If you had stayed until after dawn you would have seen the strangest sky, all white, fog roiling like smoke, dampness obscuring the sun yet compounding it, blindingly diffuse. How could the words come as a surprise? But loss cannot be anticipated entirely, yesterday was one side and this is the other. One less.
1. His left hook split your face and sent your brain to visit the farthest reaches of your skull, your head bobbing on a sea of fractured shouts receding into a single point of high shining song. 2. The cut kept opening up like a family secret. They made you stop before you lost the eye. You went to war, re-crossed the Atlantic, survived, came home, got so drunk at times that you let my […]
Oh the things I won’t try to soften up this gorgon heart of mine– wine, up late with the boxes that came after the wake what remains is mostly Fujichrome, frozen smiles, some trinkets and baubles, a hat he always wore when fishing, with its cartoon shrimp dancing– I had to stop the exercise. Some materials are just not malleable, yes this could be a carapace to shed, a loss of protection in order to […]
Inexorable tides something like inevitable grief that will arrive in what– a day, days, weeks? Out on the coast we used to climb the sea stacks and grassy headland paths to watch the surf chew up the shore and anything else that remained below not safely nested up in barnacles and pines and is it wrong now to cooly observe a breaking from some distance– metaphorically as I couldn’t get time off and don’t want […]
And just like that the ocean recedes, it got so close but spread itself too thin, and now returns to its silent, sunless depths. Silence. Eventually, the bear becomes balm, the bite of alone grows toothless— too well known. You wrote to me in words of loss, I haven’t yet found a reply— but agree we should get back out on the water, soon, that is, unless you’ve had your fill of straddling two worlds— […]
Think of a cardinal and I think of snow the natural background for that berry of a bird on a card you gave me once that you pasted in a book so what if it was summer when we watched one one last time the leather on the chair was cracked it was auburn it was orange it was afternoon and memories are nothing more than fabrications built to furnish emptying rooms and there must […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 