Four Poems
Mike Wilson
Psalm of Esoteric Meteorology
Yoke me to clouds
who make auspicious raindrops
tap my window.
Translate chiaroscuro
of thunderheads during subtle storms.
Tune me to subsonic moods of Zeus.
Bear me up to vaporous skies
where secret creatures of atmosphere
are born in synapses of thunder.
Lead me through the troposphere
to sense with organs of temperature
and barometric pressure.
Give me weather’s tenderness
kissing senseless bedsheets
flapping in the wind.
Eye in the Sky
Birds fly in
furtive bursts, bush to bough,
robins, cardinals, sparrows, doves,
crossing paths unnaturally,
some event in bird world
I do not see until I see
the hawk
trailing an unlucky bird
high
too
flew
who
at the wrong time,
or the right time.
Birds relax, return to business as usual.
Death is hungry only
once a day.
Goldfish in a Pond
Swimming is their thinking.
Cruising deep is different than
floating near the surface.
Schooled, shoaled, aware of together,
or solitary – each fin flick
a complete sentence.
Warp and woof of sensation
knits their world
writes their history.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Beets, a Dreamed Poem
Beet season has three stages: seedling, sprout, and seed.
Seedling
Seedling is the flashiest, most demanding stage,
because it stimulates hunger and possessiveness.
Chronologically, seedlings follow seed and sprout
but are always seeable in form outside time.
Viewed without appetite, and limned botanically,
seedling is growth asserting its claim to individuality.
Sprout
Preceding seedling, sequentially, is sprout.
Above ground, sprouts are boys or girls
emerging in islands as servants
indentured to appetite for power
attenuated from sensory immediacy.
Nonetheless, sprouts manifest sensuously
in person, place, circumstance, and history,
comprising what commonly is held to be life.
The sprout itself, below ground, is
an intriguing burst of green in lightless dirt.
Seed
The first stage, seed, is the most mysterious.
Viewed from one perspective, it is the Kaaba.
Dimensionally, it is a misshapen sphere.
It is helpful if seedling, sprout, and seed
are visualized top to bottom in a column,
each aligned with the others dialectically.
Consciously doing so focuses flourish,
subsumes the notion of maturation into a unity,
making synthesis easier to harvest.
About the Author
Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in many magazines and in his book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press). His second poetry collection, Before the Fall, and his debut novel, Food Court, were published in 2026.
