there's got to be more below the surface
I am the books I have not read—
perhaps begun, or perhaps not, then
abandoned like a sack of kittens,
to stack on side tables until relocated,
years later in a flurry of decluttering
before a holiday, to a shelf where
the petulant spines whisper, beneath
the dust, their clucking disappointment
with lost possibility, and false claims
of the myriad loose threads which lead
directly from the maze I only thought
of entering, when instead I opened a book.
(December 1, 2022)
1.
Where are you going?
You’re already here.
Now, let that go—
but stay
without
staying.
2.
It is easier
to be the authority
and pronounce
bits of bated wisdom,
as if you know
anything more than now.
3.
Listen, you are here:
the pulse of wind through the trees;
a loud distant sneeze.
(November 30, 2022)
I wish I were drunk,
but I am not—
There are no soft edges left.
Rage waits. Boys, with guns
bigger than them, walk
casually into classrooms
and churches to kill.
The house is cold;
the Mexican blanket is not enough.
Plague festers the air; and,
we breathe deeply. Savoring
the fear, we watch the street
humming darkly to the wind.
Again, we say what’s been said:
the same muttered rituals,
with the same fruitless results.
The world is broken, and I am
tired of this sober life.
Bit players, we dance awkwardly
in the blurred background
without lines to speak,
nor character enough to change.
(November 29, 2022)
Look, Sunshine,
the strippers at the club
are like the aurora borealis, but
never would I presume to tell you
the beauty of a jiggling moon.
I have too many privileges to grind
to toss that kind of monkey wrench.
Beauty,
after all, is the truth we pursue; and
never would I presume to tell you
how to pass a lonely afternoon.
(November 22, 2022)
This is my story:
a prelude to nothing
beyond this moment.
This is my story
as I tell it today
unrevised, unfiltered.
This is my story:
different than yesterday,
different than tomorrow.
This is my story
I must tell to myself
each day, every day.
This is my story;
I have not told, yet.
(November 16, 2022)
A student tells me
she cannot hear an
inner dialogue.
How lonely she must
be to have silence
as her only thought.
A flame burns without
a flicker, alone
in an empty room.
It illuminates
itself and the walls
along the light’s edge:
nothing can be seen;
there are no echoes.
(November 13, 2022)
“there is no absence
that cannot be replaced”
—Rene Char
She sits in a hole in the room
where time drifts like dust motes
through sunlight. There is no time
anymore for resentment, or anger,
to fester their dark intentions.
Everything fades. The half-life of names
expands absorbing our vague desires
in the absolution memory grants
with each revision. She is tired now.
Patchwork obligations, like cages
without keys, contain her reasons.
In her way, she is dying, as are we all—
an obvious cliche, yet rituals
daily provide us with parameters
where we feel most comfortable.
Life is painful enough. Outside the air
clutters with snow, and rime forms
along the fence line. She watches the door.
Once, long ago, someone knocked, then left.
(November 12, 2022)
You ask what I want.
I have no answer
that is not abstract:
Happiness, less drama, less stress;
no flagellant memories
laced in guilt and blame;
time to think;
time to move about the house;
time to take for our life.
time to remember:
who I am;
who you are—
to find ourselves
together again.
(November 9, 2022)
“To see a world in a grain of sand/and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”—-William Blake
An eternal pause
which opens in a moment
then vanishes
(like a leaf fall breaks
the still flow
of the autumn air;
or a stutter step
in a dance
almost breaks rhythm;
or a match flares
an aura briefly
as the wick takes flame)
is where we are,
always.
in the dream this time
I wrote a line to start
then again inevitably
I woke to remember
nothing but the sense
that something had left
something consequential
something now absent
like the vacancy we fill
each time we move quietly
through an empty room
something that’s always there
outside the dream I write
myself through the delusion
that I have something to say
beyond my mundane day
beyond my awkward cliches
beyond my last glimpse of land
where gulls screech to the wind
their sneers of mockery and desire
where I’m stripped of my words
and left alone with what I am
a tongueless mouth gasping
for air beneath a dying sea
(October 20, 2022)
Mist moves through the trees
which loom overhead.
The why of my way
trails vaguely behind,
catching on branches
like tufts of soft fur,
clinging to the briar.
The negligible
wind falters then dies;
and, the air thickens
as the earth reaches
for the distant sky
like a supplicant
to an absent god.
My cliches wander in
with a negligent ease.
They have no compunctions
with rude visitations.
Like a tabby stalking
a yard of a neighbor
who fed her once
years and years ago,
they simply stray from
the page’s periphery:
an easy image
returned to repeatedly,
providing a brutish clarity
to a violent mendacity.
(October 6, 2022)
He sits in a wooden chair
in the center of a locked room.
The chair is bolted to the floor.
The room is bare, but for a light
hanging above him like a sword.
