That blank sky. Day, but not an inch more. A strata of birds wind through the building cranes’ poles, seagulls high, crows, lower. Now coffee and packing. The highway is a cure in that it demands forward movement– bird or car, a stall is failed flight. Such guilty solace, to take to the Interstate, alone, to burn miles like effigies, dividing a landscape into present, and past–
Funny how an absence can feel so weighty. Of course I still breathe, but the air is rarer, and I turn a little blue from time to time. Is there a word for the echo of an embrace? I swear, I can still feel it in my arms on nights like these, starless and wakeful, resting like a chill for as long as I can keep it.
Sirens all night, unrepealable. Why does it seem to get late all at once? This is still the hour of doors and muffled stairs, which cedes to the hour of the lonely cars. Somewhere in here the static gets sharp, the night grows teeth, and alone takes on a tomb-like flavor– some dull wine that’s either cheap or gone sour– uncertainty exerting its effect on a volatile moment, but really, there can only be so many false alarms– […]
[Albedo]* No stars, but the city lights over-compensate at night– this is still the world of the living. All these towers are lit up in all sorts of hues, incandescent warmth, white and cool blues, as more diffuse clouds come in over the bay, and on their belly, a feeble pink reflection– the sky between is void, matte and colorless, an unanswered question, a voice left hanging– just think of a photon traveling across the […]
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.
There are four chambers in the human heart, for blood at least– Yesterday on 9th they were tearing down some old apartments, one wall peeled off like a sardine tin with all the rooms exposed, seeming so small from down below. Maybe it takes something brutal to know these secret inner workings, and maybe it’s better not to know, just to own these uncertain steps, to admit to getting lost in my own home. Across […]
Still life with street lamp and Gingko tree– a high-ceilinged room filled with empty hours and extremes, too cold, too hot, that ancient itch. In the lusterless dark I cannot cross over to sleep– a wild thought, an unlikely doubt, a drop in the sea, so gazing out onto a vacant street I wait for the rain to start.
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 […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 