Hours from the ocean and yet I am the tide, longing for return and mourning slack. I am a draft that haunts this house, measuring hours by rooms, and prone to sudden rains. I am not myself but am a force of nature, led to migrate by degree latitude, percentage of sun. The orchard is a sea of white now and pale pink, millions of blossoms unfurling overnight to comfort me with apples for I am […]
A stormy morning, just outside of Portland – the sky contused, the trees and grass electric as the wind picks up. Windows open. I have known too many of these mornings, alone and quiet save for the disinterested chattering of birds. The things with feathers. And nothing, nothing is crueler than hope. These birds do not sing to warm a soul, are unabashed by downpours, give zero fucks about the storm. They sing because they are […]
Breeze blew my papersdown into the culvert, oh hell. My only defenseagainst an early rattler is drunk bravado. Animals here have fur the color of dead grass,cloud or contrail– it’s motion that gives us all away.
Silent hill, sparse dove and an elbow of swifts this morning colder than all the rest How do you feel? we ask with trepidation and balsamroot stalks How deep this rabbit warren must go into the hills, hidden they must think by the fine-grained dawn and tumbleweed no longer prey to the pill-round moon and arrow-leaves But I hear it now faint as bird wings or wind caught in sagebrush, sometimes the night stalks the day.
The dove’s song is throating and low the swift’s song is motion—it sews the air but morning here belongs to the quailshouting Rod-RI-go! Rod-RI-go! Rod-RI-go!
The stars taste thin tonight. They sing faint songs and ringlike church bells from childhood, harping on the fact that there is no earthly word for a memory of something still to come, their descant muffled by the rich purple scent of the evening, willing us to look back,cajoling us only to sing songs of fire and the past.
I embrace failure with open arms, as sometimes the sun rises in the West.
We found the fried codin the glovebox two days later.It was that kind of night and my first in the country.It was wretched but I remember it fondly. A dead man in Galway,men dressed as nunsand swans at the mouth of the Corrib, and rain.Then the few wintering soulsof Inis Mor, and its cows lovely, soft-eyed and ambling.And waking, myself, in a chairto a stiff-backed dawning and the refrain of the innkeeper, born and raised and lived […]
What compelled us to go, every summer filling up the Dodge Caravan, ice chests in the back thumping like the drums that start High Noon, do not forsake me oh my darling, was it the emptiness of the West, the rock in Colorado gray as the early films supposedly set there, was it those tales of cowboys and justice that drew my mother out to Laramie, was it the dichotomy of a long-held dream and lackluster reality that led her […]
I am more Gertrude than ancient Beserker: a bird is a bird is a bird.
OPTIONAL POETRY 