In all this fog -heightened silence ears strain for a sudden noise, the streets exaggeratedly empty, the shut up glow of houses so inaccessible, no one will ever walk these streets again, except there, under a lampost’s sharp cone, a figure, attached to a dog, or drowning in place, I’ll never know, the white night swallows it up before I reach that block, and our floating paths don’t cross again.
What you want, and what you get– During Friday’s commute the fog obscured all, no notion of a lake under the bridge just strings of brake lights and headlights connecting through the damp, the freeway blocked, and I thought of course it’s a wreck, but no, someone jumped into the stream of cars. Later I heard a guy ask for his legs back, he was leaving that day, he was ready to move on, now, […]
Our words may outsize us, haunt us, outlast us, but this margin was too small– Would that we could all see how they carry on, to do due penance, or to watch them grow, flow, and divide as a river forks to small tributaries, the open sea. A word once spoken cannot be unsaid, a swoop and curl that speaks through ink can’t be erased, even if thrown away it wasn’t, then it was. At […]
Funny how the fog appeared, from nothing, a haze that revealed itself as night fell, two gradients, both with a soft affect, dark streets not as hard floating under mist, the helipad guide lights dreamlike candy-colored orbs– although it could be that I am so tired that I love everything, indiscriminately, just for being. It’s a strange response– or strange reaction, or repercussion, or compensation, or reciprocation– That. That’s probably most apt.
[The day] The gray rooms are not large enough to hold all that they contain, the precedents of admits, the recycled air and soft TV voices from other sides of curtains. And on the psych floor, small slots of afterlifes, another day, then another day, then another day, or sometimes not.
It’s the day before the day. The rain’s returned, barely seen, gathering at the eaves until water drops in chandelier pieces. Any noise is too noisy. The morning demands silence, imposes it, clearing from pavement and shingles any last vestige of snow.
i. Every night has in it a bit of every other night. That’s the secret. ii. These are not blue walls but they could be, might as well be, given how little else has changed– these curtains can go hang themselves. iii. And it’s trees instead of the cathedral beyond thick panes– and double, here, to better staunch a draft iv. Light at night is not itself either, not entirely, like a thought, it carries […]
Someday we’ll look back, I hope, and you won’t believe how I used to sit and let doubt and red wine carve me out from the inside in measured small sips, hardly maudlin, just knowing how how many laps it takes to cross the night. Then I’ll say hope is an albatross, and hope that you’ll see not just Dickinson and duality– harbinger of good omens, and doom– but also the sea stretching on for […]
On one of the last undecided days, it was a comfort to wake from strange dreams, derived from the keeping of odd hours– not mine to have. The sky is dead dull, won’t even play at being day, this empty house exhales stale heat and this beige curtain oscillates a bit, this houseplant unfurls a new burnished leaf– Still life, still life.
Slate gray lake a moving slate each crescented line a mark and an erasure. He said here lies he whose name was writ in water and so is everything– nothing completely old, or new, the same wave, different molecules. From this house on a hill the South end of the lake appears to glow from within now and then, a thinning of overcast skies, more sophistry, set against snow-dusted hills and block print vineyards, stark […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 