1.
i cannot move
too much is broken
2.
demons live in mirrors
and are trying to escape
3.
it’s almost tuesday
yet there are no doors
4.
there is a dream
i cannot see
(May 19, 2026)
Category: fragments
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I finished “If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho” by Anne Carson last night. This is the second time I have gone through this book from start to finish. The last time was about 13-14 years ago. I have picked it up randomly over the years reading bits before putting it back on the shelf. When I read it through years ago, I was also reading Carson’s “Eros, the Bittersweet,” which has several essays about Sappho. It helped. Anne Carson, if you don’t know, is an Ancient Greek scholar, who is also (imho) one of the most interesting writers in English today. She is probably best known for “Autobiography of Red,” but NOX should be on everyone’s reading list. As with the last time I read “If not, Winter,” I was reminded of Guy Davenport’s “7 Greeks,” because of the number of poem fragments which were translated with gaps in parentheses. The empty spaces made me think about two things: 1) the importance of silence and the use of space in creating meaning, and 2) how much meaning one word can carry without effort, and how placing simple words next to each other opens portals into other worlds which go beyond what is contained in the solitary words by themselves.
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“The heart lies to itself because it must”
—Jack Gilbert
What fragments have been lost
along the way? What holes filled
with other’s dry detritus?
other’s bland conjectures? These limits
become, over time, tattered as well—
perhaps more comfortable and loose,
easier to disguise time’s misgivings;
easier than telling the truth.
(November 21, 2025)
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Beneath the whispers
I hear a nascent breath:
a phrase, isolated,
out of context, yet
still a residual force—
like a white noise
days after a concert,
sings in my inner ear.
Outside the poem,ghosts of my desires
rise mouthing words
out of order, slurred,
as a pentacostal’s
frozen fire burns.
(February 3, 2025)
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from an untitled serial poem (3)
and nothing specific is ever learned
it’s more a pervasive atmosphere
an inescapable context which traps
us in a web woven and rewoven
moment by moment knitted from our flesh
and residue left from this dark frenzy
*
daily we fall deeper into the tale
yet there is no white rabbit to follow
only desire to ride us like harpies
the news the neighbors our friends all screaming
into a discontent none can escape
nor explain enough to be forgiven
*
as if there could be a strong enough god
to save us from our own stupidity
(January 5, 2020)
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We were lost in the city, a post-apocalyptic Disneyland, searching for a car. We had driven to town for a birthday party. Her birthday, a blue car. My hair was long and tousled, like it was in my thirties, not like now. The party had been in a building, like a school, but under construction, or in decay. There was a moment when we had kissed, or when she had kissed me, or almost kissed, which kept playing back in my head. Why had I turned away? Several times we passed a house which was being gutted. A large tree, like a live oak, had grown throughout the house’s framework. She clambered up the tree, to reach the second floor of the house. A large bare-chested man with a handle-bar mustache and tattoos, like a circus strongman from the 1890’s, came out and tried to sell us the house for 340,000 dollars. He said the house was only two stories, although it looked like four. We left to find the car. This went on for hours, or minutes. We would split up, return together again, push the car’s door lock key hoping to see lights flash. When we had left it for the party, the car was the only one on the street, now in the early morning light, the streets were crowded. It started to rain. A man running a uniform store overheard us talking about the house and said that we might as well buy a noose right now if we were going to buy that house. He started to tell us a story, but his assistant interrupted to show us a chef’s hat like they used to wear at diner’s or fast food restaurants, like Burger Chef in the late 60’s. Near the shore fisherman were unloading their catch from big nets. Along with the assorted fish, body parts, like arms and legs, stuck casually from the nets. She kissed me again, or tried to kiss me again, or was that the same kiss? Why did I turn away? At the party, a poet we both liked was reading her poems. No one was listening. Since the floor was being redone, broken tiles were strewn about like crackers. She looked around the crowd and wondered if there would be anyone we knew there. People I had known from work, or school, whom I had never socialized with talked together in small disconnected groups. Everyone seemed uncomfortable, and for some reason that was my responsibility. My brother-in-law, Jim, stood in the corner whispering judgmental comments, and combing his mustache. I left, but could still see them as if through a glass store front window display. The streets were empty and slick with rain. The blue car was nearby, but we had somewhere else to go. Home? An apartment? It was a white building, near where she had kissed me, or tried to kiss me. Why did I turn away? She followed me to my hotel room, commenting on the large leather chair and the open curtains as she entered. When I stepped out for a moment, she started to write a note on a pad next to the bed. She stopped and said it did not matter, when I came back into the room, interrupting her process. She said the room was over-priced. We left to find her friend and have a drink. It was emblematic somehow of the whole affair, unconsummated and vague.
(September 20-23, 2019)
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From bits she left behind,
he pieces himself together:
thousands of shards sifted,
then rearranged to form
fused-glass mosaics
into patterned fascimiles
others easily recognize.
(July 18, 2019)
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(41)
The sideways shift and snip
Clatters across the sand.
It’s easier to move out of the way—
Trouble passes, one remains
To proceed with plodding step
Along one’s path.
(3)
Time’s slow arc
(34)
All the variables led here
As inevitable as this morning’s
Sun striking the sycamore’s white
Bark; no god laughs as our choices.
(14)
A left, a right, a yes, a no:
Life’s crushed to binary.
(16)
I close an eye
To see the obvious
Connection: the moment.
(15)
I stumble step across a bridge
Swinging above a crevasse.
