This morning, walking, a welder’s sparks falling inside a building frame, a cage of flames and empty space, of noncommittal sky. Sactum sanctorum, with its quietest corners, a heart, too, is made from many rooms: antechambers, foreparlours, endlessly recessing, a heart has no heart to it, it is a door that opens and shuts. Passage defines it, existence demands it, a place of access, and egress, that hue of regret. Somewhere along this way, honeysuckle […]
A return again back from the bay industrial coast the shipyards by night and hunters at dawn a dispassionate racoon receeding into the woods the day become a little less wild . the difference between a plea and proclomation not too much both should know better this land intentionally left fallow . a rainy drive as forecast charmless towns without that dutch blue sky geese resting and in flight cursive, discursive get to the point […]
An eve, but it isn’t an arrival if it doesn’t stay. Sun on the bridge, the lake like a mirror, here suffused with gray. The night still falls early but the day gets longer. Too cold still to dig in the garden, the onions can wait, wrapped in their paper, safely frozen, dreamless, mute. Il nous en faut faire autant turelurelu, patapatapan— French carols on the stereo, blind dog sleeping in the corner. Down the embankment small […]
I dreamed a door swept shut and felled a row of empty bottles that didn’t break but scattered about with hollow echoes and you were there saying careless, careless, careless, careless awake again light coils on the floor cool-hued pools of star and streetlamp, making a cold thing colder sleep an uneasy truce
What do you say to a man who is dying? A fact, just as it is twenty-eight degrees out, the sun set three hours and thirty-five minutes ago, this is a man who is dying, but is still alive. Careful, things fall easily here, this the greatest distance, none could be further. What hues in that sunset! A slow burn over the bay, the city changes its face, harder edges of night, but ribbons […]
How the intolerable becomes tolerable, against all attestations otherwise the bite, forgotten that old dispensation what a strange capacity a heart deadens itself, dryly, inexorable as a nature show prey, predator, or merely winter coming on, nothing is surprising now, not even this
Full moon, too high to see through the window pane it does not seem like the human world light pushes us out and occupies the space there is displacement skyscrapers growing more precise by night a thousand perfect golden squares and all of them empty
ICU days line draws and scrawled fishbones sweet jesus overheard we stop at each door each door a threshold sunlight today but frosted glass a curtain drawn for privacy opacity for if it comes to pass this is a shore if anything a great big blank the lung’s secret space and the blood singing wrong
And here we are, snow come and melted, the same cool gray as ever. This damp feels like the smell of home after a time away, familiar become new, for just a moment, novel, known. And here we are, the year dwindling, eternal northern nights. Breath like a cloud. It isn’t sadness yet, but something more rare. We had a true blizzard once, trees felled by ice. Numbering the days: what was, what will. Turning […]
Cold coming over the pass, cold rain, the steep drop, the silent lake, couldn’t see a thing. And the lights of those first few towns, so warm at a distance– another arrival, and what then? A stone, no other word. Unmoved and unmovable, aloof. Knit a nest for it, feather the den, dust off the snow– or don’t.
OPTIONAL POETRY 