OPTIONAL POETRY

Disquieting returns; a freeze watch
out East, new growth on your scans,
a return to dormancy,
more gravely, its loss–

there are no more words

but look how on the porch
the shadows of some leaves
pattern the rest,

the intricate geometries
of sun, the blood-red stems,
seed pods growing dry
and perilous

Usually not a big proponent of prompts or poetic forms, but figured eh, why not?

Late again. Still not done.
This morning was chilly but
then the clouds burned off.
Already these lines are not
the right length, I contain multi

-tudes too, but poorly.
Too short. Too long. Is the point
of school to deaden
the soul prior to working?
It was unclear, so I went

back for more and still
don’t know, anything, really.
Except that even
a few words a day can be
delightful sedition

when they are not
the stilted citations
expected of me;
a casual study of
clouds needs no peer reviewing,

and even flat guidelines
for laboratory safety
can be converted to
poetry if one needs it
badly: All compressed gas

is hazardous, and
most cylinders are equipped
with pressure relief
valves, but if these fail an [extraordinary]
amount of energy

can be released, fast;
this is straight from the standard
operating
procedures but what it means
is better to fudge the lines,

four for a five,
or six for a seven,
the importance is
writing–  i.e. matter, expanding
(and relatively safely).

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 likely
cause 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, drifts
of snow, which sounds drowsy,

but no– the heaviness
of arrested motion 

is too keenly felt
in the wide open hours

of night, it’s too big
and still a space–

the moon too cold,
too bright, no matter

the blankets I pile on,
I’m frozen out of sleep

and my throat, 
it aches.

All today the sky has been 
a softening gray, so passive
the sun in retrospect seems
harsh–

by the evening commute
the far bridge was lace 
against lush, lights of
distant cities floating
like 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 going
to bed early, getting out
from under this blanket
of humidity, going from
dream state

to dream state, slippery
places, hard to grasp but
easy enough to inhabit,
especially if you’ve
been here for a while.  

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 up
to anything at all, no—
it’s enough, maybe,

the way moonlight spills across
the bay, that within minutes
of seeing a face one can

still sense that there’s more
to come, even if not the shape,
or time, or place, and a kiss

is just a kiss, I know,
still wearing your scent from
when we came close,

the same old story,
and somehow
it never gets old.

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

constrain, but even then it has two
sides, trapped and free, though never

advertising which is which,
a choppy spot, a sheltered cove

where spindly docks prolong
the shore, or whatever else waits beyond

the curvature of land–  

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 is
without light,

(sun, moon,)
there is no distance,

all darkness is
immediate

and can contain
anything,

(mountain, valley,)
except the contrast

necessary
to focus clearly

on any sort
of definitive edge–

so nothing
ever 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 sort
of 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 pockets,
hesitant now, having lost
its mettle, thin and hesitant,
distancing itself already. 

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 sky
with its somewhere sun
the cause of all the thunder,

danger being highly 
contextual, and safety
highly relative,

personal even.  
I delighted at each 
thunderclap, the kid I sat

ran from room to room 
to close the windows 
to keep the thunder out,

not rain, and led us down
to the basement where
the sound couldn’t reach.