A quiet morning, with bird, and the slow exhale of the furnace. The fire stutter starts, we all come to life. Maybe today they will find the new feeder, or the popcorn we scattered, grown soft in the rain. The wild here is more wild than before, not easily enticed. Maybe we will find what the coyotes caught last night, unholy screams, then, unnerving silence. Milk clouds this tea, a leaf sinks, then rises, like […]
All night the snow sliding off the roof the tattoo of freezing rain yielding to sun at dawn the deer came quietly up in the yard moving slowly in the deep snow and not too warily the landscape softned the foothills blanketed everything settling and coming down to rest
It’s sunny in the mountains but it isn’t sunny here fog expands, descends bright with day but clinical, sterile silence like a tumor excised or silence like the scalpel– malignant and precise– the skyscrapers disappear into the white inversion, soundlessly no breath of wind the gingko leaves a thousand stilled tongues
late morning, no snow it may have rained but is not raining presently a vacuum cleaner running somewhere, removing the evidence, making it possible to forget. Somewhere near here the tide turns away a gradual recession you have to stay and watch to see but it’s blocks and blocks away and not really ocean, more constrained bay and I recuse myself from all sorts subtlety this morning, bare streets and indifferent traffic, turn over in […]
Mornings up North the roar of central heat drowning out the creek a sign of life in a sleeping house. Light rain, the snow all melted three days ago, it had lingered a while. A drab bird turns and turns in the holly, but nothing else stirs. Read the news but then thought better of it. The same evergreens here as home. Sometimes a small distance is sufficient, and preferable. Sometimes rueful, cold, intractable. Some […]
Everything defined by space, in gestalt, they say figure -ground reversal, emphasizing that negative space, sometimes a new image pops out, at the loss of the original– seeing it another way it cannot be re-seen . here the gingko indifferent sky glimpsed through scaffolding at angles, is it contained, constrained? somehow the mind says no . but what does the mind know? a morning breeze tinged with the sea lifts all hopes but sometimes morning […]
Morning, overcast, insistent doves. A bright gray, an unsettled wind saying soon this will all blow over. The lake houses all full this weekend, bits of chatter from other porches, I mean, it is what it is— or nearer to home the silent neighbor, surveying his swaying grape vines . Our grapes are dusky-hued, small beads, the birds aren’t even interested yet, the basil deep green and starting to bolt– expectations a difficult thing. Still, the pepper […]
A hematoma where the shot went in, sore arms and clouds– that kind of aching morning that passes too quickly into day, piebald sky, the palest blue, a tepid invitation. And down to the waterfront the sound of progress, or of progression, metal frames sprouting up, or expulsed from the earth– a shower of sparks by the welder’s elbow, a joint, a joint is where you feel it first, a change in the weather, a […]
Standing still and green, the grass is more water than land. The sky is gray, dawn long past, but again, it’s hard to quantify. I think I may have a stone at my core, just one of those that studs the lawn, that fallen leaves adhere to, dense and cool, and hence the sense of weight, and how I wake on these days, Oregon mornings, to wistful rain, and a sense of longing–
A quiet morning, so few people are awake, or so few advertise it, it must have just rained but now it’s a lull, just some wind and fragmented gulls blowing over an empty lot . The sky has a tenor to it, all this year it’s been later than it seems and now there’s no denying it– we’ve been here before at home under the oppressive cloud layer . Somehow it’s a comfort to wake […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 