What happened to the owl, here? It used to perch on the corner of the roof above the back bedroom, and one summer there were three, if not a parliament, at least a party, a triangulation of HOO, Hoo, and hoo, the farthest just beyond the property line, and then there was that one that just went EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE the only animal sound I’ve been able to duplicate convincingly, and so we went back and forth, […]
[Sketch] A conservative palette is in place, here– the reeds, barn, hawk-on-the-wire, trestle, even the train, the same exact hue of rust. These are colors of decay, if limited in range, abundant in texture, rough snow in warming air, an off-white horse kneeling in a swampy pasture. It’s hard to keep a station in the foothills, but imagine how they run over the rocks, waves of words and songs getting lost, a few civilized fibers, a net in […]
It didn’t seem that windy but the lake showed otherwise– from inside the car it appeared to boil, a silent roil, a shaken -out sheet. Now here I hear the wind, but can’t see it whip the trees, everything’s coming in in pieces, seems like it’s coming apart at the seams.
The note said NOTE: this patient is deceased. Not a surprise, except again for how fast things happen, and how that fastness is exaggerated by stasis before, and I swear time is not entirely linear, more like swimming in a river, with depth and width and current to account for, running dry or out to the ocean where all water comes from, into breath then into air– it’s a cycle, it’s conserved, and this midday rain is […]
This morning’s out of spoons, as I didn’t start the dishes, the lump of laundry a culpable presence– I can hear geese squawk as they fly overhead, late, a less mundane reminder that time flies too fast, even on self-indulgently dull mornings.
The house is so quiet, I can almost hear the dread of tomorrow, outsized, and mostly undeserved. Every clear day here I marvel at how open things are– there’s a clarity in Winter. Or, less distractions, and so at night the walls come in closer and closer; I drink a little to breathe and think in three days, I’ll be halfway through the mountains, the best cure I know for claustrophobia masked by the onus of responsibility– to […]
Hazards on, I parked in the alley by the stairs to drop off a friend, had taken out the carseat no sooner than a Wrangler pulled up to park in the covered spot opposite, and couldn’t make the turn but tried with angry angles, revving, reversals— I left her at the elevator, rushed out, ready with a quip, a jokey treatise on chance and inopportune timing, but the driver cut me short with You see […]
The discrete return of the three AM bird– coming earlier in winter, at midnight a half-dreamed robin-like call, or all-dreamed but half-awake, bright against the grainy dark, a summer call, the kind you hear when mornings dawn cool in the face of all the day’s heat, another tell, as now days are frozen and the nights are even colder.
Dear Keats, Would you agree that poetry is basically an art in the same vein as bone-setting? You set your fair share of fractures, should know that healing is an unruly thing, as we make a suggestion and wait and see what grows around it, or often more like read between the lines— Sometimes the course of care is as inevitable as a river near its outlet, say tuberculosis, once? I know you know this. […]
The weather report: Clouded judgments, with a chance of rain tonight– Down the bank, a diagonal line of limbs wholly traverses the blank sky, but in reality the trees are twenty feet apart it’s illusion that they touch– convincing, as distance makes us two-dimensional, hence post-card memories, hence the flat aspect of doubt.
OPTIONAL POETRY 