Suzanne Buffam Poems

Somewhere on the planet it was midnight.
Someone was using her mouth

to say the word mouth. Someone else
was looking at the sky not listening
...

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.

I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
...

I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.
...

The last line should strike like a lover's complaint.
You should never see it coming.
And you should never hear the end of it.
...

Fate piles up
On the bloody Norman shore.
If you must swim there
Swim on your back.
...

Little patches of grass disappear
In the jaws of lusty squirrels

Who slip into the spruce.
Cars collapse into parts.
...

Any idiot can become a genius if she wants it badly enough.

One must study how the crow flies.

One must say to oneself as the crow flies so fly I.
...

I am not a wise man. This makes my life difficult in certain ways. But in other ways it simplifies things. I find it hard to sit still very long before I get up and wander the halls in my hat for example. On the other hand I stay warm and keep moving. Could these ways be the same way?
...

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don't exist yet.

Facts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.

Pluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 1341340.
...

Wind rips splendor from the trees
and lays it at our feet.
Some of us hungry,
...