The light is dim, without a shade.
He is not wearing a blindfold,
but he might as well be—
for there is nothing to see
beyond the industrial gray walls.
No one has come into the room.
He is not sure how he arrived,
only that he is here now, alone.
If he listens he can hear his breath
otherwise the room is silent
as if all sounds are absorbed
into the walls before they enter.
he sits with his back to a locked door,
or what he assumes is a locked door,
for he has not attempted to open it.
Every now and then a light flickers
beneath the door as if a warning
to him in a code he cannot fathom
even if he were able to see it.
The room is cold, not overly so, but
enough to cause his nose to run.
He would like to wipe his nose
but his hands behind his back are tied,
as are his feet to the chair’s legs.
He doesn’t know how long he has waited,
nor how much longer he must wait,
nor what he is waiting for exactly:
just that he waits in a chair, alone,
in a room; and, he is just like you.
(October 4, 2022)
Somedays I am here
more than most:
Thin flesh over fragile bones,
unable to hold a thought
from dream, I wander
from room to room
metaphorically lost
in a house I once knew.
My hand on a window,
I feel the winter sun
briefly at my fingertips,
before the shadow falls
between the bare branches
lightly laced in ice.
(September 30, 2022)
the sadness grew
its tendrils
through the rooms
of their house
casually
laconically
until
it touched
and troubled
their lives
staining all
in a yellowish
brown smudge
as if an old
mattress
tossed to the side
of an abandoned
dirt road
(September 27, 2022)
Here we are
at last, lost,
wondering what’s next?
Desperate for a redemption
to justify
our petty striving,
we sacrifice our souls
for a future
we will never see.
While the present vanishes,
a silent effect
to an unvoiced cause,
the gate clicks
closed
on its own.
(September 19, 2022)
The rough stones, I stack
in a circle around me,
slowly wear the skin from
my fingers until they bleed.
Nearby, but far enough,
you too build your circle
mixing traces of blood
into the wet mortar.
This is how we live:
each day we wait—
for a new excuse
to slowly bleed out,
then lay the last stone
of our sarcophagus.
(September 19, 2022)
to eviscerate
all that could have been
and all that there was
each day since birth’s cry
to worry the wound
probing the center
as a bee a rose
deeper then deeper
to pin the skin back
exposing the flesh
as if broken dreams
to prurient eyes
to recoil in fear
until a last breath
rises from dry lips
as a final kiss
(September8, 2022)
Each day that summer as I walked home from concentrated classes at the University (Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Berkeley all in six weeks), I would wave to an old woman who sat on the porch of her disheveled house drinking coffee, I assumed. Each day for a couple of seconds, we would affirm each other’s existence in the other’s life. One day she called out to me, she wanted my help with something. I hesitated — for I had places to go, people to meet all afternoon. I was afraid she would take more time than I had to give. After I negotiated her neglected front lawn, she held out an old alarm clock, “It’s broken,” she said, “I don’t know what the time is anymore.” I took the clock from her crumpled hands, turned the key a few times, and it started to tick loudly. She thanked me, and I went on my way. The next day and the day after that for the rest of the summer, I never saw her again. Although, now and then, for the last forty years, I think of her, her clock, and the time she took that day.
(September 5, 2022)
Pattern’s traces, worn through
repetition, call from dance’s edge;
where shadows pulse like breath,
and flicker leaves against the sky.
I hear only the sharper echoes,
of the little dog at my heals,
whose yips and growls cut past
the surf’s surge far below, but not
the curved contours cloistered
closer to my heart. I am a fool
to trust so blindly in a god,
who allows me to languish
in faith’s certainty, as if
cowardice could protect me
from the final fragile shattering.
The bits and shards scattered
along the broken grounds are
difficult to winnow. I become lost
in a melodramatic reverie
where each memory excavates
a self-abnegation usually reserved
for saints confessing their silent sins.
(September 4, 2022)
Having returned a cow
with my horns clipped,
I chew my straw sardonically,
as my sad-brown eyes survey
the undulant fields.
The cow herd pats my neck,
looks across the open field,
and asks me, a mere cow,
with a casual disregard,
“What’s this?” then walks away.
I have no language to unlock
this moment from time now.
Each song ends with desire,
a flutter of a solitary bird
falling from a tree.
(August 10, 2022)
I crawled to earth
gasping for air;
I am no more now
than who I once was.
I’ve maintained myself
in memory’s traces,
tucked between the hours
and the tired minutes.
Centuries passed slowly,
like summer afternoon
shadows thicken over
slovenly trimmed lawns.
(August 6, 2022)
to throw into the fire
the better part of you
your heart as sacrifice
to the life desired
secure in the arms
of your clarity
like a child held
tight against the night
secure no danger lurks
beyond the fire’s edge
where the shadows flicker
with insidious pleasure
(August 4, 2022)
My voices echo within a labyrinth.
