Frowned upon to write about dreams but I want to say how the wild things arrived, hares, wildcats, hawks– not dangerously– estatically. The subconcious colors the world, if neccessary, decadently– It was a tapestry how they came down from the trees, in medias res, the way dreams go, my childhood home, summertime with wolves, no fear, just floating from the same lack of gravity– not obeying logic, but following something, some unnatural orders, and happily
I have a shadow inside like bottled-up smoke and this– husks of grapes, eleven summers, oaked– can conjure it up– a caution. By the lake today the crows were swarming, the last of the maple leaves afloat on the lawn, like scarlet junks, and at China Harbor, an empty banquet room backlit by bay windows, with a hundred empty chairs– negative capability, like Keats said, to receive the world, concavity, the capacity for being contained in the empty room, […]
Oh Keats it’s late and there’s no bright star no stars at all strange given the clear day earlier but life has its ways of imposing even lighter than air it still gets in the way I know that you know this how some nights can arrive like an unwelcome guest and with such limitless depth it keeps one awake just as easily as light would
If it comes unbidden, consider it a gift– If it comes rehearsed, refuse it. These days I almost only trust the earth, the roots that it harbors, the life that bursts up from it when it cannot possibly wait one second longer–
Slate gray lake a moving slate each crescented line a mark and an erasure. He said here lies he whose name was writ in water and so is everything– nothing completely old, or new, the same wave, different molecules. From this house on a hill the South end of the lake appears to glow from within now and then, a thinning of overcast skies, more sophistry, set against snow-dusted hills and block print vineyards, stark […]
i. The longest night of the year was not so long when bridged by sleep, all kinds, dreams nested in dreams like Russian dolls, brightly-hued, drenched in lacquer, but nothing in the center– there are things the mind keeps from us. ii. Which isn’t to say I don’t still wake often– the newspaper delivered in its arc and impact, or no sound at all but with a different tenor of silence, or white noise, […]
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. […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 