I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theaters?
You’d never know, even if it sat right next to you– plenty of things have seasons, even ice insisting I’m ice, I’m ice, I’m ice. Tener frío, tener calor, sometimes translation is an easy enough thing but most of the time it is not.
Morning arrives like an unwelcome guest, I have no place for it. Colder than I thought, caught in sudden rain and the tyranny of the parking lot attendant. What sort of medium for this sort of canvas? Nothing indelible, even my footsteps echoing in the cavernous garage seem too bold a statement.
“old streams from which the water’s vanished are interesting, I mean that kind of tale, water, like spirit, jostling hard stuff around to make speech into one if its realest expressions” A.R. Ammons, If anything will level you water will
Woke late to frank sun dry hills teeming with passerines and one hoarse quail panting out its love. How foreign, to let it go unspoken, not to sing out from break of dawn as if your very heart were bursting— In the shade a dove’s cool notes, cicadas starting up, even the breeze in the sagebrush discontented until it too is heard
“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air” sonnet XCIV, Pablo Neruda
// Berceuse // The small dog got her hackles up before the owl lit on the roof a small soft sound like a slide of dirt outside in the open stretch of night its compatriot hoo-ed and we argued over stars this is arcturus or is it mars? I was wrong; dry air, water in my eyes, the largesse of sky cradled in these dry grass hills– the town, the hour, everything stilled, even the tumult […]
We all gathered around the prints: Somewhere in the Vollard suite a girl leads a minotaur through the night after a maze of loops and airy ateliers the effect is stark– the stars are gouged out the faces lit by some internal source. It notes he is blind. The aquatint is Rembrant-black the curator said, an opaque way to state more than, I think– a night that dark is felt, not seen.
A late-night musing on microbiology, weariness, to be careful with strengths that can be turned against us. I feel not unlike a rusty spring, wound up, stretched out, prone to snap. And although not a source of tetanus, I do take note of how something innocous can easily innoculate us, can cause a body to break itself.
OPTIONAL POETRY 