To wound the heart is to create it I felt it flit across the back of my hand before I saw it a fleeting shadow a large spider already gone before the stomach drop the untaught unease I saw another stationed on the orchid’s leathery leaf another where the garden abuts the foundation another tracing the fall line of the shower I leave them alone now some say age make you less tolerant […]
the maple by the window put out leaves stretching down to the shrubs, out to the pines, and aside from all this rain the house is dead quiet, the living room sunken, deluged, submersed, and now something weighty lit on the roof but then took off when I went to look, and now some robin singing, unseen, calling out warnings or conveying relief, obscure, obscured and suffused with green
Today a hummingbird hemming the courtyard corners, hail from slate skies, sun falling in heavy bars, the crack shot drop of a dead branch in the distance, all this wind, if not harbingers, still precisely sounded tones, probably worth noting
The camillas are all blooming now from the bottom up like they truly don’t care this month still manages to be unexpected warmth or hailstorms no middle ground lessons abound here I’m sure
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
On the other side of the pass it doesn’t flatten out exactly but without the trees the horizon appears everywhere lines of demarcation and a sense of expansiveness doing laps in our skinny skis we heard coyotes yap in the distance and the sun it set just a little bit later
Another bright day clear and cold as the sunlight is warm— Not to be begrudge this reciprocity or any— I get giddy climbing these impossible hills fully blinded, imbued by this particular winter sun, always coming in at high unexpected angles and intervals, falling in bars or like some ornate curtain to make any scene pastoral— orderly, quiet, serene, immutable— if only for a few hours, still, more than acceptable
The promised rain has been detained the day is just still with little anticipation for such a non-event, and one that arrives so innocuously— the thinking that nothing much will change in a mild spring rain by a veil of drops but of course it will— everything is touched, the sidewalk’s sheen, the gingko’s green, the clipped walking pace of the few passerbys outside the window, distant and distant, twice removed— the rain fills the […]
A gap between gingko leaves suggests a bird— between real things impressions, for better or for worse— what makes space negative? Is it the color of the sky, what is defined, or what falls behind, and is it intentional?
Just past the pier a sea lion, briefly and two dorsal fins like piqued interest very present and transient only a few kids saw them and exited the water but at a certain point there’s no longer a point to reticence– consider the odds or don’t it still goes out like a sigh, the tide the pier stretching out into the open Pacific like the longest exclamation
OPTIONAL POETRY 