This is no paint fleck peeling in the heat. It is the scalene wing of a moth adhering to the wall, and if I love anything at all it is this sort of thing: soft subversives, surrealities, the dozen moths like unblinking lids that I see now where I couldn’t, before. As if I would begrudge a lack of luster! I know too well, this friable nature, how a sharp wind can lift away its […]
Night comes late now and when it does a corner of horizon still glows like an ember and so the day lingers, reluctant to cede, and the moon waits to show its only face again, starting to wax or starting to wane, how weary to be a constant, let alone be in constant motion, if I were the moon I might want to cease, to disengage, to hide away until here below the oceans went […]
Now overcast and sultry, I miss the lake and its heart-stopping coldness. The pace of life adapts– the neighborhood cat sulks lazily away from the spray of the hose upon its limp leaf lair. A task for today: uproot the snarl of bleached pea-vines, shy spring no match for this heavy-handed weather. In the distance, now, what might have been thunder– and now it’s truly summer. I have no plans that can’t be changed so […]
Doldrum day. Such heat and listless air and a riot on the ascent– snow lilies, wild columbine, chickweed, yarrow, blessed lupine all strewn along the unsettled talus slope. Nearly a hundred in the shade, the salt on my skin a mockery of snow. Of all I carried up, you were by far the weightiest thought— the longest shadow, the most insistent thirst. For hours now I have held petals on my tongue, rivers in my […]
Ikebana on the bar besides orderly jars of loose-leaf tea– each photo that lines the exposed brick wall tilts out at six degrees. Even the mis -matched antique chairs are carefully curated (also holding life transiently) and oh what discipline to keep it neat– the art is restraint, what grace, what trust, leaving a thing open to suggestion–
I missed the exit and the other exit gathering the night around me the moon the city lights spilling out beyond the interstate I didn’t care even as the road narrowed into farmland loam unseen but leaching out its mineral scent no stars country dark I had nowhere and now have nowhere to be except with you what other destination is there?
Earlier today I was watching sugar ants make an easy ingress through the open screen door, like spilt beads from a split necklace, recovering themselves, bit by amber bit, making something new but not unexpected– The form reveals itself. Or so we would hope, tomorrow marking a closer return to our beginning– what animal sense has brought us back here? A return being at heart the same as an ending– a prologue in other words
High cirrus a wisp of a whisper I play at carelessness– Yes a cloud seems to float but I bet it feels laden when compared to effortless air– This is not to say that you are a burden (but I’d suffer it if you were)
The second day of summer the air a bit acrid the day moon suspended like a half-formed thought– a little wind now and it might go out completely a little wind now it might incite a spark
Another day, another astrophysicist. This one says she listens to the stars– everything out there emitting radio waves, she knows them by their frequencies, tuning the dial, different things come in– births, deaths, black holes, quasars– and never saying the same thing twice, not quite, she tells me this often is overlooked, perhaps due in part to our unconscious desire to make the things we love immutable
OPTIONAL POETRY 