It’s the lopsided charm
of this day’s superlatives—
the shortest day,
the longest night,
which for millennia
provided power
to the metaphor
for hope to console us
with heavenly promise
that peace will return
as easily as morning light
washes over dark stone.
(Winter Solstice, December 21, 2025)
Finished this today. Kind of like The Metamorphoses’ Greatest Hits. That is not a criticism. I had not heard of some of the tales, and I liked the non-bowlderized versions of the others, having read most of the tales in kids versions to my children decades ago. It was a fun read. If you see it used somewhere, it is worth picking up. Trivia for some of you guys: Ted Hughes was married to Sylvia Plath. ( I like pointing that out since he was apparently an ass to her. Now to the younger readers, he is a footnote to her. He was no slouch as a poet, however. The Crow is especially good as I remember).
September 24, 2025)
a cluster of stars
hundreds, if not
millions of light years
apart, forms a pattern
to our minds, close
enough to serve
as a myth of us
to live inside
(May 2, 2025 )
I saw an old man from my window
across the alley sitting alone on his bed.
A table lamp glowed softly nearby.
The room was barren, lifeless, empty
of all but the bed, the lamp, and the old man.
He sat still, staring toward a wall.
I could not see, from where I stood,
what it was that had captured him so.
It was as if I had been absorbed bodily
into an Edward Hopper painting;
he was so alone in his thickening sadness.
It oozed from his window across the alley
like an amoeba blindly frets its way
across a water droplet on a glass slide,
stretching toward its last bit of life.
Instinctively, I backed away quietly
into the growing darkness of my room,
and the silent frailty we all must live.
(April 10, 2023)
Figs grown fat with flesh
split open offering up
themselves like ripe lips.
Words quickly noted
hint toward more than a meaning
that memory can know.
Hunger drives us on
to speak, to savor the fruit,
to trust the mythos:
a date, an apple
a fig just beyond our grasp
which we cannot name.
Seeds cling to the sticky flesh;
a warm undulant silence.
(July 16, 2023)
A blood-red thread extends
into the dark. I’m lost
and cannot see the walls
until I walk into them.
I am cold and hungry,
but cannot eat my dreams.
I must lose my sight
before I can escape.
Here is the problem:
I have so much to say,
but desire’s not enough.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Each moment’s ripe with terror;
a bull bellows in the dark.
(April 22,2022)
Where words we would have said
were swallowed, like sailors sacrificed
to the waves, possibility slipped shut.
If only we could have heard the words
we sang in secret to each other;
if only we had not died there,
feeding like fabled monsters
upon our embittered flesh;
if only we had relented
to the siren’s cold seductions,
then the screams in the waves
which smashed upon the sea wall
would not be lost to the blind pulse
of froth and spume across the wreck.
(June 30, 2021)
then, an ever present now
The shuttlecock flits nimbly across the loom with a soft clacking beat. “For every time I’ve told this tale, I’ve told it twice again,” she implies with a sigh as she begins. She speaks of patience and home, and slow unsolicited seductions, as time unravels across the floor like red pools of forgetfulness at her feet.
He watches her hands shift the threads as if playing upon a lyre. He thinks, “There are so many ways through the woods; so many rivers and creeks to cross; so many hollows and caves to wander lost, always different, always the same as the ones crossed before.”
For years and years as he wandered, he watched the waves pulse repetitive hallucinations and horrors towards a horizon he could no longer see. Unearthly monsters churned the waters feeding one upon the other; the past devoured the past with a ceaseless hunger for more. While elsewhere late at night, she walked the halls without a light, leaned against a shuttered door, and listened to the incessant voices muttering their plots and plans for a life she abhorred.
As the story faltered to its close, there was no soft landfall upon the strand, no wreck scattered upon a beach; no violence in their reunion, nor familial embrace. What had grown between them, tangled like olive tree roots upon a cliff, could not be troubled enough to be called love, if it could be called anything at all.
The shuttlecock flits nimbly across the loom with a soft clacking beat. “For every time I’ve told this tale, I’ve told it twice again,” she implies with a sigh as she begins. She speaks of patience and home, and slow unsolicited seductions, as time unravels across the floor like red pools of forgetfulness at her feet.
He watches her hands shift the threads as if playing upon a lyre. He thinks, “There are so many ways through the woods; so many rivers and creeks to cross; so many hollows and caves to wander lost, always different, always the same as the ones crossed before.”
For years and years as he wandered, he watched the waves pulse repetitive hallucinations and horrors towards a horizon he could no longer see. Unearthly monsters churned the waters feeding one upon the other; the past devoured the past with a ceaseless hunger for more. While elsewhere late at night, she walked the halls without a light, leaned against a shuttered door, and listened to the incessant voices muttering their plots and plans for a life she abhorred.
As the story faltered to its close, there was no soft landfall upon the strand, no wreck scattered upon a beach; no violence in their reunion, nor familial embrace. What had grown between them, tangled like olive tree roots upon a cliff, could not be troubled enough to be called love, if it could be called anything at all.
surreptitiously
he squats beneath
his stone bridge
alone in the dark
like a hungry troll
who waits on a lost traveler
to stop momentarily
between her lies and his
as she peers into the mist
that waits below for her
in the ever-widening crevasse
(February 10, 2021)
how much must be
etched across the glass
like ice across the lake
before I can hear
the ravens in the wood
caw out their hunger
before the dark wings’
fluttered descent disguises
the sharp peck and pull
that is my final vision
what silence waits
as an echo’s first reflection
before it wraps itself again
around the trees like snow
(December 24, 2020)
this labyrinth has no end
no center in which to be eaten
no twine to trace an origin
just a blind turn toward hope
a quick glance back toward despair
one cannot be lost without direction
yet our angled descent is certain
I can see the sun before it sets
listen to the fuss of squirrel and jay
or be consumed in worry’s fire
there is no clear path to happiness
we are always here
(November 5, 2020)
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