This morning, walking, a welder’s sparks falling inside a building frame, a cage of flames and empty space, of noncommittal sky. Sactum sanctorum, with its quietest corners, a heart, too, is made from many rooms: antechambers, foreparlours, endlessly recessing, a heart has no heart to it, it is a door that opens and shuts. Passage defines it, existence demands it, a place of access, and egress, that hue of regret. Somewhere along this way, honeysuckle […]
a border is a boundary or a perimeter that defines a place in physical space but in gerund form bordering implies proximity to a dangerous extreme each sense topical timely but also ominous its antonym it’s hard to name exact shades of gray winter sky suitcloth ashy ashen censer censor one is smoke the other smoke and mirrors what is implied implicitly can still be false scarier is complicity best to clearly state a border […]
Unseasonable warmth, a more agitated sunset, or maybe it wasn’t– anything can be anything, now. Say it’s eighty out, say it snowed, say it’s for our good and temporary as if this has never happened before– and I will say that this sky is pink and orange as ripe citrus, this breeze bitter as pith, this wind unsettled, this night falling harder, the way a fist does, or a downpour, or a spring-loaded door
A return again back from the bay industrial coast the shipyards by night and hunters at dawn a dispassionate racoon receeding into the woods the day become a little less wild . the difference between a plea and proclomation not too much both should know better this land intentionally left fallow . a rainy drive as forecast charmless towns without that dutch blue sky geese resting and in flight cursive, discursive get to the point […]
Twelve grapes at midnight washed down with champagne one for love and one for hatred one for kindness and one for relentlessness one for luck and one for persistence one for hope and one for remembrances one for going and one for staying and in all its sweetness and for all its bitterness another two for love
An eve, but it isn’t an arrival if it doesn’t stay. Sun on the bridge, the lake like a mirror, here suffused with gray. The night still falls early but the day gets longer. Too cold still to dig in the garden, the onions can wait, wrapped in their paper, safely frozen, dreamless, mute. Il nous en faut faire autant turelurelu, patapatapan— French carols on the stereo, blind dog sleeping in the corner. Down the embankment small […]
I dreamed a door swept shut and felled a row of empty bottles that didn’t break but scattered about with hollow echoes and you were there saying careless, careless, careless, careless awake again light coils on the floor cool-hued pools of star and streetlamp, making a cold thing colder sleep an uneasy truce
What do you say to a man who is dying? A fact, just as it is twenty-eight degrees out, the sun set three hours and thirty-five minutes ago, this is a man who is dying, but is still alive. Careful, things fall easily here, this the greatest distance, none could be further. What hues in that sunset! A slow burn over the bay, the city changes its face, harder edges of night, but ribbons […]
How the intolerable becomes tolerable, against all attestations otherwise the bite, forgotten that old dispensation what a strange capacity a heart deadens itself, dryly, inexorable as a nature show prey, predator, or merely winter coming on, nothing is surprising now, not even this
ICU days line draws and scrawled fishbones sweet jesus overheard we stop at each door each door a threshold sunlight today but frosted glass a curtain drawn for privacy opacity for if it comes to pass this is a shore if anything a great big blank the lung’s secret space and the blood singing wrong
OPTIONAL POETRY 