OPTIONAL POETRY

Sometimes I heard a roar
but could not see them

sometimes silent they hung
over the cradle of the lake

decoupled from their sound,
made foreign.

I’ve heard this theory
that if you travel in a jet

your soul lags behind you,
a division of essence,

maybe more so for people
who are different

in different places
(name, voice). Less

confusing to be at first
a glint, than to let slip

the full thundering
of afterburner.

Discretion until
the baggage arrives,

or you could try to stay
in front of it, I guess.

Dear future residents of 188,
good luck.  We lasted a year,

slightly over, it was rough 
at times, I guess I forgot how

much until the neighbor upstairs
asked to bless the place with 

Holy Water. I let her, hope it 
helps, but if it doesn’t just know 

that there is very little that time 
cannot make tolerable, 

that after a while you might hear 
rats in the wall and think hey, 

we all want the same thing, 
really, a place to call our own.  

Hope clinging tenaciously
like the burrs on the carpet
on the floor of this beach house,

small impalers, causing us to jump
and curse loudly despite children
sprawled everywhere,

not mine.
We spoke in French,
they said those birds

we saw were not pelicans
but I insisted they were,
these the birds of my childhood

of all my coasts.
Then grown tired
of conjugating tenses

and drinking wine
I just sat silent, listening,
imaging the next day’s drive.

Leaving early,
I woke before dawn,
the house still sleeping,

went down to the beach
where an eagle faced the sea,
faced into the wind

as did I, and it sang,
a chirpy warbling thing
unexpected from a raptor’s beak.

A lone pair of fresh tracks
made straight for the tide line,
a coyote, must have turned,

and only recently out of sight.
On my way out I saw one
of everything,

in the dunes, a velvety buck,
much later a doe, and another
coyote who leaped across

the road and dove into
a field of cranberries,
unaccompanied,

and I think it’s funny
the hardest things to let go
of are the things

I never had,
just hoped for

Sometimes I think about where
I’ll be soon

and when I’m there, I think
about where I was

making a line
between two points

and seeing if it bent
toward misfortune

or luck.

(I have done this
enough times

that I almost believe
I’ll get where I’m going.)

Mid-summer heat, or is it late?

now it is pain to stay in one place
blue cool lakes and the mountain out:

constants, and the constant variable
of going

distinctions of end and beginning lost
in travel, skipped over

as if changing time zones, concepts,
that’s all, nowhere as real as the snowpack

still covering the trail, even now
in almost August, even in this heat wave

a sort of sedition, stamped in place
by the hooves of mountain goats

who could not care less about any
of this, who hover above the tree line

like specks of clouds against
the high cloudless sky.

Last night had teeth

looking through old photos
with not enough to drink

and the largest spider
I have ever seen creeping
down the hallway ceiling

took it out
with a baseball bat

now embedded
in the popcorn ceiling

its leg dangles down
still reaching
and something bit me

as I was trying to sleep
still at some ungodly hour

even in the dark
I could feel the welt rising.

Today is a veritable catalogue of rains:

the relentless washing rain;
the sudden faucet rain;
the don’t-answer-the-phone rain,
drowsing;

the tree-derived drops;
the sad sloppy drivel
of the overflowing gutter;

the rains of my childhood;
the rains of last April;

the is-it-raining? rain;
the gray verticality of a shock
downpour, splenetic;

the smeary window panes,
pleasant;

rain from a clear blue sky,
the devil beating his wife;
now where did I learn
to say such a thing?;

the fluidity of states;

the phase changes;
and the passing moods;

but the incessancy.

Velella, called sail-by-the-wind,
thousands of them blown ashore,

jelly gone soft in the heat, wing-like
sails flagging in defeat, a row

of seabirds forming to feast
upon the indigo dead,

seagulls more than willing,
pelicans looking windward

for something better,
trusting in the Pacific’s

strange generosity,
its willing deposition

of curiosities, penchant
for grand gestures,

a low tide that goes out
and out and on and out,

a risky invitation, still,
I cast my bread and wait.