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?
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.
Such a still night. There’s the silent police light, blue cyclic, a car stopped on the tracks. I pass, catch phrases by surprise– I don’t care and should we try? This day has gone by in a thumb of pages, brisk breeze, alacrity. People siphon off down alleys. The city is never not bright– two tickers wrap around buildings– a strip club, and headlines. The theme is themes– the cycle repeats itself, among angular buildings, a ring. Meaning a call, or a promise– […]
From the cancer ward a view, a dream of a lake. All this glass is sterile, frosted– we soften everything we can soften. Sometimes with meds. I recall how, when half-crazed, you tried to leave and carry off a decorative vase, and your paintings got much wilder, vivid wet. There is no crimson here, only windows the color of sea-glass, and clean lacquered pine. It is peaceful and nice– so quiet, floors above the street, the orderly bridges, elegant rooftops, that I can hear blunt dread roll in my stomach as I […]
At work, tragedy rooms– To favor a side is not the same as being wrong. These families, they furnish the place with love and grief– any place can be a home, except alone. Tonight the city lights don’t remind me of anything. Sometimes it’s as if this heater isn’t even on.
Cold snap. A fog-borne day. The house kept settling like distant thunder, but at some point weariness edges out fear. It will be or it won’t, either easily arrives on its own– Sisyphus, let it roll
De Kooning, the title caught my eye– Woman as Landscape– yes, also a hollow house, more curator than curated, pastel in affect, but bleached, not softened– In your absence, I become a harsh abstraction– exquisite grit, sand, if this is the ocean– and all that drifting
I have a shadow inside like bottled-up smoke and this– husks of grapes, eleven summers, oaked– can conjure it up– a caution. By the lake today the crows were swarming, the last of the maple leaves afloat on the lawn, like scarlet junks, and at China Harbor, an empty banquet room backlit by bay windows, with a hundred empty chairs– negative capability, like Keats said, to receive the world, concavity, the capacity for being contained in the empty room, […]
Too warm, but it smells of snow. Some car sound, as if an owl– hollow note. The night comes on like gratitude, always there, but sometimes staggering in effect. I get too wan, too brittle, my tongue too parched to say just how I treasure things, but it would be a mistake to doubt it– no, I’m no collector, but give me the moon like a pearl on velvet, some shinning look– I could write a book on […]
Inversion: air stagnant, the sun pale as a fish eye, moon-like, an unspeakable thought. Everything settles into the valleys between these foothills: fog, silence, hawks. Clouds of boiled wool, snow-dusted land, even my thoughts are dampened– One bird, and then another. Tails dipped in rust, dried blood, the blank-mirror lake not unlike a page, empty acres to fill, a task or a chance, like pouring a glass, or finding sleep, the readiness is all–
OPTIONAL POETRY 