Jim Natal
poet / literary presenter
ÉTUDE
in the Form of a
CROW
Poems with
Ravens & Crows
Odin’s snitches and drones baby
desert tortoise gobblers shell crackers
squatters on dumpsters squabble over
fast food bags in the middle of the street
refuse to move for oncoming cars
until the last possible moment then
hop right back you cannot kill them
or try they remember your face and
will give you no peace after that
Spare Room:
Haibun Variations
Spare Room: Haibun Variations is Jim Natal's second collection of poems written in updated Japanese haibun form, a dialogue between
crafted prose and haiku-like poetry that dates
back to Japanese haiku master Bashō in the late Seventeenth Century. At once contemplative and personal, evocative and wry, in Spare Room Natal reworks the traditional haibun form to encompass incisive commentary on contemporary environmental, political, and social issues.
After Paris in December I walked the beach. Los Angeles never looked so Gauguin, the city of sunshine versus the City of Light so "old and cold and settled in its ways."
The high clouds had been washed with white ink on blue, fat sumi-e brush strokes dispersing as they tailed off to the east, toward the mountains and then the desert.
The tide receded, revealing a boulevard of wet sand that mirrored the sky and made walking an act of levitation.
It was late afternoon. A few people had begun to gather, staking out their spaces to watch the setting of the winter sun. Almost all were alone and had settled equidistant from each other exactly like the gulls standing at the surf line facing out to sea. In a moment of shared reflection, even the ocean withdraws far into itself.
No clump of seaweed--
Long neck twisted, wings, web feet
The dead cormorant
Asian fishing bird
Trussed in filament, hooks set
An exquisite corpse