it’s those in between days now the shock of cold at dawn but then the old familiar heat red flag watch east of the Cascades the fires taking off late the spiders out early even instinct stupefied it’s time to accept the tomatoes on the vine have gone mealy and sour there is a cost to holding out too long a loss in holding on I take the chicken wire off the garden beds and […]
This is a language I can’t fully speak but clearly these waves break the way they break with intention. I couldn’t remember the topography of this beach, thought rocks not sand, misplaced the tree that straddles the void where the yellow clay blank was bitten by the surf, although I’ve been here many times as myself, and as someone else. There must be a shallow bar where the waves are breaking, beyond that, the steely […]
The heart is not here, it can not, will not, be here— in all this rain, more than we’ve seen in several years. A rabbit darts through the overgrown lawn, now gone to seed, each blade a reproach. What hasn’t been done, what can not, will not. A sparrow ascends, becomes untethered. Motion is sometimes but not always distraction. The clouds oppress but containing is what breaks you. In their garden beds the radishes crack.
To wound the heart is to create it I felt it flit across the back of my hand before I saw it a fleeting shadow a large spider already gone before the stomach drop the untaught unease I saw another stationed on the orchid’s leathery leaf another where the garden abuts the foundation another tracing the fall line of the shower I leave them alone now some say age make you less tolerant […]
not everyone does evil, but everyone stands accused in the morning a dead spider curled up and dried out in a grave of sunlight and dust still small against the floorboards still mostly legs and still a bit off-putting but less without the menace of motion agency is what we fear the most
The cold is a good counselor, but it is cold. this is clear cold rain no mists in this forest just a deluge increasingly insistent saturated loam and inundant bridge— we walk on water in water one letter difference sure, easily dismissed but your feet still get wet— this the lesson everything is as it seems— an earthworm coiling in on itself a question answering a question the gray river silt the wind […]
the maple by the window put out leaves stretching down to the shrubs, out to the pines, and aside from all this rain the house is dead quiet, the living room sunken, deluged, submersed, and now something weighty lit on the roof but then took off when I went to look, and now some robin singing, unseen, calling out warnings or conveying relief, obscure, obscured and suffused with green
Camel, dromedary. Sure, a poem but why? Even taxonomy is too pliant for you. Extinct or extant. If a line drawn in the sand is too soft then what use are words that build and fall to gently say no desert no life begins or ends precisely. It is a collection of inconstant and inconsistent forms that slump or shift at best against what confines them. Naming things is such an act. Bactrians have one […]
Today a hummingbird hemming the courtyard corners, hail from slate skies, sun falling in heavy bars, the crack shot drop of a dead branch in the distance, all this wind, if not harbingers, still precisely sounded tones, probably worth noting
The camillas are all blooming now from the bottom up like they truly don’t care this month still manages to be unexpected warmth or hailstorms no middle ground lessons abound here I’m sure
OPTIONAL POETRY 