Hilda Weiss is the co-founder and artistic director of www.Poetry.LA, a website featuring videos of poets and poetry venues in Southern California. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Askew, Poemeleon, Rattle, Salamander, and Margie. In addition to poetry, she writes training programs for Southern California Gas Co. She is an active Kundalini yoga student and holds a 4th degree black belt in Shotokan Karate. A fourth generation Californian, she lives, writes and grows her own vegetables in Santa Monica.

Vetch

Let the tangle of wild vetch
call you from practice

and draw you, still unfinished,
uphill to where the deer browse,

silent as monks—
lilies in their mouths.

Let the tendrils tighten their sticky
reach around each stem,

the way the curve of your baby
finger brings the other fingers down

to the palm so each can choose
its place on the violin’s neck

and, by touch, color the air purple,
aging to blue like dusk as it fills

the late Spring sky holding
the lopsided moon.

Published in Askew; No.6, Spring/Summer 2009

Bone

Every language has a word for bone.
We find one on the beach
at the high tide line. Pelican,
you say, maybe a wing.

New to death, still gristle at one end,
you hold it toward me. It sheds sand.
Oh! I say. It almost seems alive. I pinch it—
hard—between my thumb and finger.

Newton kept the subject of his inquiry
constantly before him.

I fling the bone
like chance.

Let the waves clean
the matter of my doubt.

I’ll Take Time

    1
It seems to me time is the highest good—
the one thing I still want to have or be.

    2
Or, absent time, I’ll choose music
because cities are spit and spleen.

    3
The luminous speak of virtues—wisdom,
character, skill. They lack a visible shadow.

    4
It takes years to become intricate,
to be as the harpist rendering ice.

Published” as part of the art installation piece by Jill D’Agnenica 
called: The Point at Which Time Stands Still. Displayed at the 24-Hour Gallery at 80 North Raymond Street (corner of Raymond & Holly) in Pasadena, CA 91101, December 11, 2010-February 3, 2011.

© 2011 Hilda Weiss