But if you think you can swallow me with grief, remember Metis: I too could start hammering. No stars tonight, not even that; I suppose we have our answers. I think it was Hephaestus who split Zeus’s head open, saving him from the headache of the woman he scorned. And thus Athena was born, goddess of wisdom. And war.
Still going. That brings us back to the stars and space-filling models. It’s one thing to fill a void, another entirely to feed a mouth: your absence is voracious.
Now the neighbor’s voice rises in an aria, a shaky tenor, I’m loathe to do work; at some point, everything has become tiring. A stick -brown lizard startles as the AC shudders to life, resurrected from its former frozen state, strange, ice forming in the heat of the day. I am half hoping for a similar result, pushing past all natural stopping points, tired of rambling towards trite collects, tired of resting, tired of tired — […]
The hawk falls and rights itself, proud it doesn’t even have to beat its wings, so high up it’s currents that bear its negligible weight; for all its presence still brittle-boned. A pair of quails flew over, barely maintaining altitude, gamey, their flight was audibly work, a heavy whirr bearing towards the safety of the tree, plumes bobbing in old-fashioned pageantry. The last holiday I was out here, I took the train back, was struck by the […]
An orange floatplane cuts the drabness of this morning. Perhaps when birds alight and tilt their head it’s not gauging us as a threat but wondering why we don’t fly. The cloud deck is low and so smellcarries, this acreage spiced, medicinal. I have a vision of the sagebrushunder rain, although today will be dry,I’ve seen them lashed, the landmade sea, this house in a floodplain. The finches sing their circular song.The floatplane lands. All this week it will be cooling […]
I wished on the first star and it was a variable star– that seemed somehow appropriate. And was originally named after a falling bird of prey, in some legends reached by a bridge of magpies, which appeals for reasons which should be obvious by now. You are far above these things, never even mentioning your birth date for fear that someone might draw a conclusion from the stars. Did you feel relieved to just forget about […]
What compelled us to go, every summer filling up the Dodge Caravan, ice chests in the back thumping like the drums that start High Noon, do not forsake me oh my darling, was it the emptiness of the West, the rock in Colorado gray as the early films supposedly set there, was it those tales of cowboys and justice that drew my mother out to Laramie, was it the dichotomy of a long-held dream and lackluster reality that led her […]
Enough wine to soften the edges and I’ll sink back in the smallest hours of the morning offered sudden clarity on a surprising parade of recollections: The smell of the metro in July. The tune of a song I haven’t thought of in years. The line of his jaw, one day unshaven. I am not a sad drunk, and this is not a melancholy poem. It is purely coincidence that a bottle once poured is never refilled, and what […]
Consider the mountain. No, consider the man. It’s bad form to sell uphill. So start with Palouse and build up to buttes, sell them in spring when the grass is lush and wildflowers run riot among the foothills. Let the rivers tell their simple story, running full from snowmelt, let the personable maples draped in moss talk, in fact shut up. Everything here was shaped by giants older and bigger than we can comprehend. Consider […]
In true poet fashion didn’t really follow the prompt of using five random song titles, but did a thing where I worked some of Chet Baker’s titles and lyrics into a poem about him. He fell to his death from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988: A slow note, sad, not of this earth, a pure tone getting lost around the corners of the night. You fell in love just once, foolish man, fell […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 