OPTIONAL POETRY

Wide awake at four AM, a sore throat woke me, throat– a word so squat and toady no wonder things get stuck; unspoken words a likelycause of hoarseness, hoarse– derived from hoar and hearse, old and musty, hint of deadly, an all-but assumption of frost,forgotten all summer until  overnight the blades of grass merit the sobriquet– encased in ice they crack under their weight, cue frozen creek beds, driftsof snow, which sounds drowsy, but no– the heavinessof arrested motion  is too keenly feltin […]

All today the sky has been a softening gray, so passivethe sun in retrospect seemsharsh– by the evening commute the far bridge was lace against lush, lights ofdistant cities floatinglike everything, like a mirage hovers,but real, when nothing else was, or at least is as good as forgotten–  we all swim home, starting to think of goingto bed early, getting out from under this blanketof humidity, going from dream state to dream state, slippery places, hard to grasp but easy […]

Who could have known the turn of the night,as on the pier the Ferris wheel glowed, we watched from above, it spun though long closed for rides, you wanted to go,but were leaving at dawn,and I’d like to inquire  if these minutes will add upto anything at all, no—it’s enough, maybe, the way moonlight spills acrossthe bay, that within minutes of seeing a face one can still sense that there’s more to come, even if not the […]

An edge. Even today, kayaking, even on water, in wave-derived furrows, patches of wind, a division between like and not  like. No, not exactly that, not here and there, either. An edge contains; convex, concave, even drawn flat it makes two from one and holds each one fast. On the east side of the lake I paddled ahead beyond the reach of your voice, trying to beat a hefty wake. An edge contains, it could […]

Mountains in the sky—how many shades of blue can the human eye see?  How many can be felt?(By day? By night?) The problem iswithout light, (sun, moon,)there is no distance, all darkness is immediate and can containanything, (mountain, valley,) except the contrast necessary to focus clearly on any sort of definitive edge– so nothingever ends.

Rising before the dawn, again,how quickly the days fall off,and how quickly some things arrive like nothing, how others don’t, until almost forgotten,reduced to the smallest sortof longing, a little bruise you can’t remember how you got, but there it is.                                      Backlit the trees don’t look like trees, branches indiscernibly thick, it seems the sky is more dark than light, the sun coming through in little […]

The storm last night caught us all by surprise, a few strong gusts the only warning before a squall line rolled across the lake and in lashings of thumb-sized rain the sky turned green.  Anywhere else I’ve lived that would mean run. Get down. Get as low as you can.  Here, it was just the greenness of the trees washing into the liquid skywith its somewhere sun the cause of all the thunder, danger being highly contextual, and safetyhighly relative, personal even.  I […]

This here is fine, but a really interesting playwould be about the boaton the backdrop slowly coming to realizethat is not actually at sea,  is not an actor but only watching them play their parts on a stage that a backdrop borders but doesn’t engage, and how it still stays, knowing this, having no choice, not mobile or motile,not even with those fullpainted sails that it oncewas so proud of.    

Up with the sun but it isn’t upisn’t even blush or flush with the butte the light comes from lowbut still catches on the grapestheir matte purple tinged with dew and pulling on the vines we’ve changed our places over time and nowI’m setting as it rises.