Where does it come from? The sky, like rain, or from the far corner at night, when the world is rendered in ground glass, from outside, a front, low pressure or high– I’ve never believed in inexorable, but these days do give me pause . As Simon said to Garfunkle, I get the news I need on the weather report and as God said to Noah, hey, you better build a boat, although charitably, a flood could be billed as […]
The gingko, green fractal reaching in the breeze– there is geometry in a quiet evening, seen and unseen structures– the sky dimming like a screen, still blue, still blue, and the arc of a jetliner, the beams and girders of the closest build site, its lightbulbs, tungsten, in metal cages, old and comforting, just that one room lit, not even a room yet, a prototype, the lack that comes before, that emptiness that is at […]
a roadside stand cherries in their sunburn hues the sky and the Chevy flat baby blue the clouds roll right off and crooked birds fall into paper hills and sometimes nothing is what comes from nothing some mylar sheeting a layer of dust
Our eyes seeing the same, our ears hearing the same, Our touch making and unmaking the same world. Not one, divided in two, not two, united in one: The second I, so that I may be conscious of myself. from Father Ch., Many Years Later, Czeslaw Milosz
Cool morning rain on the cusp of summer, on cobblestones and chairs and tables, water beading up on the laquer. So welcome sometimes, the dissenting voice– a change, a sea change, for better or worse it arrives like an empty plaza, this is the setting, the play can begin
if I should buy a shirt your color and put on a necktie sky-blue where would they carry me?
I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theaters?
You’d never know, even if it sat right next to you– plenty of things have seasons, even ice insisting I’m ice, I’m ice, I’m ice. Tener frío, tener calor, sometimes translation is an easy enough thing but most of the time it is not.
Morning arrives like an unwelcome guest, I have no place for it. Colder than I thought, caught in sudden rain and the tyranny of the parking lot attendant. What sort of medium for this sort of canvas? Nothing indelible, even my footsteps echoing in the cavernous garage seem too bold a statement.
OPTIONAL POETRY 