[Composition] A yellow spray of leaves is framed by the window of a darkened room– after a week of bearing down things open up again, the solvent bank of trees, thin-limbed for miles, the pacific emptiness of an unlit room, stagnant with sleep, strikingly silent, its soft-focus objects slumping toward memory, a row of the same shoes facing the wall– but it’s negative space that draws the eye, these empty vessels can’t distract from an emptier one, […]
It’s a wash, a monochrome wash, blank on blank, a sky less than sky, striated by rain that won’t let up. Winter rye seed floats in the furrows, soon it should dig in, unfurl, give cover. Gone birds ink out arrows with wings. An instinct is flight. An instinct is to burrow. But which instinct is right? Blight-burnt leaves splatter the ground, damp adherence, the aim, the only real aim here, to get as far as we can, stick the landing, and […]
Things that don’t distract: Kindness. Words on a page or otherwise, lines of any type, (they all lead somewhere, which is what we don’t want,) although we do. Liquids help: the way the rain melts down the window, the calamity of the lake, each wave consumed while it builds, cold comfort going, gone again.
Biopsy: seeing life but not knowing, not without second sight— and inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read, half the joke, not as funny, and in the lobby on a pleasant wall I stare at the same agreeable painting for minutes at a time and never see it.
ii. Or, say, hearts– also formed from compression, an inward pull, from longing. In the stellate dogwood a flickering thing, a hummingbird filling angles of fog-white air with desperate wing spreads, hardly effortless to beat, contract, to stay aloft, alive, to not be dwarfed by the growing winter.
i. The dog’s trot stiff with sleep, this morning creaks, walls chirring with heat, and late last night I heard birds inside the eaves. Everything is coming in now, receding from the cold, forming nests, or the warm bright centers of stars.
[Inquiry] In this brown neglect of a garden peppers gleam under a sheen of wax, warm sunset shades of orange, fuchsia, red– resistant, tropical, small in the hand and wickedly spicy, no rat would touch them, a little bellicosity a useful trait, the counterpart to too much vibrancy, a swift cure for curiosoity, as not all questions are benign, especially this late in the season.
All the cities went dark, downed trees cradling parked cars, water pulling the bridge down to closure. Lightless, the contours of the highways grew foreign and foreboding, charting black channels through the island’s core. But now, this dawn comes like nothing, sprightly birds assess the state of the canopy, a full ten degrees colder, smoke tints the air, all wholesome except for the limbs that broke but didn’t fall, the widow -makers, the swords of Damocles holding on for now, the fresh-snapped pith white as […]
Enough of this half-way month, unable to chose between borrowing or giving. Enough of caprice, don’t even call it whimsy, and all this talk on the strange weather we’ve been having. Enough of strange weather: the freak tornado, lashings of rain from a high clear sky. Of volatility. Let your clouds be clouds. No more short hope, no more false awakenings, no less, and no more, either.
The lake is irritable, it won’t be described, the more one tries, the slipperier it gets, and refusing to fly, the gulls are complicit, or maybe they’re stuck, too, held static by the wind.
OPTIONAL POETRY 