from a work in progress, “process, not a journey”(69)
the grey cat sits
on the table by the window
and watches the mockingbird
on the elm outside
.
I watch her patience
today and yesterday
and last week
and think she’s oblivious
to sit so stoically
day after day
without hope
of any desires’
consummation
.
I lose my way each day
throughout the day
thinking of this
then distracted by that
as if the unspecified contains
some mysterious truth
more than a cat
sitting in the sun
(June 28, 2020)
a presumption that all
falls into place as if
metaphor were truth
as if anything
we could say
will lead us home
words are tangents
to themselves
too fast to follow
so I plod along
content with the detritus
I stumble upon
making a trail
wherever my foot falls
(December 30, 2019)
The bees are dying—
Beauty and Truth of Nature?
Who can save us now?
(October 25, 2019)
The lie of my truth
visors the angle
of my descent.
I have no face,
but reflection,
a mirror
to lace assumption’s
discordance.
My flesh contains
shattered selves—
a prismatic array,
where each shard
bends an image
of itself into another.
This truth lies
along an edge
of broken glass;
it slices the air
with ribbons of light,
like tall grass
cuts children’s legs
as they flee through
the last summer fields.
(August 15, 2019)
Yielding more
than simple correspondences,
or letters marked in a ledger,
words bend fields
through which we see
distortions and clarities
reflected like sunlight
in a waterfall’s spume.
they reveal and cloak
certainties in our unease
with what we should believe
as true, and what we know
to be a lie as we speak.
(July 29, 2019)
My story is true in so far
as it is my story. The lines
I must maintain for my belief
to be justified are many.
I fear questions lest it all falls
like a child’s tower of blocks falls,
tumbled across unstable ground.
Although I know that the truth lies
for I formed each one on my own,
turning them over and over
like rosary beads until smooth,
they still allow me to believe
each stone lies firmly on the next.
With no one to doubt what I say,
the facade I have built is real
I explain to myself myself:
I live forms of happies
As long as the ever after,
and the hero is always me.
(June 30, 2019)
from “Renditions of Change,” a work in progress
To be there. To bear witness:
one tells one’s story— That’s all!
That is how evil falls— Again
and again— tell one’s story.
(June 5, 2019)
“..truth is often nothing more than meaning”
—Trinh T. Minh-ha
I mean–
what can I say,
you know?
I’m just talking,
to myself.
You know
what I mean?
I imagine you
do, since
I hear what
you’re saying–
You understand
what I mean?
(November 13, 2018)
“chiseller of inaccuracies”
–Fernando Pessoa
I would not speak
if I knew what to say.
There would be no need
to form words around
an unrealized dream.
It is the unsaid
which must be given
shape; which calls us
from its shapeless dark
to speak into existence
what we cannot know.
Yet, I know so little
about so much, I must
speak about it all.
I start where I am
which is always here.
First, I must listen,
discern the shapes
before I can speak.
My words carve out
what is there
from what is not
as the silence unfolds
a new kind of truth.
(August 23, 2018)
It is familiar enough
to be familiar, but no
more: a scratch in the dark
which stops when you stop
to listen to what you think
is a sound somewhere nearby,
but it’s just you thinking
in the silence to the dark.
It’s absence breathes heavily
as if aroused with metaphor
still clinging to its half-formed kiss.
It waits on memory to form
a shape which conforms to desire’s
simple reduction to a truth.
(August 17, 2018)
