Maker’s Brain

Life-maker life-lover love-maker
inventor and gracieux fils de Pan,
beautiful freaks inhabit your labyrinth.
I am reduced to peace.

Your final geometry of pleasure –
the Book of Kells, your passionate structures.
Computer’s perfect
circuitry, sense
nearly fast as time.

May none of your crafty, witty ventures
sink in the fact of jelly,
the rigid genetic casting
   (the slop of suchlike paradox),
memory’s tangle of wires
or training’s poker-burned tracks.

May triumph the love which makes you, hybrid,
build
such honeycombs, such hives

better than nature
as stained glass
and stainless steel.

Insouciance

My love, let’s learn by your mistakes:
Let us avoid intensity
Whose fever saps our sweating wills.
Observe Nature’s immensity:
See with what grand insouciance
She’s laid or mislaid the casual tarns and lakes
To gleam like polished shields among the hills.
Such effects from such negligence!

Bill Shepherd’s first full-length book demonstrates an energetic and resourceful talent; underlying the clear surface of his narrative, descriptive and reflective poems is a disturbing streak of the horrific. His ironic and farcical poems will win many readers for an approachable book.