(21)
No saints guide us home,
Nor care how far we fall.
The emptiness opens
Like an aura.
(43)
This morning everyone sleeps in
As fog drifts between the trees
Near the creek and the gray sky.
The last brown leaf has fallen
From the sycamore; the solstice
Passed under a full moon.
(30)
Dusk and dawn, progressive
And simultaneous, flow through
The landscape. Yet, we think
Our futile actions have consequence.
(19)
Like you,
Light bends
Along each wave’s edge
Into separate
And singular parts.
-
(Work in Progress)
(23)
I caught my breath,
And did not speak.
Is writing equivalent
To speech? I loved you,
In silence.
(42)
Self-doubt’s constant
Caterwauling echoes,
Like now— I mock
Attempts to quiet:
Hush, hush
Little baby hush—
All these scorpions
Are your own, each
Tail-strike skitters
Across skin.
(11)
Memory circles back to savage the corpse.
(42)
If only the dead would remain with the dead;
The past cannot so easily be revised—
I know what I desire to have happened;
Yet a mirror cannot be unbroken.
(12)
I can only see what
I think it is I see.
(4)
A lens warps light.
(38)
We are woven through our day
Despite our proclivities
Or desires. A thread’s easy
Enough to trace in retrospect
As being a part to a whole.
(31)
And here I am
Beneath a December moon
Waxing its way
Across a gray night.
Fate, or circumstance,
Is of no consequence.
(36)
He touches his forehead
To the damp ground
In a patterned response
To appease God’s chaos.
Here things are quiet;
Here one pretends
There is this center.
(6)
She waits, then dons her mask.
(7)
He scurries beneath the rain.
-
(in progress)
DNA string against black with clipping path (23)
Lights break auras
As night deepens
The rain. The solstice
Grows closer through the dark;
Grim days shorten.
(28)
Half-way back
To summer’s long heat—
In afternoon hours,
It hurts to step
Outside as if someone
Near waits with knives.
(14)
Patient enough now
To watch all this unfold
Into spring.
(40)
Outside, another cold day:
Most of the leaves have fallen
From the sycamore outback;
Its white bark stands in contrast
To the stark grey sky. Beauty
Lives with our view.
(43)
Nietzsche said, among other things,
We experience only ourselves—
Even when I shift toward you,
It remains me who must see
The shadow which falls starkly
Between us on the floor.
(36)
If no one hears the Eliot allusion,
Does it make a sound?
Or should one pretend
A studied nonchalance
To carry one through the late afternoon?
(39)
Thus, an old ritual snickers
To a close, the porch lights
Turned on, the curtains
Drawn. I feel safe,
Less exposed, contained
With the pattern—
A spider moves toward motion.
(34)
We’ve woven our disparate dreams,
And become subsumed beneath the totality
Like ocean waves rolling upon themselves
Far from shore.
(28)
My anger sits at a distance,
It does not go away—
It whispers discontent
Like whip’s end striking wet flesh.
(41)
Ubiquitous as fear,
The air tightens
Without provocation.
Yet, still we sing,
Sing our song,
As if redemption
Can be gathered
Like bags of wet cotton
Blotched with blood.
-
like so many broken bones
scattered on a shaman’s floor
wait to be puzzled back
into our imaginations
these are the answers
I do not know as these
are the questions I am
too frightened to ask
the fragments are small and soft
the edges vague indeterminate
how they are to be returned
whole waits troubled for night
as each day’s tenuous relation
struggles to piece the past entire
(November 21, 2018)
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Like the twisted medieval Streets of VeniceI had a dream where I spoke to Ezra PoundAbout cats as we walked near the libraryOf the school where I work which was notThe school where I work for these buildingsWere from the sixteenth century with tangledLabyrinthine halls where in various pocketsAnd corridors familiar students practiced yogaCalling for us like the sirens to Odysseus to playalong but Pound kept talking in ever lengtheningtangents which bent back upon themselves as onceGertrude Stein pithily accused him of explainingeverything I had tried to understand for yearsbefore I awoke and it all fell into fragmentslike glass glistening the light off in the distance(July 17,2017) -
Quilt
by
“I reconstitute a memory”–Roland BarthesBy now neither hearsThe other tell a storyDifferent than the oneThey shared. The past shattersIn the moment. Memory’sScattered bits cohereOnly through proximityAnd a desire to cohere.The emotional scrapsLinger. He sanctifiesHis past in phrases,Images, intonations,Until what she possiblyMeant when she didWhat he remembersBecomes a patchworkIn which he wraps himselfAgainst the oncoming cold.(June 7, 2017) -
the fragmentary moments vanishblur into the greater god’s oblivionone would think yet one does notpossess enough will to resistthe smothering onslaught’s surgelong enough to think for oneselflong enough to think one canexposition’s time’s relentlessexplanation nags at ragseach scrap a potential causeeach thread must unravelinto totality’s tight mosaicone’s existence is not wholeone exists within the whorl(March 9, 2017) -
The horizon blursany distinctionbetween sea and sky.Pulsatingin long undulations,in long ululations,I am at sea,no rocksto crash against.Like pyroclastic flowscascading downa ridge line,my shell cracks,hesitates,then shatters.Something glistens,for a moment,in the sea swell.Which fragment is mine?Which some otherI’ve taken on?this chrysaliswill not break;the wren’s egg’s intact.I am still,and cannot breath;one must stay silent.(February 25, 2017)
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