And at Land’s End, a pelican fell. Bird of my childhood, I watched them skim the Gulf each night, I wore the smoke of my Granddad’s stogie as we walked down towards Bon Secour, never arriving, never meaning to. Maybe it’s for the best I won’t go back before the house is sold; memories have undertows and I’ve never been good at holding my breath.
(And in our bones are arches:) Cathedral spaces, relics of our own, aqueducts– canaliculus, lacuna– at our core we are more antique Roman than Danish modern. That belongs to the birds; we’re built on living stone, they are sleek yet filigree, architectural marvels, impossible to tell that they’re hollow until holding one in hand.
(Continuing on this theme of breakage:) Bones heal but one still can feel a fracture, years after, when the weather shifts. I carry rain like a heaviness, really, it’s fluid mechanics: even in our hardest places, there’s room for expansion.
Hot tea on a warm morning; the morning breaks, slowly. This mug is chipped, some rustic clay, hand-painted in Mexico. A cartoon humpback hovers over an azure ocean, laid down cleanly in one brush-stroke. Beside El Arco de Cabo San Lucas, thin thoughts of birds fly in front of a lacquered orange sun. If drawn with beaks they might intone truth is beauty, but out of the mouth of these birds more likely a complaint: the heavy […]
There’s more than one way to start a fire, and more than one way for it not to take. You say, oh, you never know… but I’ve spent, cumulatively, days out in the cold warming soggy twigs and burning birch paper to get a spark to grow. Remember that house we found in Manzanita, right out of the 70s, all driftwood and macrame, with a wood -burning stove? You read while I fiddled with the damper, opened the draw. […]
Already the fires have started out East: an acre in Monitor, at least a thousand near Malaga.You could see the smoke for miles apparently, a bruise developing.Burn piles and dry brush, unheard of on this side wherewe live in practically a floating city; can’t go a mile without crossinga bridge, the peril here being that everything is built on filledland, layered on top of small personal histories, but at least when it gives way, eventually, we’ll all […]
This month does go on. Outside children scream at their mother, whatever it is they won’t do it. No, such an easy position to take, just digging into the ground. I should go to the garden today, see what new weeds have sprung from bare soil, if the blighted peas have finally flowered, if morning glory has overpowered all– that stealthy vine, it seems to grow in double-time relative to the leisurely pace of vegetables. I too know […]
Summer is child-like here; I want to please it. There’s still a chill as the sun pulls back, and somewhere in this house a fly is trapped; every thing drones on. I fall asleep on the couch and wake in sadness; a problem with leaving windows open– who knows what might get in?
This week, this heat has brought out little spiders; strange because they usually come in from the cold, and living near a lake in winter things do come: the rats that nested in the wall for months, growing complacent as my landlord. These spiders aren’t much for huddling, are zebra-striped acrobats abseiling from the ceiling, ready to jump, to hunt. Maybe it’s a subtle predatory bias that led me to trap the rats but let these spiders run free, […]
I’ve just realized — it’s the sound you hear when placing a shell to your ear. Or any similar object, really the rushing tides of blood inside us. There’s the draw;we’re mostly water and it goes where it will.
OPTIONAL POETRY 