Alone in this hotel room any city could be outside the muffled lives next door could be anyone’s lives the forecast says maybe a tornado tonight flooding in the lowlands even this fails to rouse me from the crisply-made bed I am just waiting for a word my heart laying open a palm outstretched
(One more for the road, and still no seagulls!) The tide also ebbs, this gray slack dawn taking me to O’Hare, to the blue line, the Magnificent Mile– and yet already, a distinct impression of lack. Although Lake Michigan is tremendous under storm clouds— afloat or from dry land, it drowns out the shoreline, the day, and necessitates a more pioneering way, dead reckoning, finding the wind and marrying one’s course to it, HOLD FAST— […]
(waves, no seagulls) An undertow is a steady offshore-directed second-order flow, i.e. it is proportional to the wave height squared. Meaning: No wave can arrive completely without also leaving. It will always contain some percentage of its own opposition, no matter how it tries to keep it down. You are a physicist, and so of all people should understand compensation, that a wave’s nature is intrinsically antagonistic, and that any assumption of linear behavior, at […]
(The ocean poem is dead. Long live the ocean poem!) Oh what havoc a hurricane can wreck, loosing stairs from houses, houses from stairs, lifting and carrying away years of construction to some arbitrary location and then burying all the roads. Of course, the map is not the territory, and this is not a poem about the ocean, it’s just, this time I am certain as a storm surge, and so also irrevocable— it’s like […]
(continuing on with the ocean poems in response to this business–) You tell me about Oaxaca. I tell you about the Gulf, and then we talk about how we both almost moved to Hawaii, once. Maybe we would have met there, too, you say, as we survey the skyline’s tines from out across the bay. It’s strange, how language tries to make distinctions between bodies of saltwater– they all commute, or aren’t we proof? […]
or love, death, or nature in general… Only five percent of the ocean floor is mapped. The rest is unknown— a deep subconscious we crawled out of, once, and return to as foreigners, except for the salt in our blood, and like some half -remembered song, our strange capacity for floating—
A neap tide now— so jealous of the shore but just think of how much ocean never once touches land so long have I endured this thirst have hollowed out and cambered bones to search and search and if I waver it is only as a breaker holds itself fleetingly in disbelief before it falls like thunder, and arrives, abruptly, finally—
Another day breaks like a bone, dragging me along to my chagrin– another night is gone before it’s gone, at least that’s how it felt on a scale of one to ten, a ten. It doesn’t help, this hesitating sky. The air feels thin, too brittle to breathe in– this ossified blue, it does not move me to move from rest. These recalcitrant breaths do not support it.
I had hoped to watch the sky fill in with stars, particularly the obscure ones reserved for the backcountry but fell asleep too early, having spent all night waiting for night to fall. Even late, the mountains glowed, echoing the Northern sun ringing out across the old burn zone, new brush rallying up dry avalanche chutes– so very little snow this year. Slowly, the lake receded into suggestion; an owl called lowly, both begging the […]
Heart, heart, what did I say? Oh the moon got into you, the moon, the sky, the lake— and then you went and showed your face, boldly, no hesitancy, and so now, we wait— How vast, this night. And just like that I can finally admit, it isn’t that I fear your loss— what terrifies me most is that some day you may be right. Or some evening, sitting […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 