Arch, I’d like to go see the Arch, trenchant, I’d like to go see the sea– Melville I know about Novembers of the soul, and Decembers, Januarys, and Februarys– There’s something about the Pacific that tempers a temper, dulls a sharp tongue, I don’t know why I get like I do but call me Ishmael it’s not unprecedented– just give me a shore and a ship and a star to sail by and a home […]
We all came through the night unscathed to the first day of Spring slow to arrive no different than the last day a dead sky hesitant rain I’m not so gullible as to try and balance eggs and brooms and the like but must admit I feel a sort of stasis as in something surely is holding us in place
Inexorable tides something like inevitable grief that will arrive in what– a day, days, weeks? Out on the coast we used to climb the sea stacks and grassy headland paths to watch the surf chew up the shore and anything else that remained below not safely nested up in barnacles and pines and is it wrong now to cooly observe a breaking from some distance– metaphorically as I couldn’t get time off and don’t want […]
This another sort of entrapment– the weight of ought and should even now even here waking so late to a colorless sky and still-bare branches backlit and immobile I went to stake the peas with sticks to try to gather and balance things now well beyond reason now well past care even the hermit juncos stopping to observe my shoddy weaving– silence and mania in this setting of a rescinded spring of days that can’t […]
suivre l’onde amère words from a lifetime ago what dredged them to the surface if not this night’s precipitous drop . what precipitated it who can say a tide it changes anything might lurk deep waters, etc., au fil de l’eau il n’y ait plus rien ( à perdre) . the point being one cannot actually follow a wave from shore (at least) it breaks– any return is subtextual e.g. subtly below the water’s surface […]
Maybe the first take of a place is the most correct one the sweet relief of green a shock of it! under open blue skies elaborately scalloped clouds nosy chickens familiar rivers what a long long long winter it had been the air no lighter than it was across the channel but I was immeasurably so happy even
(2) Wan sunrise on the frills of fledgling pea vines a red hue betrays these sprouts as beets and here the dumb exuberance of the radishes yes I have grown cold please accept these as my excuse
Herald to a gaudy spring the potted Narcissus outside the door sprouts from a pool of standing water strange how a myth persists but nothing truly self-absorbed would share so freely unattributably and intangibly its scent so maybe that’s the Hyacinth these flowery Greeks easy to confuse all springing up from the blood of gods and lovers
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass. . Beware the ides of march a blunt bit of soothsaying still vague as rain but more than most of us get– . a proper rain today the lawn waterlogged sober and calm sometimes I underestimate the gray and its singular inward focus . the flute-like call of some bird falls through an open window almost cold enough out to warrant shutting it but the keen […]
A leave-taking still I’ll see these yellow doors again but it won’t be this me hardly a loss so why this longing for lasting? . All the seeds we planted are coming up distinctive seed leaves true to type and rain this weekend– progress as planned . Is this the way it goes for blossoms that fall off of nascent fruits false starts that only thought they were the thing . Or is this just […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 