in all their frayed near transparency.
Each role lives on as a ring
worn deep within, shining through
as everything does once
ploughed under.
* *
* *
And so with grieving.

-Stuart Blazer



Days are funnels
narrowing to what happens
to us; my mother's mother,
born in Odessa, sits
with her daughter listening
to me read poems.
We are three translations
from the Russian.
* *
* *
Reaching to kiss
this smoothly wrinkled cheek
my lips brush an apple
from another world.

-Stuart Blazer


Back-roads in Fall

At 60 miles per hour
wood ripples
along the sides of barns;
at 30 it slows
to a painterly grain.
That hazy greenish white
is mountain laurel.
Braking to a stop
bright circles are nailheads
in the sun;
you can tell how worn
the clapboards are.

-Stuart Blazer


Ignition of mind & air,
reminder that we are
fallen ash, rising smoke.

-Stuart Blazer

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