This morning’s out of spoons, as I didn’t start the dishes, the lump of laundry a culpable presence– I can hear geese squawk as they fly overhead, late, a less mundane reminder that time flies too fast, even on self-indulgently dull mornings.
The house is so quiet, I can almost hear the dread of tomorrow, outsized, and mostly undeserved. Every clear day here I marvel at how open things are– there’s a clarity in Winter. Or, less distractions, and so at night the walls come in closer and closer; I drink a little to breathe and think in three days, I’ll be halfway through the mountains, the best cure I know for claustrophobia masked by the onus of responsibility– to […]
Hazards on, I parked in the alley by the stairs to drop off a friend, had taken out the carseat no sooner than a Wrangler pulled up to park in the covered spot opposite, and couldn’t make the turn but tried with angry angles, revving, reversals— I left her at the elevator, rushed out, ready with a quip, a jokey treatise on chance and inopportune timing, but the driver cut me short with You see […]
The discrete return of the three AM bird– coming earlier in winter, at midnight a half-dreamed robin-like call, or all-dreamed but half-awake, bright against the grainy dark, a summer call, the kind you hear when mornings dawn cool in the face of all the day’s heat, another tell, as now days are frozen and the nights are even colder.
Dear Keats, Would you agree that poetry is basically an art in the same vein as bone-setting? You set your fair share of fractures, should know that healing is an unruly thing, as we make a suggestion and wait and see what grows around it, or often more like read between the lines— Sometimes the course of care is as inevitable as a river near its outlet, say tuberculosis, once? I know you know this. […]
The weather report: Clouded judgments, with a chance of rain tonight– Down the bank, a diagonal line of limbs wholly traverses the blank sky, but in reality the trees are twenty feet apart it’s illusion that they touch– convincing, as distance makes us two-dimensional, hence post-card memories, hence the flat aspect of doubt.
Gray plumes stretch from the hospital incinerator. A bald eagle perches above the floating bridge. Also facing due South, but still in final descent, a 747– Delta, by the chevrons on its tail. This rare dry air shows such precise detail; would that my thoughts were so clear, or even clear as your intentions, but they aren’t, and especially not to me.
Hot air expands cold air contracts, but this cold snap has resembled the opposite. There’s so much space, now, for the sky to fill– it pools over the lake at sunset, over-saturated, splits the bare tree branches like a fine-toothed comb. Nothing about this suggests recession, even the early nights wait a little longer, gently sloping into dusks of pin-prick stars. The moon through the woods spills rolling shadows, making an ocean floor out of the […]
We lost the trail momentarily, it sunk into the spongy forest floor and opportunity arose between the wide-spaced trees, each gap an alluring possibility. Silence settled down, protected from shearing winds by a sheer rock face, only small vibrations, the distant clip clip of a carabiner, hinted at the climbers advancing insect-like up the wall. We went up, found our path beyond a slew of boulders and then, of course, saw the simpler way there; I was distracted by envy, […]
A line of demarkation where the sun cleared the ridge, the rest of the gardens in blue shade, iced over. To start we took down birdhouses stuck on high stilts, two had peat bricks, one studded with cold pebbly eggs, one with a petrified bird, hatching only half the battle– The compost frozen solid, we broke it up with garden forks, lifted, threw all piles together to prolong its warm center, to keep it going longer, decomposition still a marker of life […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 