This morning seagulls called out whistle-bright above the frozen world, camellias under ice, clear dawning. Now it’s night, my bags are ready, nothing is left but to savor life, packed down nicely, finally, and this dry cava, cold as a cave, clinquant on the tongue, like the ocean arriving, a secret revelation, so transient and divine [HAPPY NEW YEAR! Optional Poetry is going on vacation, for the next week or so will be posting poems from the […]
The bend of a bird’s wing seemed so sharp, the guttural scrape of the snowplow clearing the road, but it couldn’t keep up with the sky and its act of forgetting, these relentless rounded edges, forgiving all, and always– The last snow walk before the drive back it was blowing down, so that the path erased itself, became new with every step and it was hard to return, to leave the banks that softened hard […]
Vineyards under snow, civilized rows, punctuation for a run-on landscape. Our straggling vines look like veins without a body, the blooms we contain, of darkest blood, clandestine first pressings. Even at night the drifts are pure white under a haloed moon— why speak and spoil the effect? Let a suspended particle be: Ice crystal, brix, a word unspoken— I’m learning to let a thing fall, or ripen
White world, little distinction between ground and sky, even birds won’t brave the coldness. Yesterday I saw geese fall out over the shale lake, like lanterns, gold-bellied, backlit by a setting sun. The first Christmas without your call. Today is startling in its stillness, another thing has come and gone: Snow coats the road and yards, the mountains engulfed by clouds, so what else can we measure by besides a sense of gain, or loss?
Sleet on the way home, the wind’s incisors. What do you say to a man who is dying? I miss the turn for the exit, three times around the parking garage’s flattened concrete helix. I vacate my spot, I leave it wanting. The heart is a door that opens and shuts.
Such a still night. There’s the silent police light, blue cyclic, a car stopped on the tracks. I pass, catch phrases by surprise– I don’t care and should we try? This day has gone by in a thumb of pages, brisk breeze, alacrity. People siphon off down alleys. The city is never not bright– two tickers wrap around buildings– a strip club, and headlines. The theme is themes– the cycle repeats itself, among angular buildings, a ring. Meaning a call, or a promise– […]
From the cancer ward a view, a dream of a lake. All this glass is sterile, frosted– we soften everything we can soften. Sometimes with meds. I recall how, when half-crazed, you tried to leave and carry off a decorative vase, and your paintings got much wilder, vivid wet. There is no crimson here, only windows the color of sea-glass, and clean lacquered pine. It is peaceful and nice– so quiet, floors above the street, the orderly bridges, elegant rooftops, that I can hear blunt dread roll in my stomach as I […]
At work, tragedy rooms– To favor a side is not the same as being wrong. These families, they furnish the place with love and grief– any place can be a home, except alone. Tonight the city lights don’t remind me of anything. Sometimes it’s as if this heater isn’t even on.
Cold snap. A fog-borne day. The house kept settling like distant thunder, but at some point weariness edges out fear. It will be or it won’t, either easily arrives on its own– Sisyphus, let it roll
De Kooning, the title caught my eye– Woman as Landscape– yes, also a hollow house, more curator than curated, pastel in affect, but bleached, not softened– In your absence, I become a harsh abstraction– exquisite grit, sand, if this is the ocean– and all that drifting
OPTIONAL POETRY 