more sudden rain from the rooftop a news ticker wraps around high across the alley disembodied letters top headlines, this city turning into glass– impermeable, deflective burying the lede, ample precedent here– furniture in the basement of the Panama Hotel under decades of dust left hastily and never retrieved a drawer left open a child’s homework– internment camps extant, planned reopenings and someone arguing in bad faith– semantics willful callowness a cage is a cage […]
Escape to the mountains to see what endures– the sun-baked alpine packed dirt and scree fiery wildflowers strange butterflies warming afternoons a rock comes loose– quiet more profound after its absence tread lightly almost as if trespassing on scalloped snowfields glaciers, blue-hued, nearly holy– if they won’t last what could?
They told me how one architect cast himself as St Thomas to look out over the rooftops in perpetuity– a sentinel of the Île, to dawns, the rains, those low gold winter sunsets, the Seine grown vein-dark by evening, bridge spans reflected to form perfect spheres of sky– transient beauty, it was a later addition, the apostles on the spire, nothing lasts forever as it stands and nothing stands forever but they took down those […]
It has been a while and it will be a while more still awake waiting to watch an hour disappear shouldn’t be it’s late and getting later or earlier wherever you draw the line however you define it looking through your photos to know a thing to have to hold it it must be late to be thinking still about distance
At night the half -constructed tower is full of light and nothing else, each morning recently it has snowed, heavily, after a period of rain, it is natural and unsettling what fills the hours, open places devoured, as if commodities– mere weeks till spring, and then what?
How many words for snow what could be long-awaited or sudden sea change overnight the gulls are beside themselves the city roofs are white ice-plated pavement you are far and likely to stay that way for a while the sky is still flakes dislodge in the breeze whole trees dissolve into white pixels and then it all starts up again like an orchestral chorus overwrought and beautiful it makes its own time
big surf days the horizon akimbo music through the open window slack-keyed as the palms bend under the weight of all this sunset
It encloses and divides of course not just physically say them and we become us because of what we are not– imply danger like an impatient shadow which makes this safety but not for much longer– so what has changed? The sun got lower. Sell it quickly there is no time, suddenly no time to lose– loss is arriving so deny it be afraid so they become fearsome discredit suffering or accept the precarious– was […]
this day was longer than the day before it late filtered sun on snow-laden trees winter is textural rime ice and powder everything built upon another cold pastiche this punched out step in a snowfield an irreversible mark sharp punctuation but not indelible this night this storm will erase it nothing lasts not even nothing
Such a long long way to go and still think maybe not– call it a joke or call it a knife it gets the point across . Real snow recently deep stuff cathartic erasure a blank slate for a blank stare for whatever can’t be said . Hesitation is an answer delay is an answer even silence is an answer yes, it can be heard– in the depths of the glades my ears were ringing […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 