All day today half -heard noises, like a baby mobile, or was that a cat? Don’t you hear the thing, calling? Or am I too attuned to the periphery, lines of demarcation, too glib the response, quick as a field of grass in spring, Whitman said tongues, no, blades– but I’m not green, can count the seconds before a thunder clap, and if I were to really ask– easier to shut the cold thing out, […]
You said it’s still winter, ice sheets around Greenland, while flying, up above it all, hermetically sealed, observing, removed, the ice withdrawing, the ocean stretching to fill a void, although from altitude it wouldn’t seem to be moving at all, there are subtle things you miss from austere heights, giving up detail for the largest panorama, further out, still, with no more borders, strange landforms falling under the very edge of the day, abstract clouds […]
Waiting on the weather report. Come dawn we’ll know better but for now it’s unseasonably warm. Which makes these words unreasonably harsh. Why burden your burden? You sink stones in mud to step on, a way across, why be mean to your means, unless you seek an end?
Punctuation. Pedantry. It’s not a question but a wall, impermeable by design. The forecast has been wrong all week; I anticipate wrongness now like expecting rain, the hail that fell for hours, you can tell it will by the color of the sky, or at least I thought you can, that doubtful gray superimposed on blue. Hard rain that doesn’t roll off, the wind compels it, impels it. And falling silent, do I repel, or […]
Trying to use the produce before it spoils, the milk a lost cause, dust rueful on the mantle. So easy to think, if only– but each year knows better, better. How does the cilantro just liquify? It’s cool in the refrigerator. What lasts and what does not? Salt and biterness, but you can’t cure a life. Maybe preserve it, depriving it of air, and light, keeping it for the sake of possession, the fear of […]
Dog star, always there, in the dog days of summer, in these winter hours that pass like small lifetimes, secret, still, enclosed. I forget sometimes that being a tide involves wide margins, sea changes, rushing in and reticence in equal measure– never ever there but always moving towards it. Dog star, still there, waiting faithfully at the edge of the horizon. Not a portent. Not an omen, but maybe an answer to some unspoken longing.
Day and night, vise-like, bookends to whatever this is. A return? Or stalled momentum. Pieces of salt, like stars, stud the black ice. This year drawn out to its breaking point– a twist of the champagne cork– anticipation is such a terrible ache. And this cold cuts to the bone. Waiting for a word, a sign, breath suspended in the frigid air, and fingers gone numb, only hurting when they touch something warm– a loss […]
The high was still low. In the shade the cold was bitter, and when the wind picked up– Three arbors of grapes, overgrown, neglected, and some chipped clipping shears. What makes a return prodigal? A morass, deadwood, suckers, shoots the color of rust, dried blood, arteries, and the ashen ghosts of summer after summer. Excise, and find the form inherent. To finish a thing, just one thing, done in its proper season and sequence. A […]
The shortest day gives way to the longest night. Of course. The street, this building, quieter than usual, perhaps everyone gone, travelling home, or just asleep. The hour is late, maybe the emptiness woke me, that big, smooth zero, like a rock of ice. You know it would float. That doesn’t make sense, I know. Of course. But that doesn’t make it wrong, either. Harbingers, suddenly listening to Tom Waits, craving a racket. There are […]
More North than home, this morning-still forest– dull today, awaiting more snow, more sky, more anything– a drowsy forest, half-sleeping under packed-down ice, still dirt where the sun breaks through, on some days, but not this one, no more day now than hours ago, barely more than night, the sun somewhere in its low arc, somewhere under these insulating clouds, very little moves, the lake comes as a surprise, so silent at its banks, even […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 