OPTIONAL POETRY

The first barrier is waiting.            Or is it wanting? Every night
 is a river runningand I am a shadow,
 a dry-sider trapped on the surfaceof everything. It’s not for momentumI pull the blade; a current pulls along 
in any state,even without me
 the boat will float,even in pieces, even 
beyond. The banks unseenbut sensed as with sleek 
mammalsthat slink under the water with back currents,eddies,           […]

The sky uneasy after thunderlast night, having gone to bed angry, and the mapleleaves barely waver   in the barely breeze.I dreamed of someone I barely knew, but family–having never really had a chance to talk, I threw him a party, made him a cake, still, the end was fixed in place. These leaves are summer-fat,big as diner plates, obscuring the view.  An outburst of rainwould be a relief about now.   Dreaming, I argued about […]

When I first heard,I wanted to walk, as usual, motion the first barrier and the first barrier to fall. Now, in my childhood neighborhood I wonderat the changes, how things seem smaller, except those I loved, and those I loved and lost towering over all. It’s wilder here,and the wooded road is welcoming, all shadows and dry pine until the brushagainst a nettle, the stingingimmutable– I was reaching for blackberries, minding thorns when I got into them, wantingonly the sun-warmed burst of juice, and […]

Here is where the steel will buckle, here is where the paint will lift. Here, the half-closed eyes of a lazy driver, the thin red line of his passenger’s lips, pressed into silence in the aftermath. Here is the air, thick as amber, the impact now inevitable, the last few seconds fixing vectors in place, lines bisecting lines painted on asphalt in cheery new yellow that can only be trusted as a guide to follow, useless for keeping […]

Saltwater, watermelon, and sunburns, but not nearly as brightly hued, only imparting a slight warmth in the dark cool of this room. This, August’s largess. The lifeguards shout at the boats that pass too close to shore, slow dow! slow down! It can’t ever last this effortless state, these ripest days, this most seasoned of seasons. I peel a piece of bark from the red Madrona tree, set in the dry grass before I leave.    

It’s early enough that noise is still the purview of the street, no voices, only the exhaust of a dryer vent, a crow’s gutter-landing scrape, the pangs of a parked car’s engine settling.  I walk the way I used to walk, I used to live here, on this street where sparrows fight over a crumb of bread. Or maybe they’re sharing it, it’s hard to say. Someone has defaced every sign reading NO anything with the addition you can’t have nice things. Well, sure, […]

Working in the garden patch the path under bright sun, unable to see a thing– it’s become a motif, to hear bees tend to the silvered borage, feel the brush of nasturtiums spilling at the feet of trellised beans as water pools in the rich black dirt, needle-legged spiders high-stepping the confluence– So often in summer I get a sense of return, but without leaving; or is it sun-blinded, yet feeling as if I see things more clearly?      

It’s pleasant to bicker over princes and landowners and somewhat old-fashioned, sweet as summer-dried hay: things that are ours, that were never ours, that were only ours– you Russians say toska– a word untranslatable but so well-felt. We may argue like old hens and even this is comforting but when I say Natasha should never have ended up with Pierre  of course you agree, though still preferring Andrei to my Kostya.  

Turned back at the mountain trailhead, we climbed instead a nearby peak and then instead broke left, wrecked by the heat, for an alpine lake, each set of switchbacks a fresh slap, the thinning treeline promising almost there for miles and then finally the break into a basin meadow and a perfect still round of glacial-hued water. In it in a minute, cold and clean, our reverie broken only by two German women who had hiked up with their purses, sat […]