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.
The night before a departure, waiting for that balm of Not Here. It’s supposed to come in threes, but between worse, and worst– I mean, I can’t even tell if this food has gone bad– implications are tiring. I’m going to the ocean, to take in the water’s endless rehearsal and the steady, steady shore, to live in the littoral– there’s not one thing that isn’t somehow in motion, just I wish they sometimes weren’t
From the cancer ward a view, a dream of a lake. All this glass is sterile, frosted– we soften everything we can soften. Sometimes with meds. I recall how, when half-crazed, you tried to leave and carry off a decorative vase, and your paintings got much wilder, vivid wet. There is no crimson here, only windows the color of sea-glass, and clean lacquered pine. It is peaceful and nice– so quiet, floors above the street, the orderly bridges, elegant rooftops, that I can hear blunt dread roll in my stomach as I […]
With light, a shadow, after the tide, an ebb– Nothing wholly itself, everything containing a trace of its own leaving. The yellow morning catches in the spider web’s sheer girder, an ode on capability, and a dirge for the inevitable– There is a chill now at dawn. Sometimes I don’t know what to say: It’s no joy to always consider all that is possible. The gothic ruin of these late October maples, a pang of […]
A sun-drunk yesterday on late-season heat, even though it doesn’t clear Madison street in the evenings anymore, and gets cooler earlier, the sky gone staticky, the shadowy grains saying go home, no reason to stay here, just another thing gone, and paltry remainders.
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 […]
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— […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 