Scraps of some other’s stories without form
return as someone else’s dark whispers
where all our monsters are of my making.
My lies breathe wetly in the dark where
I take up my veins like a woolen skein
to braid these lonely secrets from my heart
to some broken cross I drag though the night.
There are not any guides to trace the way,
no straight lines to unravel obliquely
as if some kind of redemption were there
waiting for love and forgiveness for all.
Hope is the final lie, the last true lie:
the sun breaks over the trees without us.
The fences were in need,
as always, of repair,
not mended like Frost’s,
but more of a courtesy
to recognize an accord
with a tone of enmity
slipped in like mortar,
or a knife beneath bone,
as an acknowledgement
of a division where X
does not equal Y,
even in the abstract.
(July 27, 2022)
Late at night when you cannot sleep
and you step silently through the house;
or lost in thought driving to work
and you do not notice your normal exit,
then the niggling whispers gain a clarity
that cannot be partitioned or pardoned.
No little boxes filled with secrets to be
placed locked in other larger boxes
appear to safely hide your face within.
When all your variant stories disentangle,
and fall away like petals on a dying rose,
how do you begin to confess the lies
manifested through accidental negligence?
How do you begin to open the sarcophagus
you have for so long hidden within? How do
you even begin to begin to live again?
(July 23, 2022)
There is no truth to face;
these circles are closed and reflexive.
War is endless: we walk blindly
through one blooded field or another.
Nothing matters. Her one endless song
is too full of flowers and mockery.
*
I float between sleep
and dreams of sleep.
With no other joys,
no other pleasures,
I sink beneath
waves of dry tears.
(July 18, 2022)
I talked too much, saying little.
Then a decade of unbroken silence
followed without your laughter.
Yet, I still felt the silent trace
of your fingertips along the length
of my bare arm, as you spoke.
Our intentions were never clear.
Then we left, each to our ways;
and, I became a ghost to you.
(July 10, 2022)
Summoned from Shaman Mountain
as his lover for the night, she steps
lightly from dream rising on waves
surging from a storm. The flowers
give way beneath the plum tree’s
branches; and, the scent of narcissus
lingers like the moon before the dawn,
as she wraps her thighs around his hips.
(July 7, 2022)
“If I knew what I was doing, I’d be doing it right now…”
—Radney Foster
Another morning sun trickles
through the cottonwoods. Today,
I have time to write. Instead,
I watch the cardinal pair twitter
from branch to branch, fluttering
like drunken dancers in love.
I have nothing to say; yet, today
that is enough. The cottonwoods
slowly clatter in the soft breeze,
while the grey cat purrs at my feet.
(July 1, 2022)
Each day I shuffle about the house
lost within the duties of the day.
I wonder: all these poets with their advice
full of absolutes and disdain for others—
when do they find time to write;
to sit alone with their words;
to scrape the burnt rice from the pan?
(June 30, 2022)
In the early evening silence,
cicadas and doves, hidden
in the trees, whoo and trill,
as the sprinkler fans the grass
with artificial rain.
This is enough,
as the sun tips the tops
of the tallest trees
with a light-green fire
before it sets behind the hills.
(June 24, 2022)
While degrees
prove persistence
more than
knowledge gained,
one cannot pretend
through screams
and violence
to know anything.
If one attends
to each breath
and stumble along
the garden path,
one’s practice should be
enough; yet, life
disguises wisdom
in each rose’s bloom.
(June 23, 2022)
The ghosts enter my dreams again. They dislike the arrangement of the furniture. So, they move the leather couch to the opposite wall, reset the clock, close all the doors, open all the windows, letting bugs get in, and finally turn off all the lights except the one over the kitchen table, which glows eerily as if in a noir movie from the 1950’s. I have to admit the new arrangement of the room makes for a better flow overall, yet something is still wrong. Although I see all of this, I am not there. I am somewhere else, disconnected from my life like a mirror. I try to speak, but the words come out backwards, the syntax jumbled and slurred. The ghosts look perplexed, but as an act of condescension, they don’t pay any attention to me. They serve themselves tea from a fine china teapot into matching china cups. They speak to each other nonchalantly, about memories I recognize as mine, but do not recall well enough to contradict the revisions they are making. After I wake, and then through the rest of the day as I wonder about the house, I pick up scraps of what was said, and try ineffectually to sew my desires back together as if they were a patch work quilt collectively stitched on a Sunday afternoon over gossip and prayers. Yet, something is missing: I think it might be me.
(June 18, 2022)
Together we drank and sang
into the night; we were true
to ourselves and each other.
Today, even the half-hearted
are cut down by the heartless.
What chance did our song have?
Tonight in the distance,
I hear a solitary flute player.
I think of you, and weep.
(June 17, 2022)
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