it’s still light out early to bed a headache all day dull creeping thing– absence too spatial, temporal the gingko trees or the sky in between I take it back though there is no void nothing is relentlessly a thing the streetlight comes on a breeze stirs the leaves thunderstorms tomorrow no reprieve
and then summer turned back into itself gray with cool rain and mist in the foothills violet arcs in the talus field foxgloves laden with water and the falls falling audibly again were it so simple fashioning a retreat unease even here nothing quite dampens it
surprising, the sun today surprising, the sunset dramatic on the rooftop suffused, cinematic and people being kind genuinely good it makes the worse worse the same way presence augments absence the news is so bad the night so beautiful long long notes from bitter -plucked strings
more sudden rain from the rooftop a news ticker wraps around high across the alley disembodied letters top headlines, this city turning into glass– impermeable, deflective burying the lede, ample precedent here– furniture in the basement of the Panama Hotel under decades of dust left hastily and never retrieved a drawer left open a child’s homework– internment camps extant, planned reopenings and someone arguing in bad faith– semantics willful callowness a cage is a cage […]
Escape to the mountains to see what endures– the sun-baked alpine packed dirt and scree fiery wildflowers strange butterflies warming afternoons a rock comes loose– quiet more profound after its absence tread lightly almost as if trespassing on scalloped snowfields glaciers, blue-hued, nearly holy– if they won’t last what could?
We are on lockdown Is what they say overhead Cacophony of sirens Shut the door quickly No text pages no emails We google 911 Mass casualty incident at this address The halls are dead quiet The blinds don’t fully cover the window Isosceles of sunny day Code blue ED is called The news channel website loads Breaking News: Live Aerial footage of our building We move the intern away From the window No audio Police […]
They told me how one architect cast himself as St Thomas to look out over the rooftops in perpetuity– a sentinel of the Île, to dawns, the rains, those low gold winter sunsets, the Seine grown vein-dark by evening, bridge spans reflected to form perfect spheres of sky– transient beauty, it was a later addition, the apostles on the spire, nothing lasts forever as it stands and nothing stands forever but they took down those […]
It has been a while and it will be a while more still awake waiting to watch an hour disappear shouldn’t be it’s late and getting later or earlier wherever you draw the line however you define it looking through your photos to know a thing to have to hold it it must be late to be thinking still about distance
At night the half -constructed tower is full of light and nothing else, each morning recently it has snowed, heavily, after a period of rain, it is natural and unsettling what fills the hours, open places devoured, as if commodities– mere weeks till spring, and then what?
How many words for snow what could be long-awaited or sudden sea change overnight the gulls are beside themselves the city roofs are white ice-plated pavement you are far and likely to stay that way for a while the sky is still flakes dislodge in the breeze whole trees dissolve into white pixels and then it all starts up again like an orchestral chorus overwrought and beautiful it makes its own time
OPTIONAL POETRY 