OPTIONAL POETRY

Disquieting returns; a freeze watch out East, new growth on your scans, a return to dormancy, more gravely, its loss– there are no more words but look how on the porch the shadows of some leaves pattern the rest, the intricate geometries of sun, the blood-red stems, seed pods growing dry and perilous

Usually not a big proponent of prompts or poetic forms, but figured eh, why not? Late again. Still not done. This morning was chilly but then the clouds burned off. Already these lines are not the right length, I contain multi -tudes too, but poorly. Too short. Too long. Is the point of school to deaden the soul prior to working? It was unclear, so I went back for more and still don’t know, anything, […]

Wide awake at four AM, a sore throat woke me, throat– a word so squat and toady no wonder things get stuck; unspoken words a likelycause of hoarseness, hoarse– derived from hoar and hearse, old and musty, hint of deadly, an all-but assumption of frost,forgotten all summer until  overnight the blades of grass merit the sobriquet– encased in ice they crack under their weight, cue frozen creek beds, driftsof snow, which sounds drowsy, but no– the heavinessof arrested motion  is too keenly feltin […]

All today the sky has been a softening gray, so passivethe sun in retrospect seemsharsh– by the evening commute the far bridge was lace against lush, lights ofdistant cities floatinglike everything, like a mirage hovers,but real, when nothing else was, or at least is as good as forgotten–  we all swim home, starting to think of goingto bed early, getting out from under this blanketof humidity, going from dream state to dream state, slippery places, hard to grasp but easy […]

Who could have known the turn of the night,as on the pier the Ferris wheel glowed, we watched from above, it spun though long closed for rides, you wanted to go,but were leaving at dawn,and I’d like to inquire  if these minutes will add upto anything at all, no—it’s enough, maybe, the way moonlight spills acrossthe bay, that within minutes of seeing a face one can still sense that there’s more to come, even if not the […]

An edge. Even today, kayaking, even on water, in wave-derived furrows, patches of wind, a division between like and not  like. No, not exactly that, not here and there, either. An edge contains; convex, concave, even drawn flat it makes two from one and holds each one fast. On the east side of the lake I paddled ahead beyond the reach of your voice, trying to beat a hefty wake. An edge contains, it could […]

Mountains in the sky—how many shades of blue can the human eye see?  How many can be felt?(By day? By night?) The problem iswithout light, (sun, moon,)there is no distance, all darkness is immediate and can containanything, (mountain, valley,) except the contrast necessary to focus clearly on any sort of definitive edge– so nothingever ends.

Rising before the dawn, again,how quickly the days fall off,and how quickly some things arrive like nothing, how others don’t, until almost forgotten,reduced to the smallest sortof longing, a little bruise you can’t remember how you got, but there it is.                                      Backlit the trees don’t look like trees, branches indiscernibly thick, it seems the sky is more dark than light, the sun coming through in little […]

The storm last night caught us all by surprise, a few strong gusts the only warning before a squall line rolled across the lake and in lashings of thumb-sized rain the sky turned green.  Anywhere else I’ve lived that would mean run. Get down. Get as low as you can.  Here, it was just the greenness of the trees washing into the liquid skywith its somewhere sun the cause of all the thunder, danger being highly contextual, and safetyhighly relative, personal even.  I […]