And here I am, againseeking the simplest solace the flicker of pinkin an underwing don’t know if you saw itwhich tips me over again, the elegant branchingof a dormant magnolia like alveoli againstthe darkening sky but too brittlefor breath, also but this illusionof inertia is beguilingfor once flight seems franticor perhaps just out of reachto stay rooted exactly here without even the weightof a thought of returning no movement no reckoningthat might be fine
All night the snow sliding off the roof the tattoo of freezing rain yielding to sun at dawn the deer came quietly up in the yard moving slowly in the deep snow and not too warily the landscape softned the foothills blanketed everything settling and coming down to rest
On the other side of the pass it doesn’t flatten out exactly but without the trees the horizon appears everywhere lines of demarcation and a sense of expansiveness doing laps in our skinny skis we heard coyotes yap in the distance and the sun it set just a little bit later
A sea change sitting in the dark listening to it rain just how long have I been holding my breath?
A different kind of rain today, static, and a peculiar light cast up from the bay filtering through damp streets steel and glass a very high tide today they said- knowing what is beneath, now obscured, I can imagine it more clearly, vividly if less realistically, a strange tradeoff, and not an unwelcome one
More rain, and drowsy expectation— soon, something will happen, plans have been made, action will be taken, just not yet— the world outside remains discrete, drops on the glass each a microcosm of its own
Flood warning even the hills get treacherous side streets and alleys like tributaries water finds the fastest way or makes a way— before I would have made something of this, or tried—- now I just watch some guy out in the thick of it shouting and throwing rocks at the cars that pass by
We missed the countdown a TV delay screaming outside and the belated realization a ten second handicap on eating our grapes
More doors are closed now in the hospital patients sequestered behind glass scrawled on with O2 sats a menagerie of respiratory failure such an artificial habitat- beyond the windows the mountain is out austere white margins suspended above the horizon by unlit foothills what a sunrise today– everyone was talking about it neon pink as the surgical masks our buyer found somewhere although with each minute the blockprint fades into just a day like any […]
This morning however is unexceptional muffled gray hardly a birdcall just some souped-up car passing at a distance and all the racket of an otherwise silent house—- mysterious humming and draining that never gets noticed or questioned—- the subtle menace of the benign
OPTIONAL POETRY 