ZamBomba13 poems: Blue Belly, My Dinosaur is a Kangaroo, Martha’s Vineyard, I-5, Firestone Library,

Orion, Colonel David Died a General, Cape Cod, So? , I Don’t Eat  Clouds, Just Sky, Groove, The Farm,

Yellow Rainboots

Perihelion: Web Del Sol: 2 poems Saying Goodbye to Bob, Raking Leaves

Manzanita 2 poems  Hokkaido, Walt Whitman’s Publisher

Montserrat Review 4 poems  The Cosmological Argument, The Cosmological Constant, Archangel,            Parallel Universe

Caesura 1 poem   If This Is All I know         Poetry Center San José  1650 Senter Road San Jose, CA 95112-2599

Poetry Depth Quarterly 2poems:  Lydia, Crossword Puzzle

2003 issue of PDQ, and "Lydia" was published in the July-August-September 2002.

Poetry Now 11 poems Bedminster Catharsis, Yellow Rain Boots, Mastodon, Here   

We Go Again, Daniel, Spider Silk, Light From Light, Pilot Light, Siege of Corinth, So Long,

The Last Great Killing

Rattlesnake Review & Medusa's Kitchen  56 poems: Baby Universe, Dam Building, Old Volvo,

      Neutrino, Shiloh, What Planet, Magpie, Inclement Spring, Penis Idiot April, Grey Beard, Heart Trouble, Threshold,

The Biggest Questions, The Fireman’s Wife and Ernest Hemingway, November Geese, First Frost, Space Cowboy,

Blizzard, This and Another Thing As Well, My Son's Birthday, Excerept with Cellos, Violas and Violins,
   
      Stopping Light, Cominciare Adagio, String Quartet, Magnolia Egrets, June Aspen, Six-Way Bypas Over Coffee

At The Bookstore, Several Obscurities, Stellar Dust, Copper Staples, Raking Leaves, God Bless the Kennedys &

Nut Case, Happy Burning Pumpkin, Placental Shells, Tail Spin, Honey From The Rock, The Secret of Life,

Donner Lake, Ravens in Bare Branches, Waiting For the Other Shoe, The Last Great Killing, The Walnut Stump,

A Few Days Later, Fog-Wrapped Before Rain, Dawn After Rain, Raking Leaves for Lou, Pompeii & Herculaneum,
   
      Justice in a Village Square, The Secret Meaning of Life, Dog Lips, Sprung Spring, My Father's Economics,

Bonnie Bordner, Gandalf Tree

Convergence-journal 2  poems  Dark Energy/Dark Matter, Kayak, Version 2

The Sandhill Review 2 poems  Snowing Outside, Kayak, Version 1

Putah Creek 3 poems   Tilt Up, Snail’s Trail, Brother Richard

Poems For All   2 poems   Whiskey Yankee Tango Bravo, Singing Children Haiku

Blue Moon Press  1 poem   Carpenter of Souls

Easel Café Expresso Stockton   5 poems  Monster, Sand Storm, Long Rose, Blue Guitar,

Back-lit Purple Raspberry Neon

Sacramento News & Review 1 poem Whiskey Yankee Tango Bravo

      Stockton Arts Commission Poetry Contest 1997, 1998, 2004  Yellow Rain Boots 1^st place, She Is There.

          3^rd place, Again Ash Wednesday, 1^st place

      Recordnet.com Michael Fitzgerald Blog: 3 poems Threshold, November Geese, First Frost

Total 122 poems published as of 3/27/08

Archangel                       
 
Great as sunlight, rock to sky, 
green above rich soil,
wings raised lifting sails.
One might not think
to share the parallel
opposite track of another direction,
so many passing conscious thoughts
unaware the apparatus lenses
require cleaning
to the sound transmitted
through the bones of a middle ear,
vibrations felt like hooves thundering
perspectives of mass extinctions,
planetary brutal as volcanic ash.
What mystery named
in mercy, deliverance or retribution,
with hands to hold a rose as well as sword,
would kiss the face of God with song,
trumpet the dawn of time?

















The Cosmological Argument         The Montserrat Review

Seeking a proof of God he sets out into the tangle
under an overcast sky of dispute, encountering
Anselm, Prior of Bec,  part thatched landscape of Canterbury's
cut-stone future (ontos),  nearly eight hundred years
removed from Paley's teleology of design & causation,
Kant's flawed favorite; he arrives back at a windowsill
open to sunshine, birds scurrying past baking oven doors
wafting evidence, plain as day, seen sensory &
self-evident, needing no further explanation,
existence humming in ears just returned from
the long burning forest, loving the music of light
shattering eyelashes, fire warm in a distant room,
centuries away, metal tabletop cold beneath his hands here
folded on the promise of a resolution.




























