Standing still and green, the grass is more water than land. The sky is gray, dawn long past, but again, it’s hard to quantify. I think I may have a stone at my core, just one of those that studs the lawn, that fallen leaves adhere to, dense and cool, and hence the sense of weight, and how I wake on these days, Oregon mornings, to wistful rain, and a sense of longing–
That blank sky. Day, but not an inch more. A strata of birds wind through the building cranes’ poles, seagulls high, crows, lower. Now coffee and packing. The highway is a cure in that it demands forward movement– bird or car, a stall is failed flight. Such guilty solace, to take to the Interstate, alone, to burn miles like effigies, dividing a landscape into present, and past–
These matroyshka days, they don’t progress but nest one within another, like waking dreams or dreams of waking— And just like that it’s morning, again, in this, some city, unlike others, but also mostly the same, a dawn, a limbo, drinking coffee and trying to name things— this is a Thursday, and this is my home.
Arch, I’d like to go see the Arch, trenchant, I’d like to go see the sea– Melville I know about Novembers of the soul, and Decembers, Januarys, and Februarys– There’s something about the Pacific that tempers a temper, dulls a sharp tongue, I don’t know why I get like I do but call me Ishmael it’s not unprecedented– just give me a shore and a ship and a star to sail by and a home […]
You get the sweeter guava I get the crisper night This is what I hear when I talk to you now: the blurble of nearby fountains and incessant motorbikes. You said you felt old and I said so-and-so got married and so all we really spoke about were different types of distance and the connection kept failing as if to drive a point home– it must be so nice to get away from it
OPTIONAL POETRY 