Still going. The hills were plywood tonight, rolled in from offstage and heavy on pastels. The rain passed with alacrity; the clouds that were left were dumb sheep things. They say the coyote came as close as this deck, more brazen in winter, a prouder pariah. I’m not there yet, feeling little delight as a photographer shoots a wedding across the lake, flash after flash ricocheting from the water. In those hills are mountain lions, fewer now, […]
Kubler-Ross, I’m going out of order. Ended up in the weeds, under the grape arbor in the lightest of rain, pulling clumps of them out by hand, sending rocks hurtling to my dog’s great amusement. Although the kitchen metaphor is apt — so far under, I’m standing on the bottom; Metis a major oceanid, myself, feeling salty.
But if you think you can swallow me with grief, remember Metis: I too could start hammering. No stars tonight, not even that; I suppose we have our answers. I think it was Hephaestus who split Zeus’s head open, saving him from the headache of the woman he scorned. And thus Athena was born, goddess of wisdom. And war.
Still going. That brings us back to the stars and space-filling models. It’s one thing to fill a void, another entirely to feed a mouth: your absence is voracious.
Now the neighbor’s voice rises in an aria, a shaky tenor, I’m loathe to do work; at some point, everything has become tiring. A stick -brown lizard startles as the AC shudders to life, resurrected from its former frozen state, strange, ice forming in the heat of the day. I am half hoping for a similar result, pushing past all natural stopping points, tired of rambling towards trite collects, tired of resting, tired of tired — […]
The hawk falls and rights itself, proud it doesn’t even have to beat its wings, so high up it’s currents that bear its negligible weight; for all its presence still brittle-boned. A pair of quails flew over, barely maintaining altitude, gamey, their flight was audibly work, a heavy whirr bearing towards the safety of the tree, plumes bobbing in old-fashioned pageantry. The last holiday I was out here, I took the train back, was struck by the […]
Hickory smoke come in the window, spider webs in the bath — I’ll have to write my way out of this gray box.
An orange floatplane cuts the drabness of this morning. Perhaps when birds alight and tilt their head it’s not gauging us as a threat but wondering why we don’t fly. The cloud deck is low and so smellcarries, this acreage spiced, medicinal. I have a vision of the sagebrushunder rain, although today will be dry,I’ve seen them lashed, the landmade sea, this house in a floodplain. The finches sing their circular song.The floatplane lands. All this week it will be cooling […]
I wished on the first star and it was a variable star– that seemed somehow appropriate. And was originally named after a falling bird of prey, in some legends reached by a bridge of magpies, which appeals for reasons which should be obvious by now. You are far above these things, never even mentioning your birth date for fear that someone might draw a conclusion from the stars. Did you feel relieved to just forget about […]
Along Echo Ridge the wind sung and we kept hearing voices unsure if it wasa trick of acoustics or our subconscious trying to compensate for the remotenessof the space. Last year’s fires mostly burnt the underbrushwe came across its path now and then but in the cradle of down, scorchedbranches, nascent lupine grows, nature also fond of filling voids.It’s carelessness or lightning that starts them off and from Purte’s View we can see a tree, taller than the rest, set apart, a blackened skeleton […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 