Hope clinging tenaciously like the burrs on the carpeton the floor of this beach house, small impalers, causing us to jumpand curse loudly despite children sprawled everywhere, not mine. We spoke in French, they said those birds we saw were not pelicansbut I insisted they were, these the birds of my childhood of all my coasts. Then grown tired of conjugating tenses and drinking wineI just sat silent, listening,imaging the next day’s drive. Leaving early,I […]
Sometimes I think about where I’ll be soon and when I’m there, I think about where I was making a line between two points and seeing if it bent toward misfortune or luck. (I have done this enough times that I almost believe I’ll get where I’m going.)
Mid-summer heat, or is it late? now it is pain to stay in one place blue cool lakes and the mountain out: constants, and the constant variable of going distinctions of end and beginning lost in travel, skipped over as if changing time zones, concepts, that’s all, nowhere as real as the snowpack still covering the trail, even now in almost August, even in this heat wave a sort of sedition, stamped in place by the hooves of mountain goats who could not […]
We flew into Milan at dawn our train left early for the coast shuffled into a compartment empty except for old upholstery and stale heat the lullaby tracks lulled us to sleep and I’m not sure what woke me but the gray city had gone our train was threading tunnels through a cliff day and night night and day glimpses of the Ligurian Sea cool green against the damp morning and how my heart leapt–! […]
Last night had teeth looking through old photos with not enough to drink and the largest spider I have ever seen creeping down the hallway ceiling took it out with a baseball bat now embedded in the popcorn ceiling its leg dangles down still reaching and something bit me as I was trying to sleep still at some ungodly hour even in the dark I could feel the welt rising.
This old purple sofa a raft in a sea of cardboard boxes the expanse of bare hardwood floor all other furniture gone it is my roosting place and I stay here till later than I should each morning now waking and wondering where am I the angles of light from different windows the unexpected ceiling a wall where it shouldn’t be the early subconscious reckoning that I’m not home anymore
Today is a veritable catalogue of rains: the relentless washing rain; the sudden faucet rain; the don’t-answer-the-phone rain, drowsing; the tree-derived drops; the sad sloppy drivel of the overflowing gutter; the rains of my childhood; the rains of last April; the is-it-raining? rain; the gray verticality of a shock downpour, splenetic; the smeary window panes, pleasant; rain from a clear blue sky, the devil beating his wife; now where did I learn to say such […]
Velella, called sail-by-the-wind, thousands of them blown ashore, jelly gone soft in the heat, wing-like sails flagging in defeat, a row of seabirds forming to feast upon the indigo dead, seagulls more than willing, pelicans looking windward for something better, trusting in the Pacific’s strange generosity, its willing deposition of curiosities, penchant for grand gestures, a low tide that goes out and out and on and out, a risky invitation, still, I cast my bread and wait.
Woke to a breeze, thoughtI must have carelessly left a window open, here,back in the city, but no, everything is closed,still, silent. What a strange place must exist just below the surface of consciousness, that I could dream up wind, and feel it.
I was just calling to say that I am on fire. You told me to rain more. Or was it, try not to mind? Either way the lines got crossed, distance no comfort, I’ll have to resort to homing pigeons. Or smoke signals, more like.
OPTIONAL POETRY 