February 15
Winter, continued tea and quince paste on toast, hard rain all afternoon weariness, dilutional a taste of Spain the label says I’ve never been a dream dredged up on a cold mid-week day in an empty break room in this damp gray state
All posts tagged: winter
December 10
And here we are, snow come and melted, the same cool gray as ever. This damp feels like the smell of home after a time away, familiar become new, for just a moment, novel, known. And here we are, the year dwindling, eternal northern nights. Breath like a cloud. It isn’t sadness yet, but something more rare. We had a true blizzard once, trees felled by ice. Numbering the days: what was, what will. Turning […]
January 10
An ending is forcibly also a beginning– On the train from the airport, distant mountains under alpenglow, the air cold and friable, and all these memories like shards, catching the light and so irreparable– a minute passed is gone. [Thank you for all your kind comments while I was away– looking forward to catching up on everyone’s posts]
December 28
The bend of a bird’s wing seemed so sharp, the guttural scrape of the snowplow clearing the road, but it couldn’t keep up with the sky and its act of forgetting, these relentless rounded edges, forgiving all, and always– The last snow walk before the drive back it was blowing down, so that the path erased itself, became new with every step and it was hard to return, to leave the banks that softened hard […]
December 27
Vineyards under snow, civilized rows, punctuation for a run-on landscape. Our straggling vines look like veins without a body, the blooms we contain, of darkest blood, clandestine first pressings. Even at night the drifts are pure white under a haloed moon— why speak and spoil the effect? Let a suspended particle be: Ice crystal, brix, a word unspoken— I’m learning to let a thing fall, or ripen
December 26
White world, little distinction between ground and sky, even birds won’t brave the coldness. Yesterday I saw geese fall out over the shale lake, like lanterns, gold-bellied, backlit by a setting sun. The first Christmas without your call. Today is startling in its stillness, another thing has come and gone: Snow coats the road and yards, the mountains engulfed by clouds, so what else can we measure by besides a sense of gain, or loss?
December 23
Sleet on the way home, the wind’s incisors. What do you say to a man who is dying? I miss the turn for the exit, three times around the parking garage’s flattened concrete helix. I vacate my spot, I leave it wanting. The heart is a door that opens and shuts.
November 15
Maybe it’s a lack of solid ground, afloat in a sea of glass and iron, but my tongue is growing sharper. Scaffolding and sterile girder, these do not unfurl, have no grace of life, just conceal so many empty rooms, like lidded eyes. The sky has a presentiment of coming weather, grows dull even as a crack of blue appears, but it’s just another space for lease, too toothless and meek to last for even […]
November 13
Tonight, a half-assed storm. The drunk man in the lobby slurs I don’t need this. Enough, rain, enough— my glass is turned over. I’ve run out of words to describe the night.
November 12
The top of the gingko has lost its leaves, with a windstorm in the forecast. In a sunbreak today I walked around the lake seeking solace in the dockyards, but found only cruel sleek boats, so capable of leaving that they were no comfort. These nights are gluttons, and there’s little left to take— I could count each yellow leaf, fine as a petal, yet strong enough to have held the sun, once. Anything could tame it, now, […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 