middle spring: a poem by Amalio Madueno

My good friend the poet and general rascal Amalio Madueno is going to read at Ventucky College next Weds. April 9 and I’ve been rereading his book, Lost in the Chamiso looking for a poem to use for a broadside to publicize his reading, National Poetry Month, and Earth Month activities.

Since a number of people have been coming to this blog looking for spring poems, I offer you this one of his.

Middle Spring

Below me and above, middle Spring.
Blossom air soothes gravel and stone.
Birds in my shaggy yard scamper in dust
At home in morning’s ocean breeze.
Night after night dreams become less
Familiar, like the landscape of a city
I will never see. Today is light,
Tomorrow will be lighter still. Sundogs
Streak the perihelion, spiders drop
Filaments of light out of the blue
Into sunny scrutiny – the intersection
Of the everyday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amalio Madueño grew up on the borderlands of California and Baja,organized farm workers with Cesar Chavez, and studied poetry in graduate school at UC Irvine; he now lives near Taos, New Mexico.

Long associated with the Taos Poetry Circus and Mexican Bob’s Poetry Camp, Madueno has published widely in journals across the United States and Europe. Recent anthologies featuring his work include Venus in the Badlands (ed. J. Macker, Santa Fe 2006) between sleeps: the 315 experiment 1993-2005 (ed. Dinsmore and Alley, Vancouver BC, 2006) and Wandering Hermit Review (Seattle, 2006). Ranchos Press has published almost a dozen chapbooks of his in the last 10 years; Lost in the Chamiso (wild embers press 2006) is his first full-length book. Amalio performs his work frequently the throughout New Mexico and the west in featured readings, seminars, television and radio, as well as on videos and CDs.