There’s a bit of prairie nested between the two mountain passes with long long grasses and with all the wind today it seemed like green water an inland ocean a true friend familiar but never not surprising and the big hawks were out today circling the foothills like shadows liberated from the ground and their shadows of shadows like afterthoughts and a lone tumbleweed crossed 97 still a little green but it’s early in the season and […]
I do not like this kind of hope– fragile as a newborn, I fear for it. Say what you will, but tread gently, please– tundra, tagia-like, it takes years to grow. And I know, I am the very last person who should lecture you on this. Tomorrow, till late, it’s a red flag warning– high winds, low humidity, that is, fire weather– That is, forgive my impulsivity, I lack a cool shore.
Imperceptibly cooler here the breeze a bit nervy but nothing has changed except the date a sense of closing distance but also wonder– the moon narrowing a door reopening is it any wonder that signals might get crossed? . Desert-bound to sort it out with arid skies and flat nights to measure against– heat dampening ambition where small flecked falcons coast in draggy circles beneath a pitiless sun their shadows scripting out something wholly unintelligible– . and where I can accept this
No quiero seguir siendo raíz en las tinieblas, vacilante, extendido, tiritando– Neruda, and I even then I wondered how much of you I could know. Do you remember? We walked in the snow and talked about the edge of the universe, how contrary to conjecture it is expanding faster than ever. Four years. Is it chance, or could you predict this? A softer scientist I see both suns– giver of life and vengeful destroyer– and would accept either, now: no […]
It’s hard to fill up this much space, or loathsome to try. Another day of crisp blue sky, and that feeling of having been here before, or more like a premonition of a memory, a medley, vagueness and clarity, the patterns under trees, delineated shadows of leaves and the breeze, only one seen directly, the other inferred, and this is what preoccupies me–
In the end, does the ocean feel constrained? Or large lakes in their basins? Somehow it’s already late morning again it’s inevitable bounded stillness or bounded movement the margins have been set it doesn’t matter how you fill them.
We passed a black dog around the hairpin bend and going up it then descended as if to follow us, its owner having to call and call. How rapt those brown eyes, the wet nose on the scents about us. And how apt, as whatever this is that is trailing me these days, even up these trails, it is certainly dogged.
How much harder to write the open days– calm at dawn the morning a breeze, all windows open to prepare for later heat. The details are kind: Young maples have filled the silence between the pines with undulating green, you’d never guess just how the bank drops off– Down in the valley children scream in play, two girls wailing like teakettles, like birds of prey, and on the porch, lines of silk spark in succession — […]
Does this feel like water? Overflowing banks, a drought, both demonstrate a marked loss of control– Or, the ghost of steam, water giving up its form to take on another, but still remaining water– (maybe fire then is more apt– it isn’t, then it is, until it burns itself out.)
Whatever this is I’m attributing to the moon it’s probably due to wine or the hour, empty things exerting more pull, being more of a lure than those that are full— . It’s late, the small dog’s snore belying its size: or, what seemed large is small, or, what is small, seemed large.
OPTIONAL POETRY 