OPTIONAL POETRY

First thing this morning the first bridge closed, running late, and over my shoulder a pocket of lake, under a scowling sky– It’s hard to say why or what has changed, but the flat glint of skyscrapers through the downtown corridor was so real it seemed phony– not tortuous as that turn of phrase, but clear and clearly resolute, a setting set, not buildings I knew, although they looked just like them.

In enough fog this house is a treehouse, everything come in close, a leaf recoils from an unseen drop of rain, only reaction visible, here, there, the leaves ring, and it’s all too simple to forget antecedents, the silence is lazy -making, the forest immense, the pines too water-laden to stir at all, and maybe it’s the same with you.

Looking at a map these days my eyes drift up to the border towns or over to the coastal towns and linger longer than they should. Our eyes are meant to follow lines, some of us follow them religiously away. Today is the first true winter day, the sun won’t rise against green and gray as I get dressed and drive to the hospital.

I didn’t throw it in, but I didn’t swim out, either. If you are the ocean, certain, certain, then I am the bird, open, open; we share no common phases or forces. Without some heaviness it’s hard to generate lift, and without lift we’re left treading, treading, so where’s the shame in being an albatross around a neck, weighty, weighty, in not being slight in not being forgotten in not forever waiting, waiting?

Sometime in the night the fever broke and morning dawned cool, drops of rain adhering to the handrail like blisters, the maples greener for their washing.  One to the west is turning yellow, one to the east is not, instead rusting in spots, anthracnose, a disease of trees. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this winter might be rougher than the last, maybe blight is only blight but if it’s a sign what else could […]

Stranger still are the fever dreams arriving with dangerous vibrancy, the wheels come wholly off, a restless sleep, not restful when the room’s edges keep smearing off in half-conciousness, I am too cold.  I am too hot. Everything else real is muddled, and everything unreal is not.

I haven’t been out east in weeks but the last dream I dreamed last night was of the coyote; with unreal immediacy I watched, unobserved, floating by as it prowled the porch boards, emboldened by the late state of sunrise. I know it goes there, leaving clumps of fur and scat, but only when we’re gone, until now I’d never seen how close it comes to the glass door, assesses its reflection, having moved from cautiousness to callousness a long […]

Now, something’s completely gone. Though it’s sunny outside it’s fundamentally changed. No more heat. And yesterday, melodramatic clouds threatened downpours, occasionally made good on it. But all fall really is is the short-lived adolescence of winter, at least here it gets old fast.

This morning can’t win. Though the doorstep fog has cleared a cat drowses next to the dryer vent, exhaust curling like breath into the stillest of air, nothing else moves; no one is there. Except a squirrel trying an open garage and finding only paint cans, a long held dream but nothing to eat, only smooth sealed metal cool against his hands. Nothing else, he moves cautiously on, sticking to the bushes, avoiding the void beneath this pale, dead sky. He makes the […]