                  KUSF






























The Cosmological Constant

To balance the gravitational contraction
caused by matter you walk down to the river
in this city of trees about to bloom magnolias
and cherry blossoms. You are suddenly stopped short
by a purple surprise of violets against thick green
and a background scent like aromatic kisses
emerging from winter's damp fog. Daffodils are erect
and simple in front of another house further on
and ash and walnuts are sturdy oak ribs in the ship
of what is relative to your perspective. You see juniper
and Lebanese cedar over by the sea as you navigate
through the paradigm red-shift expanding universe,
standing for a moment at the intersection of
quantum mechanics and gravity, wondering,
perhaps it hadn't been such a blunder after all,
as you return to the front step with this persistent
question dropping like a walnut on the driveway
catching your full attention.























            Disneyland





























Parallel Universe              

This porpoise skipping on waves
doesn't begin to tell the story
though the part of it that leaps
from one medium density to another does.

This fog above water melted
from the glacier does not even
begin to explain the question,
though some might say that 
electrical frequencies do.

If I was honest about what really matters
most at this moment, however,
the possibly fifteen fetal folded
dimensions reflected in your eyes
are nothing compared to your kiss.

If This Is All I Know   Previously  published by Cæsura
Inspired by Lorca's "Casida of the Dark Doves"
in Favorite Poems

If the sun is a golden sled,
moon a snowy phantom
above the ice-bound lake of wishes,
I may not know the owl of night.

Summer's river whispers
warm and full as the gathering
wilderness dozes in a
hammock of dusk,
urgency sliding into the river.

January's distant open palm
rests on a wool shoulder
brushing across the knuckled back
of June, two sides of the same hand.

If I know this and love
guides our children
beneath the Andromeda Galaxy,
perhaps the owl will fly tonight.

 
 
 

Unified Field Theory/
Uncertainty Principle                             
   First appearance Tule Review

                            When he was an undergraduate
                            my father met Albert Einstein
                            as if something might rub off in a handshake
                            and I can imagine the gentle Master now,
                            looking as if Tesla was his barber,
                            making some pretty calculation
                            in the middle of a neighborhood
                            of forgetful distractions,
                            lawnmowers cutting the background radiation
                            of a cosmic signature,
                            springtime blossoming
                            with his hatred of uncertain chaos,
                            loving his godly unification,
                            as if the truth could ignore paradox
                            like the stings of an angry hive of bees.

She Is There
                                                    3rd place winner 1998 SAC Contest

Watching her as she leans on the swing
she looks off at the roses
and I see that she has taken on the dimensions
of her life at school
which has drawn shadows along her edges
so that a flat surface no longer contains her.
Shape has given her a curve of depth
with colors additional.
Words spill out of nowhere like a covey of quail
as she whispers to an imaginary friend
and if I want to really see her now
I will have to focus but then look out beyond
her hair that is touched by the breeze,
just a little out of place,
and travel to where yesterday
is still today before sleeping
and it takes more many brushstrokes
to carve a portrait's painting.

Scarecrow
      First appearance Tule Review

Shirt of straw and flannel in summer's
long cornstalks,
wearing a cocked fedora
with its broken crown,
fearless guard sentry on the frontier
of incessant dark flapping feathered appetites.
He is my stand-in delegate of the seriously frayed
hole in an oblique elbow,
collar worn dangerously thin
while threatening such fabulous fireworks
in his freeze frame stunt man's
calculated gesture of hang time
and mere appearances,
one mean spider monkey
in the middle of a frosty corn field.
He carries a standup comedy
sticking out of his back pocket
for all the world to see when the time is right.
But that's not his primary purpose
though it's there for a closer scrutiny.
I erect his facsimile counterparts
along the edge of every sweltering agriculture
like ravenous foraging mercenaries
lighting their evening campfires.

Sidewinder
    First appearance Tule Review

This is the place on the other side of levitation
where the dance was invented like feathers
and wings to traverse wind's empty air drop,
elevator unsprung from the mineshaft cable's
sure footing lost like shifting sand hour glassed
through the bottleneck turnstile
as we consider the various implications.
If we try a similar twisting gyration,
arms entwining up like two mating rattlesnakes
will we come to comprehend
the scaled muscle's rippling purpose
and climb the sand dune's maddening vertical gravity?
Look into the eye's dark slit,
its tongue smelling out your body's heat.
Feel the spell of hesitation,
hypnotic pull of its desire.
Now, it is your upper jaw
that retracts the deadly hypodermic,
poison sacks filled with death's quick semen
as the desert's glowing anvil
forges horseshoes for the Apocalypse
 

     

      
   Delta Pastel  Dawn             Delta Pastel   Dusk          Cotact David directly to order these books
                                                                                                                                            for $12.00 plus postage  at   david324h@yahoo.com
   Reviewed by Nancy Wahl      7/7/06                              also available at Lu Lu.com

"I’ve known David Humphreys for a long time.  He is a quiet man.  Unassuming.  But his Delta Pastel is not.  It is a veritable Vesuvius of knowledge erupting with metaphors spewing out anachronisms.  David’s images flow from the extremes of Stephen Hawking’s universe to “a purple surprise of violets.”

