Silent hill, sparse dove and an elbow of swifts this morning colder than all the rest How do you feel? we ask with trepidation and balsamroot stalks How deep this rabbit warren must go into the hills, hidden they must think by the fine-grained dawn and tumbleweed no longer prey to the pill-round moon and arrow-leaves But I hear it now faint as bird wings or wind caught in sagebrush, sometimes the night stalks the day.
The dove’s song is throating and low the swift’s song is motion—it sews the air but morning here belongs to the quailshouting Rod-RI-go! Rod-RI-go! Rod-RI-go!
The stars taste thin tonight. They sing faint songs and ringlike church bells from childhood, harping on the fact that there is no earthly word for a memory of something still to come, their descant muffled by the rich purple scent of the evening, willing us to look back,cajoling us only to sing songs of fire and the past.
I embrace failure with open arms, as sometimes the sun rises in the West.
We found the fried codin the glovebox two days later.It was that kind of night and my first in the country.It was wretched but I remember it fondly. A dead man in Galway,men dressed as nunsand swans at the mouth of the Corrib, and rain.Then the few wintering soulsof Inis Mor, and its cows lovely, soft-eyed and ambling.And waking, myself, in a chairto a stiff-backed dawning and the refrain of the innkeeper, born and raised and lived […]
What compelled us to go, every summer filling up the Dodge Caravan, ice chests in the back thumping like the drums that start High Noon, do not forsake me oh my darling, was it the emptiness of the West, the rock in Colorado gray as the early films supposedly set there, was it those tales of cowboys and justice that drew my mother out to Laramie, was it the dichotomy of a long-held dream and lackluster reality that led her […]
I am more Gertrude than ancient Beserker: a bird is a bird is a bird.
Hope is an omnivore; it eats both insects and fruit but when newly hatchedit is altricial, i.e., born relatively immobile and requiring nourishment for a certain duration. [Eh, can’t win them all … interesting conceit though]
Enough wine to soften the edges and I’ll sink back in the smallest hours of the morning offered sudden clarity on a surprising parade of recollections: The smell of the metro in July. The tune of a song I haven’t thought of in years. The line of his jaw, one day unshaven. I am not a sad drunk, and this is not a melancholy poem. It is purely coincidence that a bottle once poured is never refilled, and what […]
Consider the mountain. No, consider the man. It’s bad form to sell uphill. So start with Palouse and build up to buttes, sell them in spring when the grass is lush and wildflowers run riot among the foothills. Let the rivers tell their simple story, running full from snowmelt, let the personable maples draped in moss talk, in fact shut up. Everything here was shaped by giants older and bigger than we can comprehend. Consider […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 