OPTIONAL POETRY

Now, something’s completely gone. Though it’s sunny outside it’s fundamentally changed. No more heat. And yesterday, melodramatic clouds threatened downpours, occasionally made good on it. But all fall really is is the short-lived adolescence of winter, at least here it gets old fast.

This morning can’t win. Though the doorstep fog has cleared a cat drowses next to the dryer vent, exhaust curling like breath into the stillest of air, nothing else moves; no one is there. Except a squirrel trying an open garage and finding only paint cans, a long held dream but nothing to eat, only smooth sealed metal cool against his hands. Nothing else, he moves cautiously on, sticking to the bushes, avoiding the void beneath this pale, dead sky. He makes the […]

Some acts are unretractable– take out the nail and you still made a hole. I’d rather be a hammer, if I only could, I surely would, but is it action or inaction that makes one most culpable?

Now it maddens me not to know what bird is making the call in the dark.  A little knowledge making clear all that I don’t know. What did it say? Why did it stop? And now begins again; what is the story? Fog before sunrise electric and eerie. I look in the cedar, the waxy bay laurel, find no feathered shape to match the voice, the morning is speaking and I can’t see how, only the blank faces of houses, blinds drawn across their eyes. [wanted to put in […]

The fog today so gray, so low to the ground, like smoke on a humid day, and from it emerged shapes of trees, prototypes, not yet beings– the sun on fogged glass was blinding bright, reflecting back instead of showing me outside as cars hurtled down the highway as if it were nothing, our only concession to think twice before changing lanes, too well aware that unseen does not equal unreal, we lose that luxury at 70 miles per hour.

[Hydrangea] Heartfelt, thankfulness, sorrow, frigidity– the meanings are mixed when it comes to these. A few blue remain but most petals are sea-green, burnished at the tips by a deep dusty pink. The rains have returned leeching acid from the soil, the plant conveying the state of its roots– in neutral soil it could say anything,  leaving one to infer. Most now are the consistency of brown crepe paper and fall with ease, melting into the dew-damp walk. Silence and space– the most […]

The clouds in White Center: Charbroilled smoke from Zippy’s Giant Burgers, altocumulus hued pink from the first real sunset. It seems flatter here. The mountain peak hogs the view down certain streets, and in the parking lot one over, an argument, a dog barks incessantly– no, they might have been agreeing, loudness skewing immediate perceptions, the air just after sunset tinted like a window, not quite night yet, but everything softening, and I know they call this place rat city, but tonight it’s almost pretty. No, it […]

A garden-variety massacre: Powdery blight, tomato stems felled, liquifying, putrid, thin and brown, fruits on the ground in varied states of decay, forests of mold hairs, copious and fine– Under gray skies in sodden soil collapsing husks returning to whence they came– There was a storm that shook fruits free, there was hard ground that split their skins, there was a rat that sunk in teeth and then there were seeds so many small promises that even neglected even laid to waste […]