I didn’t throw it in, but I didn’t swim out, either. If you are the ocean, certain, certain, then I am the bird, open, open; we share no common phases or forces. Without some heaviness it’s hard to generate lift, and without lift we’re left treading, treading, so where’s the shame in being an albatross around a neck, weighty, weighty, in not being slight in not being forgotten in not forever waiting, waiting?
Sometime in the night the fever broke and morning dawned cool, drops of rain adhering to the handrail like blisters, the maples greener for their washing. One to the west is turning yellow, one to the east is not, instead rusting in spots, anthracnose, a disease of trees. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this winter might be rougher than the last, maybe blight is only blight but if it’s a sign what else could […]
Stranger still are the fever dreams arriving with dangerous vibrancy, the wheels come wholly off, a restless sleep, not restful when the room’s edges keep smearing off in half-conciousness, I am too cold. I am too hot. Everything else real is muddled, and everything unreal is not.
I haven’t been out east in weeks but the last dream I dreamed last night was of the coyote; with unreal immediacy I watched, unobserved, floating by as it prowled the porch boards, emboldened by the late state of sunrise. I know it goes there, leaving clumps of fur and scat, but only when we’re gone, until now I’d never seen how close it comes to the glass door, assesses its reflection, having moved from cautiousness to callousness a long […]
Now, something’s completely gone. Though it’s sunny outside it’s fundamentally changed. No more heat. And yesterday, melodramatic clouds threatened downpours, occasionally made good on it. But all fall really is is the short-lived adolescence of winter, at least here it gets old fast.
This morning can’t win. Though the doorstep fog has cleared a cat drowses next to the dryer vent, exhaust curling like breath into the stillest of air, nothing else moves; no one is there. Except a squirrel trying an open garage and finding only paint cans, a long held dream but nothing to eat, only smooth sealed metal cool against his hands. Nothing else, he moves cautiously on, sticking to the bushes, avoiding the void beneath this pale, dead sky. He makes the […]
West coast joining in the #fullmoonsocial2014 with a poem and a beer, and drinking it from a glass to keep this shindig classy: We’ve given you a dark side, and labeled you pale— maybe we are the distant ones. Still, you look up to all things bigger, tugging on our tides. Are you of us? We began and you began. Somehow formed, you can’t escape us, and for all our proximity, I’d say we hardly […]
Some acts are unretractable– take out the nail and you still made a hole. I’d rather be a hammer, if I only could, I surely would, but is it action or inaction that makes one most culpable?
Originally posted on <a href="http://jeffschwaner.com/2014/10/05/full-moon-poetry-party-fullmoonsocial2014">Translations from the English</a>: <br />Let’s harmonize with the Ancients, and each other. ? On October 8th, the full moon rises. In the hours it’s alight, let’s do like the Ancients do, and send out a poem to those we’re thinking about but cannot be with, or to each other, or simply to the moon itself. In a wrinkle on the tradition of Full Moon parties, let’s post our poems on WordPress and tag…
Now it maddens me not to know what bird is making the call in the dark. A little knowledge making clear all that I don’t know. What did it say? Why did it stop? And now begins again; what is the story? Fog before sunrise electric and eerie. I look in the cedar, the waxy bay laurel, find no feathered shape to match the voice, the morning is speaking and I can’t see how, only the blank faces of houses, blinds drawn across their eyes. [wanted to put in […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 