Could it mean something that today everyone was singing? the kid the chef the drunk man on the corner hands raised waiting to be raptured for an hour The chef had the words but not the tune arriving at work just as I was leaving the drunk had the voice but distance muffled his meaning the kid went I need you I need you more than anyone darling before rote memory gave out and red-faced […]
In the holly, a steller’s jay, angles hiding angles– black-beaked, black -crested, less bird than polygon, the very shape of caution– its sleek blue bravura hidden in the shadows of one hundred glossy leaves, I saw momentarily the bird itself, not the brash emblem it presents and loudly projects from blatant chimney perches– It was unguarded I saw a touch of matte on a bird that is all glint and grit and out and open, […]
I don’t want to be a landscape she wrote but instead of a plea it came out as trees and Midas smirked.
Writing as a landscape, a warning– don’t mistake placidity for peace. It could be that the stillness of the trees is self-imposed, the dormant volcano, disciplined; though tired of being a backdrop, too tired to do much else but stay, glacial, to wrinkle the horizon with creases the same non-hue as a day-moon, elusive, barely showing up in photos.
You get the sweeter guava I get the crisper night This is what I hear when I talk to you now: the blurble of nearby fountains and incessant motorbikes. You said you felt old and I said so-and-so got married and so all we really spoke about were different types of distance and the connection kept failing as if to drive a point home– it must be so nice to get away from it
The rain coming down to soften our edges to dampen as to muffle not as to douse Such mildness today we thought we’d have a standoff but all we got was tired understanding the kindness that evolves when nothing else is left It’s been a long week everything is weary us the sky gone pewter the slickening roads and bridges that pull towards home and there’s never a lack of water here a glut of […]
Pour it out a perfect phrase there’s no way of getting some things back and every night at every second mere feet from disaster cars course along the freeway Beyond the exit a soccer match is being written out under the spill of floodlights by leg and sinew and there’s many ways the game could go but in the end it can only go one of them so much determined by these white painted lines […]
What becomes ischemic when long denied hope? Deferral and deferral how long must it go on for living tissue about thirty minutes before it’s irreversible and reperfusion though vital just adds injury on insult and this hurts unless it’s good and dead and then you better cut it out quick but just how the hell would you debride a soul? Or determine the margins of what’s left if anything
This breeze is coming in from somewhere is every bit as intentional as this dappled sun these lean robins the pagan call of the flicker that echoes from the maples shouting what we all already know slowly but surely color is returning to this world
Full of fog-deadened air the forest so still that a breath is all that stirs, no birds, and I almost feel guilt for taking one in, so rare is the air here, so alien the sky, so unworldly this morning among the immediacy of trunks: pine, fir, pine, fir, fir, pine, cedar– I’ve only come to set my emptiness in a greater stretch of it, to sit a bit somewhere where silence is still the […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 