Enough wine to soften the edges and I’ll sink back in the smallest hours of the morning offered sudden clarity on a surprising parade of recollections: The smell of the metro in July. The tune of a song I haven’t thought of in years. The line of his jaw, one day unshaven. I am not a sad drunk, and this is not a melancholy poem. It is purely coincidence that a bottle once poured is never refilled, and what […]
Consider the mountain. No, consider the man. It’s bad form to sell uphill. So start with Palouse and build up to buttes, sell them in spring when the grass is lush and wildflowers run riot among the foothills. Let the rivers tell their simple story, running full from snowmelt, let the personable maples draped in moss talk, in fact shut up. Everything here was shaped by giants older and bigger than we can comprehend. Consider […]
In true poet fashion didn’t really follow the prompt of using five random song titles, but did a thing where I worked some of Chet Baker’s titles and lyrics into a poem about him. He fell to his death from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988: A slow note, sad, not of this earth, a pure tone getting lost around the corners of the night. You fell in love just once, foolish man, fell […]
It will be the ocean that gets me in the end, all and always the ocean— kindly, with none of the biting hungerof a breaking wave. I do not knowthe body of water but it will be calmas it often is at dusk. I do not know the body of waterbut the body of water knows me.Even here far from the coastit pulls on me like riptideto return, return, return. It will be calm, it […]
I had to relearn everything — how to breathe, how to wake how to walk a city block without my little crutch my hands were awkward birds for months, flapping around for something to do. We practiced endings every day, another after another fire to filter, another thing gone, another thing done and past — and yet of all the things I’ve ever quit it’s a your papery kiss I miss the most.
OPTIONAL POETRY 