If you had stayed until after dawn you would have seen the strangest sky, all white, fog roiling like smoke, dampness obscuring the sun yet compounding it, blindingly diffuse. How could the words come as a surprise? But loss cannot be anticipated entirely, yesterday was one side and this is the other. One less.
It comes in threes and here’s the third, bad news couched in benign words, no, pareidolia– man in the moon, Jesus in a breadloaf, such a hunger for finding something, anything, even terror. You asked what you should say. Nearby is the country they call life you will know it by its seriousness. Rilke. I don’t know, nor do I want to, really. Give me your hand.
The day’s calvacade, a clatter of hours– this life could use more sotto, more legato. A thing is more striking given the proper setting: Consider a spotlight in its wealth of darkness. The weight of a caesura. Excursive silence.
The night before a departure, waiting for that balm of Not Here. It’s supposed to come in threes, but between worse, and worst– I mean, I can’t even tell if this food has gone bad– implications are tiring. I’m going to the ocean, to take in the water’s endless rehearsal and the steady, steady shore, to live in the littoral– there’s not one thing that isn’t somehow in motion, just I wish they sometimes weren’t
And like that, overnight, the end of full summer— a tainted glass, rain, that striking first chill. Oh there is something so sad and lovely about these first days of autumn: A distance carries more, an absence weighs, a heart grows blonder, gold as desire, as early larches turning to fire, as bold gestures dreamed of in quiet hours, the night gone still. The night that follows the day, the beauty and terror of the […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 