Love like sleep on a late autumn day– come in from the cold and settled in place. Relief compared to being out by the lake in all this rain, caught in the rage of branches in a squall– a leitmotif, the urge toward the perilous, but this the theme: I return to returning (da capo al fine) even setting out I draw closer to you.
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.
You said you hear the coyotes more at night now, that deer traipse down the gully’s broken scree with inherent trepidation, their silence speaking for them as much as any yip or yowl. I miss the cold nights there when it’s so clear a halo rounds the moon, sharp air forcing awe from my ungrateful lungs. I miss the length of a northern winter night, with ample room for new and old fears, and how fresh […]
A granite morning stony-faced the construction pit eroding away like confidence seeming to say there’s nothing much that is guaranteed to stay . no birds no rain no breeze just two trees that seem somehow fake, given their present surroundings
Now overcast and sultry, I miss the lake and its heart-stopping coldness. The pace of life adapts– the neighborhood cat sulks lazily away from the spray of the hose upon its limp leaf lair. A task for today: uproot the snarl of bleached pea-vines, shy spring no match for this heavy-handed weather. In the distance, now, what might have been thunder– and now it’s truly summer. I have no plans that can’t be changed so […]
Doldrum day. Such heat and listless air and a riot on the ascent– snow lilies, wild columbine, chickweed, yarrow, blessed lupine all strewn along the unsettled talus slope. Nearly a hundred in the shade, the salt on my skin a mockery of snow. Of all I carried up, you were by far the weightiest thought— the longest shadow, the most insistent thirst. For hours now I have held petals on my tongue, rivers in my […]
Earlier today I was watching sugar ants make an easy ingress through the open screen door, like spilt beads from a split necklace, recovering themselves, bit by amber bit, making something new but not unexpected– The form reveals itself. Or so we would hope, tomorrow marking a closer return to our beginning– what animal sense has brought us back here? A return being at heart the same as an ending– a prologue in other words
The second day of summer the air a bit acrid the day moon suspended like a half-formed thought– a little wind now and it might go out completely a little wind now it might incite a spark
The night is always more than the day the unseen weighing more heavily yet subtly the quick creasing of a bat’s wing a dull red speck that might be Saturn the implication of the doubly-stilled lake I wish I had stayed to swim in these expanses but now it’s late Monday, the maple leaves are wilting on the trees, stale sun, full heat, and I’m here if you want me–
OPTIONAL POETRY 