Sometimes dismay the price of ownership— this unruly garden not soft or settled,but built up with intent and too-rough edges. Still, a weed can flower, and sunlight descends again, low, springy, rupestrine— still, joy in organic geometries. I pick out rocks with a rusty trowel, an indigo jay shouts out its indigo call, but harbingers are tricky— I don’t know know know know know, either, creating so many holes and filling them all with seeds […]
Tableau: fake flowers in an enameled clay vase, the kind with birds and bird-like lines– yesterday’s coffee rewarmed, the bitterness doused in lait partiellement écrémé– bright horns gild the otherwise silence, some neighbor listening softly to Ring of Fire– beyond, the water. Yesterday we watched the tide sweep out, skookumchuch slipping through fingers of land, with vortexes and contrary eddies, spoken, taken aback, deadly– orange urchins, broken like eggshells, littered the rocks, exposed and lit […]
Even though and still the trees are making new leaves don’t act as if you expect it you’ll ruin the surprise look even now they are waiting for the perfect moment avert your eyes don’t look until they shout their green shouts
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, […]
Too warm, but it smells of snow. Some car sound, as if an owl– hollow note. The night comes on like gratitude, always there, but sometimes staggering in effect. I get too wan, too brittle, my tongue too parched to say just how I treasure things, but it would be a mistake to doubt it– no, I’m no collector, but give me the moon like a pearl on velvet, some shinning look– I could write a book on […]
Inversion: air stagnant, the sun pale as a fish eye, moon-like, an unspeakable thought. Everything settles into the valleys between these foothills: fog, silence, hawks. Clouds of boiled wool, snow-dusted land, even my thoughts are dampened– One bird, and then another. Tails dipped in rust, dried blood, the blank-mirror lake not unlike a page, empty acres to fill, a task or a chance, like pouring a glass, or finding sleep, the readiness is all–
Sixteen in the shade, but a high open sky. Some places, the sun doesn’t go anymore– There’s snow from days ago on the butte’s burn scar. An owl landed on the roof but didn’t call– a weighty presence, waiting overhead. The nights get deep and silent here, the withered scrub brush doesn’t stir, no wind, the lake is static, stretching out like expectation, a hole in the landscape, of unspoken depth.
Sometimes I feel shy as a rabbit caught in arrant moonlight– crepuscular, I loathe extremes. What is this light that floods my life? Am I prey or is this love, finally– for so long I have sought out gray: Too dark for night, too light for day– purposed impossibilities. It isn’t only doubt that makes my heart race, but those howls at dawn chill my heart to an ice-clotted lake. Everything is loss: Of stars, of sun– […]
The top of the gingko has lost its leaves, with a windstorm in the forecast. In a sunbreak today I walked around the lake seeking solace in the dockyards, but found only cruel sleek boats, so capable of leaving that they were no comfort. These nights are gluttons, and there’s little left to take— I could count each yellow leaf, fine as a petal, yet strong enough to have held the sun, once. Anything could tame it, now, […]
Rain like lace. I hate this weather for its consistency. My heart is temperamental as a leaf, it turns and turns and drops at anything. Scientists think that red pigments lower the freezing point of leaves, keep them viable for longer with the heat of anger. Or, having fallen, that anthocyanins leach out to poison the roots of any competition— such ugliness begat by beauty. And at the base of every leaf, an abscission layer, for […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 