Our eyes seeing the same, our ears hearing the same, Our touch making and unmaking the same world. Not one, divided in two, not two, united in one: The second I, so that I may be conscious of myself. from Father Ch., Many Years Later, Czeslaw Milosz
Cool morning rain on the cusp of summer, on cobblestones and chairs and tables, water beading up on the laquer. So welcome sometimes, the dissenting voice– a change, a sea change, for better or worse it arrives like an empty plaza, this is the setting, the play can begin
if I should buy a shirt your color and put on a necktie sky-blue where would they carry me?
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
OPTIONAL POETRY 