Even though and still the trees are making new leaves don’t act as if you expect it you’ll ruin the surprise look even now they are waiting for the perfect moment avert your eyes don’t look until they shout their green shouts
Lilac streaks this sunrise against the dusky mountain the floor moves on with plans for discharge or work for the M.E. it does get lighter earlier now I panic in traffic thinking I’m late staring at the mountain and what does late even mean if not that we take so much for granted
Sadness is thick but more precisely it is dense. I do sense danger in the sea’s laughter, but also fairness. Why do I return to the indifference of the ocean? It gives as much as it gets, doesn’t boast of its limitlessness. You wrote a book of questions, but what of the ones you didn’t ask? I have a few I can’t even bring myself to speak, instead writing some lines like you, like this– […]
A thin cloud drawn across the night sky a cloud not a jet trail not as precise above it the moon below it stars in some celestial equation so enamored am I with this idea of divination two of the stars are traveling in opposite directions jetliners both going and both leaving but I wasn’t looking for something so obvious so keen am I on division always wanting to know just how many times a […]
Biopsy: seeing life but not knowing, not without second sight— and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read, half the joke, not as funny, and in the lobby on a pleasant wall I stare at the same agreeable painting for minutes at a time and never see it.
The road paved in ice and that damn owl playing hopscotch on the roof all night. The room too warm, the smell of snow came in a cracked window at three, such an unbecoming hour, and it seems there will never be enough– I mean, there isn’t a leap or reach that isn’t preface to a landing.
This morning seagulls called out whistle-bright above the frozen world, camellias under ice, clear dawning. Now it’s night, my bags are ready, nothing is left but to savor life, packed down nicely, finally, and this dry cava, cold as a cave, clinquant on the tongue, like the ocean arriving, a secret revelation, so transient and divine [HAPPY NEW YEAR! Optional Poetry is going on vacation, for the next week or so will be posting poems from the […]
The bend of a bird’s wing seemed so sharp, the guttural scrape of the snowplow clearing the road, but it couldn’t keep up with the sky and its act of forgetting, these relentless rounded edges, forgiving all, and always– The last snow walk before the drive back it was blowing down, so that the path erased itself, became new with every step and it was hard to return, to leave the banks that softened hard […]
Vineyards under snow, civilized rows, punctuation for a run-on landscape. Our straggling vines look like veins without a body, the blooms we contain, of darkest blood, clandestine first pressings. Even at night the drifts are pure white under a haloed moon— why speak and spoil the effect? Let a suspended particle be: Ice crystal, brix, a word unspoken— I’m learning to let a thing fall, or ripen
White world, little distinction between ground and sky, even birds won’t brave the coldness. Yesterday I saw geese fall out over the shale lake, like lanterns, gold-bellied, backlit by a setting sun. The first Christmas without your call. Today is startling in its stillness, another thing has come and gone: Snow coats the road and yards, the mountains engulfed by clouds, so what else can we measure by besides a sense of gain, or loss?
OPTIONAL POETRY 