What becomes ischemic when long denied hope? Deferral and deferral how long must it go on for living tissue about thirty minutes before it’s irreversible and reperfusion though vital just adds injury on insult and this hurts unless it’s good and dead and then you better cut it out quick but just how the hell would you debride a soul? Or determine the margins of what’s left if anything
This breeze is coming in from somewhere is every bit as intentional as this dappled sun these lean robins the pagan call of the flicker that echoes from the maples shouting what we all already know slowly but surely color is returning to this world
Full of fog-deadened air the forest so still that a breath is all that stirs, no birds, and I almost feel guilt for taking one in, so rare is the air here, so alien the sky, so unworldly this morning among the immediacy of trunks: pine, fir, pine, fir, fir, pine, cedar– I’ve only come to set my emptiness in a greater stretch of it, to sit a bit somewhere where silence is still the […]
When St Valentine came to the States he found work in a meat-packing plant living with some Slavs in a tenement just beyond the stockyards. Blue-eyed, stout, he broke down carcasses daily and the vagaries of a new language, naming his children things like Jenny and Fred and coming home smelling of offal and blood until Valentin became Valent became William, shedding the weight he had gained as a new-eyed baby— the crimson name of […]
I called both fights, the Armenian, then Adams, the latter spelling out his bad intentions with a nasty right hook, the former, though rusty, knowing every trick in the book. Oh, age. I could be proud that I’m never surprised but I’d trade it all for something unpredictable for once, not just Friday nights in sweats, texting my dad about the fights— I think this guy will win, and then he does. What did Teddy […]
And then they returned those birds to stratify the sky to incise with wings their variable trajectories and sometimes a sign is actually a sign like when one letter burnt out so that the neon spelled a name once spoken still known if barely but no I’ve heard that song before it seems if anything that hope precludes action and a chance sighting on the street is only routine entropy hokum really even today I […]
Where does a bird go when it rains this hard I’ve seen nests scribbled in lean branches but it doesn’t add up like how does fog mask emphatic rock, these glaciered exclamations? These mornings do not suit these days– sunrise giving in to rain the mountains fade the snarl of birds the feathered cloud that hovers up above the ave like modern augurs has been gone for days, God, what does that foretell?
There’s gradients of silence– the moment just before the PA system comes on, the moment just before the voice calls a code, the moment after . And every voice there ever was started as a child’s voice . Is that why we’re so eager to rush, to save? Or is it salvation by action, by lack of thought? . After a while you can tell apart each wing of this hospital by the timbre of […]
These nights predictable as the twelve-bar blues this life too it’s bound to leave you behind it’s bound to leave you and it’s a shame the rain passed through the sky so starless still there’s nothing outside the window nothing seeable and even I would sing if it could make that nothing less so
An unseen bird sings a one-note song that almost slides into two sleeping with eyes open the old dog hears it too, incessant, incessant, the invitation had said silence. . An amber bead suspended in the window frame opens up into a spider . What kind of bird is it? One bird, one song, one note, and no response, what does it ask, who does it ask, could it be me could it be what […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 