Love like sleep on a late autumn day– come in from the cold and settled in place. Relief compared to being out by the lake in all this rain, caught in the rage of branches in a squall– a leitmotif, the urge toward the perilous, but this the theme: I return to returning (da capo al fine) even setting out I draw closer to you.
There are four chambers in the human heart, for blood at least– Yesterday on 9th they were tearing down some old apartments, one wall peeled off like a sardine tin with all the rooms exposed, seeming so small from down below. Maybe it takes something brutal to know these secret inner workings, and maybe it’s better not to know, just to own these uncertain steps, to admit to getting lost in my own home. Across […]
Still life with street lamp and Gingko tree– a high-ceilinged room filled with empty hours and extremes, too cold, too hot, that ancient itch. In the lusterless dark I cannot cross over to sleep– a wild thought, an unlikely doubt, a drop in the sea, so gazing out onto a vacant street I wait for the rain to start.
With light, a shadow, after the tide, an ebb– Nothing wholly itself, everything containing a trace of its own leaving. The yellow morning catches in the spider web’s sheer girder, an ode on capability, and a dirge for the inevitable– There is a chill now at dawn. Sometimes I don’t know what to say: It’s no joy to always consider all that is possible. The gothic ruin of these late October maples, a pang of […]
A sun-drunk yesterday on late-season heat, even though it doesn’t clear Madison street in the evenings anymore, and gets cooler earlier, the sky gone staticky, the shadowy grains saying go home, no reason to stay here, just another thing gone, and paltry remainders.
You said you hear the coyotes more at night now, that deer traipse down the gully’s broken scree with inherent trepidation, their silence speaking for them as much as any yip or yowl. I miss the cold nights there when it’s so clear a halo rounds the moon, sharp air forcing awe from my ungrateful lungs. I miss the length of a northern winter night, with ample room for new and old fears, and how fresh […]
A quiet morning, so few people are awake, or so few advertise it, it must have just rained but now it’s a lull, just some wind and fragmented gulls blowing over an empty lot . The sky has a tenor to it, all this year it’s been later than it seems and now there’s no denying it– we’ve been here before at home under the oppressive cloud layer . Somehow it’s a comfort to wake […]
A granite morning stony-faced the construction pit eroding away like confidence seeming to say there’s nothing much that is guaranteed to stay . no birds no rain no breeze just two trees that seem somehow fake, given their present surroundings
Waking to obvious rain. Like bright -hued children the construction men wait, dwarfed by and dampened at the site’s abyss. Something might be wrong, now, they collect and gather, staring down. Conjecture: a short but unknowable distance. A gull’s nervous warble, unseen. The stillness of the ginkgo tree. No wind. Someday it will grow to shade this view, to blatantly obscure, not by illusory degrees— I know what is unknowable, sometimes. All this slanting rain. […]
1. His left hook split your face and sent your brain to visit the farthest reaches of your skull, your head bobbing on a sea of fractured shouts receding into a single point of high shining song. 2. The cut kept opening up like a family secret. They made you stop before you lost the eye. You went to war, re-crossed the Atlantic, survived, came home, got so drunk at times that you let my […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 