A magnitude of difference between true totality and ninety-eight percent. Even so, and for only ninety-three, we rushed out after rounds and off the floors and gathered on the roof in scrubs and scrub caps or business casual sharing cheap glasses and cardboard viewers and temporarily forgetting the code just moments earlier— occluded vessels, and an open chest. I didn’t hear them call it, had stared from the corridor at the vacant face, unsure, but […]
Not imperceptibly the days get shorter– slight variance, shade of dawn ochre, another day comes crashing in. I went to the counter-rally pretending to be a photographer, but when the ball blasts went off I just ran without thinking or taking any shots of the bodies hurtling toward me in a haze of chemical dispersal, covered ground without comprehension or feeling, only seconds later realizing what I had and had not done. The days accelerate– […]
That full moon like a brass button studding the night, implying perforation, adeherence, closure. In some places it was occluded, tarnished– but we couldn’t see it from where we sat, adrift in a deep night that fell like a curtain. For every word a third unspoken. That full, full moon and the Earth’s shadow encroaching. The very papable weight of nothing.
Waking with a burning throat it’s the sun that changes not the haze a distinction worth making? Who knows. The sky bright opaque some big eye’s sclera and it doesnt blink
a thirst and that way weariness rests just outside the eyes- another rainless day sun on green glass oh the height of it all a seagull seems to fly low here the trees seem out of place set pieces this room is mostly window and open space but some things you just can’t fake this song progresses through common chords characterize everything as a wait it sure doesn’t feel like arrival nobody’s fault but mine […]
back from the ocean city night sounds windows open to let the night in what else to say it hums with some energy not unlike a tide changing also gradually but impossible to refute not unlike this sunburn or how much I’m missing you
this night is loud the house continually settling a clatter of stars or do they ring out like fallen coins to steal a moment convincingly there can be no hesitation a minute must be occupied completely by nothing at all a low jet-plane and thoughts intrude and now it is just late dawn coming head-on from miles away
the way a summer day lingers, and the night, too a golden thing won’t go– some minutes are a life of possibility, the breeze shakes the shades and sunbeams shift on the floor like seagrass underwater, ephemeral, summer, how many ways it could go, or stay, first cool of evening, but still light out, birdcall and voices from afar, and summer fruit, the lazy sweetness of it all, each hour rising up like super-heated air, […]
Late late morning a ripple on the lake a standing wave or complicated wake two lizards sunning themselves and not much else to say, calm and soft here, East of the mountains I watch descents: parasails, quails the crescent day moon the onerous ray of sun and spare a thought for yours: did your crampons bite? did the pack give way? Alone in the shade of static, fixed hills, I wonder, and wait.
more wilderness here in a square foot than home already hotter than predicted these clouds look like a child drew them and incessant songbirds insisting it’s not summer yet that we are still arriving such a strange place this year is given in to longing at every margin still snow in the passes and this baslamroot spent
OPTIONAL POETRY 