i. The dog’s trot stiff with sleep, this morning creaks, walls chirring with heat, and late last night I heard birds inside the eaves. Everything is coming in now, receding from the cold, forming nests, or the warm bright centers of stars.
[Inquiry] In this brown neglect of a garden peppers gleam under a sheen of wax, warm sunset shades of orange, fuchsia, red– resistant, tropical, small in the hand and wickedly spicy, no rat would touch them, a little bellicosity a useful trait, the counterpart to too much vibrancy, a swift cure for curiosoity, as not all questions are benign, especially this late in the season.
All the cities went dark, downed trees cradling parked cars, water pulling the bridge down to closure. Lightless, the contours of the highways grew foreign and foreboding, charting black channels through the island’s core. But now, this dawn comes like nothing, sprightly birds assess the state of the canopy, a full ten degrees colder, smoke tints the air, all wholesome except for the limbs that broke but didn’t fall, the widow -makers, the swords of Damocles holding on for now, the fresh-snapped pith white as […]
Enough of this half-way month, unable to chose between borrowing or giving. Enough of caprice, don’t even call it whimsy, and all this talk on the strange weather we’ve been having. Enough of strange weather: the freak tornado, lashings of rain from a high clear sky. Of volatility. Let your clouds be clouds. No more short hope, no more false awakenings, no less, and no more, either.
The lake is irritable, it won’t be described, the more one tries, the slipperier it gets, and refusing to fly, the gulls are complicit, or maybe they’re stuck, too, held static by the wind.
The morning hums. Muted, it’s unclear how– another soporific, with the lingering dark, the anesthetic fog. Downtown yesterday street corners jutted into sun but the size of the hospital precluded it– so we walked in the shadow on parallel streets not quite woken but just below, with no real desire for surfacing.
Where is the storm? The suffused trees clammor. Three sparrows perch in the window jamb and perplexed, one’s brought a white feather, an offering, for nesting, or a sign of surrender? Clouds edge out blue, the ground still wet from early showers, under the eave a sham shadow. These double panes don’t keep out cold, they’ll shake with thunder should it happen to show to lively up these Monday morning lows.
First thing this morning the first bridge closed, running late, and over my shoulder a pocket of lake, under a scowling sky– It’s hard to say why or what has changed, but the flat glint of skyscrapers through the downtown corridor was so real it seemed phony– not tortuous as that turn of phrase, but clear and clearly resolute, a setting set, not buildings I knew, although they looked just like them.
In enough fog this house is a treehouse, everything come in close, a leaf recoils from an unseen drop of rain, only reaction visible, here, there, the leaves ring, and it’s all too simple to forget antecedents, the silence is lazy -making, the forest immense, the pines too water-laden to stir at all, and maybe it’s the same with you.
Looking at a map these days my eyes drift up to the border towns or over to the coastal towns and linger longer than they should. Our eyes are meant to follow lines, some of us follow them religiously away. Today is the first true winter day, the sun won’t rise against green and gray as I get dressed and drive to the hospital.
OPTIONAL POETRY 