An eve, but it isn’t an arrival if it doesn’t stay. Sun on the bridge, the lake like a mirror, here suffused with gray. The night still falls early but the day gets longer. Too cold still to dig in the garden, the onions can wait, wrapped in their paper, safely frozen, dreamless, mute. Il nous en faut faire autant turelurelu, patapatapan— French carols on the stereo, blind dog sleeping in the corner. Down the embankment small […]
I dreamed a door swept shut and felled a row of empty bottles that didn’t break but scattered about with hollow echoes and you were there saying careless, careless, careless, careless awake again light coils on the floor cool-hued pools of star and streetlamp, making a cold thing colder sleep an uneasy truce
What do you say to a man who is dying? A fact, just as it is twenty-eight degrees out, the sun set three hours and thirty-five minutes ago, this is a man who is dying, but is still alive. Careful, things fall easily here, this the greatest distance, none could be further. What hues in that sunset! A slow burn over the bay, the city changes its face, harder edges of night, but ribbons […]
How the intolerable becomes tolerable, against all attestations otherwise the bite, forgotten that old dispensation what a strange capacity a heart deadens itself, dryly, inexorable as a nature show prey, predator, or merely winter coming on, nothing is surprising now, not even this
Full moon, too high to see through the window pane it does not seem like the human world light pushes us out and occupies the space there is displacement skyscrapers growing more precise by night a thousand perfect golden squares and all of them empty
ICU days line draws and scrawled fishbones sweet jesus overheard we stop at each door each door a threshold sunlight today but frosted glass a curtain drawn for privacy opacity for if it comes to pass this is a shore if anything a great big blank the lung’s secret space and the blood singing wrong
Again, short days. What else is there to say? Besides all the things a night can be: Clarity of skyline, articulate distance. I love the red of WONDER BREAD, of CITY LIGHT, old neon signs, all heart. It’s no good here in the thick of it, LED bright and still the ankle twists to the gutter. A huddle passes, soft people, shapes only, the very power of suggestion. And then the street empties out, except […]
Cold coming over the pass, cold rain, the steep drop, the silent lake, couldn’t see a thing. And the lights of those first few towns, so warm at a distance– another arrival, and what then? A stone, no other word. Unmoved and unmovable, aloof. Knit a nest for it, feather the den, dust off the snow– or don’t.
Lost in some forest north of the city, the driver returns the wedding guests home, some somewhat drunk, a song rises up, hoarse, flamenco– staccato clapping, the rutted road, headlights bathing the night fog in gold. There is no place to be now, the wedding guests are returning home, with newly-softened gazes, reminded again of love, the road turning in on itself, laughter, fake despair. The wedding over, the driver drives the wedding guests somewhere, […]
If you had stayed until after dawn you would have seen the strangest sky, all white, fog roiling like smoke, dampness obscuring the sun yet compounding it, blindingly diffuse. How could the words come as a surprise? But loss cannot be anticipated entirely, yesterday was one side and this is the other. One less.
OPTIONAL POETRY 