I’m getting versed in the unspeakable: the architecture of a lung, tributaries of veins, and pain, all kinds: white-hot, bone-ache. Removed from all contexts a bruise can be beautiful: pastel, galactic, nascent. The way skin grows up against a suture, shifting dunes. If all goes well, we replace ourselves. This is the brachial, this the subclavian— remember, a life is motion, and nothing less.
[1] New construction, half this city is empty, prematurely gutted. Dark blocks, wide swaths of light and the knife-edge of a night, designed for carving. Such an uncomfortable clarity that comes at these hours, hurtling blindly at a great rate of speed, every second falling free from the world until the earth rolls up again to meet our feet .
The gingko again, new leaves faint at the edges, a hesitating green, tempered ebullience, middle spring. What is inside is petrified, a relic, scared, and sacred. All weekend long, a promised rain that never really arrived, and so it goes, the hour, the day, half-measured, half-guessed at– an imprecise heart can still feel exacting.
The blue of day becomes the blue of night. Low jet planes tracking their way down, the flame of a heater inside its glass tube, genie-like, what would I wish for? More light, or lightness, whatever quality it is that becomes so pronounced in its absence. That I could soften this pumice heart, abrasive, with all its pockets of emptiness. Another song of another sparrow. That I would finally know better. That a night would stay […]
The world today, flooding intermittently. Dry now, the sky is being willfully obtuse about just what it is— the white of an eye, a means of containment. Nothing about it says finite. The city seen from a moderate distance— old glass, new glass, die-cut gulls. It’s a low ceiling that we operate under. In copper-hued plate glass, the transit of clouds.
Sometimes dismay the price of ownership— this unruly garden not soft or settled,but built up with intent and too-rough edges. Still, a weed can flower, and sunlight descends again, low, springy, rupestrine— still, joy in organic geometries. I pick out rocks with a rusty trowel, an indigo jay shouts out its indigo call, but harbingers are tricky— I don’t know know know know know, either, creating so many holes and filling them all with seeds […]
A trepidatious return this spring, sun-balm then savage wind, no attempt at medleys– heartening in a way to be so unmoved, but not dispassionate– in lashing of rain some deep defiance. Let it come. An eerie squall-light descends, a sulfur sky, inscrutable glass– such unapologetic tones.
At first the night, and then the reckoning, that special brand of dread, like a sleeping limb, still there, present, painfully so . something blooming just outside the yard not jasmine not lilac not honeysuckle not any flower I know or have managed yet to find– . if a lesson, like a scent, intangible, volatile [+A million apologies for being derelict in wordpress activity of late]
A hill under rain. Today no seagulls wheel and whistle like scratched glass above a half-filled lot. Which isn’t to say silence, no, this city expands like vapor to fill a space, yellow cranes like stork legs, that idea of nascence– which doesn’t actually countermand death– a square of sky where a building once stood, rubble-dust dampened by another sudden shower. A hill from trees, and land from sea, just like the weather, living here, […]
Tableau: fake flowers in an enameled clay vase, the kind with birds and bird-like lines– yesterday’s coffee rewarmed, the bitterness doused in lait partiellement écrémé– bright horns gild the otherwise silence, some neighbor listening softly to Ring of Fire– beyond, the water. Yesterday we watched the tide sweep out, skookumchuch slipping through fingers of land, with vortexes and contrary eddies, spoken, taken aback, deadly– orange urchins, broken like eggshells, littered the rocks, exposed and lit […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 