Caffeinated daybreak, ridge-line over the porch rail. What glides at eye-level above the creek bottom, surveilling the pasture? Peregrine Falcon? Harrier? The world charged like shook foil—that’s a good one. Its colors sharpen as we come out of the inbetween. Wind-gusts rattle these pages, empty interiors, room enough for any grief you’d fill […]
Spring comes forward as a late-winter confection, and I cannot decide if it advances a philosophy of meekness or daring. This year’s snowdrops: is it that they are spare, and have a slightly fraught lucidity, or are they proof that pain, too, can be ornate? Even a propped skull is human nature. And […]
Rembrandt paints his carcass of beef. You see a little blood near the poppies and don’t think of detachment. Humbert and his girl are driving across America. One has a thirst so unslakeable, one walks right into the river. How exciting spring is! and how errant, holding out love and […]
Each night, the same dream: I’m an odd Victorian mansion in a field of wheat. And I’m either waiting for the field to catch fire or the hearse of love to pull up to the manse. Don’t wake me. In daylight, my mother talks of brideliness as a measure of time: in a kind of […]
Something shifts in that in-between November light– sends questions of color, cold and time through my body. The birds sleep. Am I mistaking morning for gloaming? Perhaps the other way around? Something in my lungs remembers: The leaves have fallen, snow is coming. I changed my clock. “Falling Back” first appeared in Winter […]
I walk to Library Park and watch the sun set. There are days of cold ahead. The oak is an etching— an outline, her twisted branches reaching like swollen broken fingers fighting the fracturing cold. The firmament blushes. Each figment of her bark recedes until she is but one stoic profile of complicated, […]