OPTIONAL POETRY

Sometimes I heard a roar but could not see them sometimes silent they hung over the cradle of the lake decoupled from their sound, made foreign. I’ve heard this theory that if you travel in a jet your soul lags behind you, a division of essence, maybe more so for people who are different in different places (name, voice). Less confusing to be at first a glint, than to let slip the full thundering of afterburner. Discretion […]

Dear future residents of 188,good luck.  We lasted a year, slightly over, it was rough at times, I guess I forgot how much until the neighbor upstairsasked to bless the place with  Holy Water. I let her, hope it helps, but if it doesn’t just know  that there is very little that time cannot make tolerable,  that after a while you might hear rats in the wall and think hey,  we all want the same thing, really, a place to call […]

Hope clinging tenaciously like the burrs on the carpeton the floor of this beach house, small impalers, causing us to jumpand curse loudly despite children sprawled everywhere, not mine. We spoke in French, they said those birds we saw were not pelicansbut I insisted they were, these the birds of my childhood of all my coasts. Then grown tired of conjugating tenses and drinking wineI just sat silent, listening,imaging the next day’s drive. Leaving early,I […]

Sometimes I think about where I’ll be soon and when I’m there, I think about where I was making a line between two points and seeing if it bent toward misfortune or luck. (I have done this enough times that I almost believe I’ll get where I’m going.)

Mid-summer heat, or is it late? now it is pain to stay in one place blue cool lakes and the mountain out: constants, and the constant variable of going distinctions of end and beginning lost in travel, skipped over as if changing time zones, concepts, that’s all, nowhere as real as the snowpack still covering the trail, even now in almost August, even in this heat wave a sort of sedition, stamped in place by the hooves of mountain goats who could not […]

Last night had teeth looking through old photos with not enough to drink and the largest spider I have ever seen creeping down the hallway ceiling took it out with a baseball bat now embedded in the popcorn ceiling its leg dangles down still reaching and something bit me as I was trying to sleep still at some ungodly hour even in the dark I could feel the welt rising.

Today is a veritable catalogue of rains: the relentless washing rain; the sudden faucet rain; the don’t-answer-the-phone rain, drowsing; the tree-derived drops; the sad sloppy drivel of the overflowing gutter; the rains of my childhood; the rains of last April; the is-it-raining? rain; the gray verticality of a shock downpour, splenetic; the smeary window panes, pleasant; rain from a clear blue sky, the devil beating his wife; now where did I learn to say such […]

Velella, called sail-by-the-wind, thousands of them blown ashore, jelly gone soft in the heat, wing-like sails flagging in defeat, a row of seabirds forming to feast upon the indigo dead, seagulls more than willing, pelicans looking windward for something better, trusting in the Pacific’s strange generosity, its willing deposition of curiosities, penchant for grand gestures, a low tide that goes out and out and on and out, a risky invitation, still, I cast my bread and wait.