OPTIONAL POETRY

Working in the garden patch the path under bright sun, unable to see a thing– it’s become a motif, to hear bees tend to the silvered borage, feel the brush of nasturtiums spilling at the feet of trellised beans as water pools in the rich black dirt, needle-legged spiders high-stepping the confluence– So often in summer I get a sense of return, but without leaving; or is it sun-blinded, yet feeling as if I see things more clearly?      

It’s pleasant to bicker over princes and landowners and somewhat old-fashioned, sweet as summer-dried hay: things that are ours, that were never ours, that were only ours– you Russians say toska– a word untranslatable but so well-felt. We may argue like old hens and even this is comforting but when I say Natasha should never have ended up with Pierre  of course you agree, though still preferring Andrei to my Kostya.  

Turned back at the mountain trailhead, we climbed instead a nearby peak and then instead broke left, wrecked by the heat, for an alpine lake, each set of switchbacks a fresh slap, the thinning treeline promising almost there for miles and then finally the break into a basin meadow and a perfect still round of glacial-hued water. In it in a minute, cold and clean, our reverie broken only by two German women who had hiked up with their purses, sat […]

Sometimes I heard a roar but could not see them sometimes silent they hung over the cradle of the lake decoupled from their sound, made foreign. I’ve heard this theory that if you travel in a jet your soul lags behind you, a division of essence, maybe more so for people who are different in different places (name, voice). Less confusing to be at first a glint, than to let slip the full thundering of afterburner. Discretion […]

Dear future residents of 188,good luck.  We lasted a year, slightly over, it was rough at times, I guess I forgot how much until the neighbor upstairsasked to bless the place with  Holy Water. I let her, hope it helps, but if it doesn’t just know  that there is very little that time cannot make tolerable,  that after a while you might hear rats in the wall and think hey,  we all want the same thing, really, a place to call […]

Hope clinging tenaciously like the burrs on the carpeton the floor of this beach house, small impalers, causing us to jumpand curse loudly despite children sprawled everywhere, not mine. We spoke in French, they said those birds we saw were not pelicansbut I insisted they were, these the birds of my childhood of all my coasts. Then grown tired of conjugating tenses and drinking wineI just sat silent, listening,imaging the next day’s drive. Leaving early,I […]

Sometimes I think about where I’ll be soon and when I’m there, I think about where I was making a line between two points and seeing if it bent toward misfortune or luck. (I have done this enough times that I almost believe I’ll get where I’m going.)

Mid-summer heat, or is it late? now it is pain to stay in one place blue cool lakes and the mountain out: constants, and the constant variable of going distinctions of end and beginning lost in travel, skipped over as if changing time zones, concepts, that’s all, nowhere as real as the snowpack still covering the trail, even now in almost August, even in this heat wave a sort of sedition, stamped in place by the hooves of mountain goats who could not […]

Last night had teeth looking through old photos with not enough to drink and the largest spider I have ever seen creeping down the hallway ceiling took it out with a baseball bat now embedded in the popcorn ceiling its leg dangles down still reaching and something bit me as I was trying to sleep still at some ungodly hour even in the dark I could feel the welt rising.