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
Crescent moon mostly a shadow mostly nothing absence of light each night listening for the voice hearing it wishing I hadn’t– the matte of lack having plenty but just not that– the rest is black but this silver sliver shiny as promise pulling like desire like a hook through the mouth
the garage door of the building across the street flies open an anxious eyelid creaking, sleepy the suns sets earlier and earlier these days trail off suggestively this is sharper an intentional silence it says everything it needs to
At first the quiet like a balm the calm eye of a storm but it, too, turns evenings like cupped palms all that they might hold what prescribes dread instead of hope it gets darker earlier turning in this cave of a world and still no word
the thing about truth is something is or is not it rained then stopped no amount of shouting will change it interrupted it begins again it floats better than hope and other feathered things like ducks with their distinctive ambulatory style and vocalizations
like low tide but lower like after the sun sets still light but transient block print birds flying south loss indelible and loss suggested
lost a bit too easy to float in a darkened room eyes adjusting static, snow falling on the ceiling there are so many tones of silence this one aches hollow as a bird bone this down comforter is heavier it’s the air trapped between feathers that warms flight light but more parachute or net for falling upwards?
It is an active quiet low jets in their final approaches cars accelerating all departures the lights in the half-finished tower go out in blocks goodnight, goodnight the muffled bassline of some song in passing the man-made geometries of light against a matte black night no moon, no stars just the bright cascade of glass bottles into the bin behind some bar the city full of emptiness expanding out like a lung
Normal order Common decencey nouns that lean heavily on their moderators an unfortunate depenency civility servility still a distinction still at long last sir at long last or I guess not
The sky now the correct gray– sea-derived, the summer’s fires gone out, the focus turning slowly inward, like a tide returning, an impartial action, attribute to it whatever you’d like, it won’t attach and it won’t last and that is some sort of beautiful– every night a blank page. The gingko starts to shiver
OPTIONAL POETRY 