 He moves his poems through the languages of Science and God, bringing all the argued dichotomies together, dispelling differences, and seeing them both naturally in our everyday lives.

Where his poetry sometimes gets Quixotic, there is the delightful sense of windmills tilting.  As in “Snapshot” capturing the irony of our digital lives “….we have no time left for anything anymore,” leaving us with “…that sudden moment when no one will be able to think of anything more to say.”

In “Laura” David tells us of an encounter with someone who “…could profoundly alter the smooth regular pattern of my life / and actually turn everything upside down / and inside out.”

He probably doesn’t realize it, but that is exactly what his poems do, because he balances them all within that mysterious Dark Matter of his “…lovely seductive universe.”  

                

Our Father Who  Barnes&Noble.com/2000            

Praise from Princeton's Paul Muldoon, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2003

David Humphreys’ Polychromatic Hummingwordswarm  
of  his latest collection, "Art In Heaven"… The words come gushing, like
a waterfall. I don’t understand it entirely, I just stand under it,
entirely hosed by roses. -- John Morearty-- Talking It Through Poetry, Comcast Television, Public Access San Joaquin Co. CA    
                                                       John's Bio     

"Reading a David Humphreys poem is like watching a magician pull a cloth from beneath
a set and often overflowing table; every time he is successful----even those occasions
when he has spilled everything upside down."    Heather Hutcheson   Editor Poetry Now
                                                         Sacramento Poetry Center   of poems in "Our Father Who"

"The images show a dark humor and joy in life, no matter what,"  "Every line, every word is useful.
They are little analogies that lead to an abstraction. Anyone can write the abstraction, but Humphreys
makes it real and true. He takes risks and I admire that."   Jane Blue   Editor of Tule Review  of poems in "Our Father Who"

PUTAH CREEK This blog is for poets in the Putah Creek Watershed area, and bio-regionally beyond; a non-publishing way of sharing our work with each other. Email: clan_of_the_dog@yahoo.com All Good Things -James Lee Jobe Posted in tacit conjunction with poetscornerpress.com October 25 2005  Tilt Up  -David Humphreys- posted October  25 2005 (A construction technique by which steel reinforced                      Snail's Trail                                                                                                                          Brother Richard concrete walls are poured flat on the ground and then lifted into their vertical positions by a crane.) This must be the Valley of the Kings with dimensions so immense. I strike my sledge against the concrete wall and it reverberates in this dark empty room like a bottomless cavern. We must be building a space port in a sky without stars with machines that whine like huge recorded whales as our little workers are lifted high above the floor. Pharaoh may ride his chariot forever now that his desolate tomb can refrigerate frozen cherries jubilee. I feel like submerging in the tank where they search for neutrinos, air bubbles shivering to the surface like quicksilver jellyfish. I am looking for the place where space bends back upon itself, turning inside out before it disappears. Bats congregate here when the tank is empty, wrapped in leathery umbrella wings. Now though, I am distracted by a little square bodied brown fish with white spots that is swimming excitedly back and forth in front of my mask. --- Snail's Trail On yesterday's morning walk April was filled to the brim, partly overcast with wind chimes and the sound of traffic on streets, daffodils and iris gone now, roses having taken their place. I noticed it about four fifths through the circuit coming back on the eastern leg just to the south, a shiny winding erratic track on gray tarmac, evidence of some terrible injuring trauma, perhaps an unconscious nonfatal accident of a striding shoe catching part of the shell to set the suffering wheel reeling, careening in the darkness, time when all snails go into the world. At the end of its amazed path its crushed shell rested. Today is windless and clear, all the trees like glass in early light and shadow, ten different kinds of birds calling in the hollow quiet, doves, blue jays, ravens, finches, a mockingbird, something that sounds like an owl, robins, woodpeckers. I started looking for yesterday’s snail halfway through the walk, having thought about its final tipsy struggle but it was nowhere to be found. Some bird had cleaned it from the street and the moisture of the night had erased its trail of saliva without leaving the slightest trace. --- Brother Richard You were the one who fought for world domination as if continents of upheaval stubbornly sand-boxed a slide or tire swing, teeter-totters standing as idle as the backstop in the open field behind the old house, tarweed smelling as strong as horse sweat, alfalfa and straw before we started smoking and ruined our sense of smell. Kingsley was the big green frog stuffed animal that watched us fight it out for the very last time. It must have been the ski pole stuck in the door or the way you just wouldn’t quit while everything rolled in like thick fog down the dark forgetful mountain. If Mom’s horse hadn’t been stung by that angry hive and she hadn’t broken her back every other detail might also have been just as different as indelible tattoos and a long ponytail, burly motorcycle arms muscled up with a medical degree, "if only things would just last a little longer," you said, your memory still as good as 381 Park Avenue South, your opals internally radioactive ring fingered treasures. You always had a special gift for the unexpected crashing out of a forest of moonlit miracles, wings spread wide like some delivering angel. --- David's website is poetscornerpress.com, and features MANY fine regional poets.-JLJ-