Camel, dromedary. Sure, a poem but why? Even taxonomy is too pliant for you. Extinct or extant. If a line drawn in the sand is too soft then what use are words that build and fall to gently say no desert no life begins or ends precisely. It is a collection of inconstant and inconsistent forms that slump or shift at best against what confines them. Naming things is such an act. Bactrians have one […]
Today a hummingbird hemming the courtyard corners, hail from slate skies, sun falling in heavy bars, the crack shot drop of a dead branch in the distance, all this wind, if not harbingers, still precisely sounded tones, probably worth noting
The camillas are all blooming now from the bottom up like they truly don’t care this month still manages to be unexpected warmth or hailstorms no middle ground lessons abound here I’m sure
I can drive back now without google mapsback home? one struggles with the definition Snow in the forecastI can’t find my gloves somewhere still unpackedthe endless boxes stacked haphazardlyin the stale spare room like the thoughtsof an insufficiently occupied mindhalf-open and malevolently unfinished winter solsticethe temperature dropping
And here I am, againseeking the simplest solace the flicker of pinkin an underwing don’t know if you saw itwhich tips me over again, the elegant branchingof a dormant magnolia like alveoli againstthe darkening sky but too brittlefor breath, also but this illusionof inertia is beguilingfor once flight seems franticor perhaps just out of reachto stay rooted exactly here without even the weightof a thought of returning no movement no reckoningthat might be fine
All night the snow sliding off the roof the tattoo of freezing rain yielding to sun at dawn the deer came quietly up in the yard moving slowly in the deep snow and not too warily the landscape softned the foothills blanketed everything settling and coming down to rest
On the other side of the pass it doesn’t flatten out exactly but without the trees the horizon appears everywhere lines of demarcation and a sense of expansiveness doing laps in our skinny skis we heard coyotes yap in the distance and the sun it set just a little bit later
A sea change sitting in the dark listening to it rain just how long have I been holding my breath?
A different kind of rain today, static, and a peculiar light cast up from the bay filtering through damp streets steel and glass a very high tide today they said- knowing what is beneath, now obscured, I can imagine it more clearly, vividly if less realistically, a strange tradeoff, and not an unwelcome one
More rain, and drowsy expectation— soon, something will happen, plans have been made, action will be taken, just not yet— the world outside remains discrete, drops on the glass each a microcosm of its own
OPTIONAL POETRY 