[Nighthawks — after Hopper] Night renders them toys, people shapes, a yellow glow, how gratifying to see lives in motion– she stifles a yawn, he is looking for something, how safely intimate— there is always a space between all I could say, all that I could love, plate glass, evening air, a catalogue of neon, bent tubes lending a voice to the hours that should not ever have been reached, erratic streetlamps, a passing brakelight ring […]
The courtyard undergoes serial dilutions, the rain making miserable and pooling underfoot. There’s nothing that can’t wait. Or no consequence real enough to blunt this murk; it’s cold by the window but none of us move. Even the geese have long since bailed, a lone crow flies higher than usual, it doesn’t even look alive, but more like a hole, a mobile, missing piece of sky, and when the rain rises the crow goes too, or the […]
A sea town, or close enough, where some days brine settles on the hills, lingers in alleys, a sea breeze, at least a sea smell– not unpleasant, though the gulls get trashy here, stooping around to compete with crows, and some days like now the sun doesn’t come up, just the overall gray brightens and fades, and, sure, it gets rough– but these pockets of salt help to elevate the sense of place, refining streets where day-drunk men argue as they load […]
[This Cat] Demented by night, his eyes deep saucers for lapping up light, hungry for the hunt, naturalized to a sleepy house but not at home in it, residing more in the space between the jam and the barely -closed door or in motion just beyond the window, with midway desires, a contrary nature, to kill prey dead but also play, to go but stay, for me to hold his tensile weight, his lazy drape achieving the aim his involuntary […]
Typical, to dream of buying a lotto ticket, then to wake before scratching the silver foil off, too busy trying to find where I parked my dream-car, anxious, dream-late to a dream-place. Something exciting will happen soon, but nothing much will come of it, again, dreams only reflections (or projections?) of the real; forgotten ticket in bag, I wandered wooded streets, the neighborhood coming unfixed whenever I turned my back, whole roads replaced, trees growing menacing, fences sprung up– and I stayed lost until I […]
There is an unseen tide at play here, just audible when the conversation lulls. At times our words are large and difficult to hold, so like wet stones we let them fall where they will. At this time of year, everything is damp, laced or lapped, saturated or submerged, but without a tide-table I’m left unsure: this water will go out or will follow us home, or will do something else, that much is clear, that much I know.
[Composition] A yellow spray of leaves is framed by the window of a darkened room– after a week of bearing down things open up again, the solvent bank of trees, thin-limbed for miles, the pacific emptiness of an unlit room, stagnant with sleep, strikingly silent, its soft-focus objects slumping toward memory, a row of the same shoes facing the wall– but it’s negative space that draws the eye, these empty vessels can’t distract from an emptier one, […]
It’s a wash, a monochrome wash, blank on blank, a sky less than sky, striated by rain that won’t let up. Winter rye seed floats in the furrows, soon it should dig in, unfurl, give cover. Gone birds ink out arrows with wings. An instinct is flight. An instinct is to burrow. But which instinct is right? Blight-burnt leaves splatter the ground, damp adherence, the aim, the only real aim here, to get as far as we can, stick the landing, and […]
Things that don’t distract: Kindness. Words on a page or otherwise, lines of any type, (they all lead somewhere, which is what we don’t want,) although we do. Liquids help: the way the rain melts down the window, the calamity of the lake, each wave consumed while it builds, cold comfort going, gone again.
Biopsy: seeing life but not knowing, not without second sight— and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read, half the joke, not as funny, and in the lobby on a pleasant wall I stare at the same agreeable painting for minutes at a time and never see it.
OPTIONAL POETRY 