Ornithology 103
We came to study the seagulls. When our field trip to the sea didn’t pan out (budget cuts), we caravanned to the dump, fording through oceans of crud to see the […]
Nature
Les Fleurs du Mal
There is a difference between clarity and charity. There is a difference between mimesis and god. Contingency, contingency: who can bear the cruelty of winter, that consummate objet d’art? I am still glued to myself. Meditation hasn’t worked, nor religion, useless homilies resounding in the ear. That machine won’t do what I tell it to […]
Destination
i. There are only metaphors for becoming. Only the sibuyas un-peeling its layers calachuci spreading their petals paruparo emerging from cocoons events of blossoming, acts of uncovering, of nakedness. There are no great […]
Subic Bay
for Felipe Niceties never killed anyone, just words, said trying at kindness, now tired, as if in a boat race to the finish. I will always out talk you and you will smile softly like a lover steeling the self for a particular cruelty: the sting, here at the shore, waves hurtling sea-spray towards […]
Weather
A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water. Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted in cold salt […]
Shorelines
Whatever is the opposite of keening, that is the sound the waves make, trawling themselves across the long shallow shore in Ogunquit, Maine: home, in another century, to fishermen who built a tidewater basin, furrowing the soft marshland, digging a channel to give safe harbor to boats named “Susan Bee,” “Clementine,” and “Anna Mae.” In […]
Daphne on Being Wood
I never meant it to be permanent: this body-house of wood, this foliating iron lung, these brachia of branched leaves that were my exeunt and leave-taking. I did not intend to remain a tree forever: perhaps for one or two eras of Apollo’s high-octane testosterone, the nymph mania that sparks […]
Waveland, Mars
Up in my leathers, my formulas My grandmother cutting away a wet nightgown From my mother’s barren legs. What the shining, The heaven snipers & copper pipes — Light what up, the mallow of wild Heart wood, a swung cornet, Soprano comet, the baroque & invented valves. Harmonia me into the good […]