Sometimes I feel shy as a rabbit caught in arrant moonlight– crepuscular, I loathe extremes. What is this light that floods my life? Am I prey or is this love, finally– for so long I have sought out gray: Too dark for night, too light for day– purposed impossibilities. It isn’t only doubt that makes my heart race, but those howls at dawn chill my heart to an ice-clotted lake. Everything is loss: Of stars, of sun– […]
Don’t call me in the winter, I don’t want to be found– begrudging dawn for how it plummets into day, this bed a nest, a raft– it seems foolish to leave it, to give in to insatiate minutes, no, just like the tide, I’ll go out when I’m ready–
Sadly, I part from you; Like a clam torn from its shell, I go, and autumn too. — Distance, felt viscerally. Almost winter, this cool sun returns me: I rode a retired racehorse, once, around a frosty outdoor track, he was prone to startle, making counterclockwise loops at an unhinged gallop, reverting to a yearling heart. Ashamed of its unruliness I put my through its paces, but really, who works who? This day is […]
Mums are finished nothing left to write about except the radish — And I return to lemons, their solar scent, spice dishes with a heavy hand. I might collect jars of jam, seeded with constellations, figs from the Adriatic, salt, pine, and citrus– once I wandered the walls of Dubrovnik, above the red clay roofs– and yet it’s still winter, and here I am, haunting or haunted, steam rises from my soup.
Awakened at midnight by the sound of the water jar cracking from the ice — Basho, I’m too well-acquainted with the small of the night, the lonely hours that pull one out of sleep, so desperate for company. Seeing only frost from my window, a hoary silence, and lacking discernment, I thought it had snowed. It’s noon, now, golden, and I’m a foreigner to myself. (I don’t normally do writing challenges but was tempted by this great post […]
Again the dockyards, again, so much space in this sky, this air, it’s getting intolerable: Nothing weighs on me like nothing . By the museum on the south shore an art installation, a small house filled with a snarl of branches, meaning, I guess, that the facade we build is still an extension of our true nature, or something about the impermenance of shelter, but then again I’m usually too literal in my interpretations . But […]
Maybe it’s a lack of solid ground, afloat in a sea of glass and iron, but my tongue is growing sharper. Scaffolding and sterile girder, these do not unfurl, have no grace of life, just conceal so many empty rooms, like lidded eyes. The sky has a presentiment of coming weather, grows dull even as a crack of blue appears, but it’s just another space for lease, too toothless and meek to last for even […]
Entre chien et loup, now, when you visited it was summer, but you’d recognize this grimy rain from living up au Nord– ça fait un bail, I know, a voice from years ago sending thin words out over the Atlantic into a late night but putain, mec, reply
Tonight, a half-assed storm. The drunk man in the lobby slurs I don’t need this. Enough, rain, enough— my glass is turned over. I’ve run out of words to describe the night.
The top of the gingko has lost its leaves, with a windstorm in the forecast. In a sunbreak today I walked around the lake seeking solace in the dockyards, but found only cruel sleek boats, so capable of leaving that they were no comfort. These nights are gluttons, and there’s little left to take— I could count each yellow leaf, fine as a petal, yet strong enough to have held the sun, once. Anything could tame it, now, […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 