Karla Linn Merrifield

The Calling

Every poet I now
disseminates the force.
It is what we do.
 
We make Protean allusions;
we perform Herculean metaphors
for myth’s sake.
 
In the phrasing of music
into words, power spreads
to brain waves, in heartbeats.
 
With the owl’s voice of darkness,
with the turtle’s midnight silence,
we harmonize in unison.
 
We sing the eerie electric pulse
as the Universe expands.
 

*with a line from Chris Crittenden

 
© 2012 Karla Linn Merrifield

Close Encounter

A marvel in the planetary world
of owls who weep
is your nervous laughter
leaned into the bosom
of a shrieking constellation.
 
Brilliant galactic diadems
of my turtle eyes
on black satin of deep space.
I orbit twin reptile moons,
returning the primal gaze of night.


*with a line from Chris Crittenden 


© 2012 Karla Linn Merrifield

Fractal of the Altered State

Slime, mud, rock, ash, nova,
ash, rock, mud, slime.
Call her what you will.
 
Green     frond     leaf     needle     lichen scale     eruption,
scale     needle     leaf     frond     green     .          
Call her Fern; she’d like that.
 
Alligator…armadillo…tortoise…blast.
She’s called Owl, too; she calls
to tortoises…armadillos…anoles…alligators.
 
And you, so it’s been told by Earth,
in skeins of Spanish moss in the poem called
Matter changes.  Matters Change. Fusion happens.
 

*with a line from Michael G. Smith

 
© 2012 Karla Linn Merrifield

No-Tech Scherzi Quartet from Florida

No gizmos, no iTunes,
no electronic nothing.
 
Rather moths, rain showers, the crickets,
their secrets chirped.
 
And to tickle your fancy:
earnest armadillos.
 
Me, of course, going on
about gopher tortoises.
 
 
                                    for Beau Cutts

 
© 2012 Karla Linn Merrifield

Gestalt of a Vision of the Four Elements

imp idea
elf mood
fairie tone
word of dryad
 
If I do not
fall prey to the owl
who laughs, I will
grin and bear my carapace.
 
 
© 2012 Karla Linn Merrifield

Award-winning poet, National Park Artist-in-Residence, and assistant editor and book reviewer of The Centrifugal Eye, Karla Linn Merrifield has had work published in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has seven-going-on-eight books to her credit, including Godwit: Poems of Canada, which received the 2009 Andrew Eiseman Writers Award for Poetry, and her new chapbook, The Urn, from Finishing Line Press. Forthcoming from Salmon Press is her full-length collection Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. And from Finishing Line Press, Merrifield’s The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica. She is currently co-editing the forthcoming Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%. You can read more about her and sample her poems and photographs at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.

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