Dear Keats, Would you agree that poetry is basically an art in the same vein as bone-setting? You set your fair share of fractures, should know that healing is an unruly thing, as we make a suggestion and wait and see what grows around it, or often more like read between the lines— Sometimes the course of care is as inevitable as a river near its outlet, say tuberculosis, once? I know you know this. […]
The weather report: Clouded judgments, with a chance of rain tonight– Down the bank, a diagonal line of limbs wholly traverses the blank sky, but in reality the trees are twenty feet apart it’s illusion that they touch– convincing, as distance makes us two-dimensional, hence post-card memories, hence the flat aspect of doubt.
Gray plumes stretch from the hospital incinerator. A bald eagle perches above the floating bridge. Also facing due South, but still in final descent, a 747– Delta, by the chevrons on its tail. This rare dry air shows such precise detail; would that my thoughts were so clear, or even clear as your intentions, but they aren’t, and especially not to me.
Hot air expands cold air contracts, but this cold snap has resembled the opposite. There’s so much space, now, for the sky to fill– it pools over the lake at sunset, over-saturated, splits the bare tree branches like a fine-toothed comb. Nothing about this suggests recession, even the early nights wait a little longer, gently sloping into dusks of pin-prick stars. The moon through the woods spills rolling shadows, making an ocean floor out of the […]
We lost the trail momentarily, it sunk into the spongy forest floor and opportunity arose between the wide-spaced trees, each gap an alluring possibility. Silence settled down, protected from shearing winds by a sheer rock face, only small vibrations, the distant clip clip of a carabiner, hinted at the climbers advancing insect-like up the wall. We went up, found our path beyond a slew of boulders and then, of course, saw the simpler way there; I was distracted by envy, […]
A line of demarkation where the sun cleared the ridge, the rest of the gardens in blue shade, iced over. To start we took down birdhouses stuck on high stilts, two had peat bricks, one studded with cold pebbly eggs, one with a petrified bird, hatching only half the battle– The compost frozen solid, we broke it up with garden forks, lifted, threw all piles together to prolong its warm center, to keep it going longer, decomposition still a marker of life […]
Deep in thought I missed the exit. The hatchback in front of me almost did the same. What a night, with its unreasonable coldness, reunion dinners, and unplanned diversions through childhood towns. Once I saw the church I knew exactly where I was: Still lost, just no longer in the temporal sense— I mean yes, a course can be corrected, but home— The point is, it isn’t entirely a place, and a longer drive just […]
Upstream, they’ve built gardens out of marshland, plots of leeks patrolled by bitterns, the water plate-glass flat, growing brackish in summer, précis: the color of indifference. In town, day-drinkers float in a sea of wicker and ashtrays and flat-faced dogs caught up in their leads. Beyond the quai the church bells toll time, here, another passing hour is only another train that’s gone. Somewhere farther up North, the river dumps out, in memory, the coast was always cold. Even on a sunny […]
I could go or I could stay or stay for now and later, go– these are the dangerous hours, they curl in like something clipped from its life-source, dead leaves, finger -nails– time seems to shorten and encircle but I wouldn’t quite say trap– it’s only a cage if I want to go out, which I might, but maybe not just yet.
It seems unfair to be tasked with motion when all of nature is still and frozen– the first true frost puts pallor on the cedar, slips a chill past the window, blatant warnings I would gladly head if only I could, instead of turning out into darkness ghosted by ice to go someplace I don’t want to be.
OPTIONAL POETRY 