The sky just before dawn is dark electric, expectant. In almost every sense the word progression means progress, except here, at the margins. The sky is blue as airless blood, as secret blood, as all the terrible beauty that I’d rather not know.
Sleet on the way home, the wind’s incisors. What do you say to a man who is dying? I miss the turn for the exit, three times around the parking garage’s flattened concrete helix. I vacate my spot, I leave it wanting. The heart is a door that opens and shuts.
From the cancer ward a view, a dream of a lake. All this glass is sterile, frosted– we soften everything we can soften. Sometimes with meds. I recall how, when half-crazed, you tried to leave and carry off a decorative vase, and your paintings got much wilder, vivid wet. There is no crimson here, only windows the color of sea-glass, and clean lacquered pine. It is peaceful and nice– so quiet, floors above the street, the orderly bridges, elegant rooftops, that I can hear blunt dread roll in my stomach as I […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 