soft beneath my touch
the petals almost slick
as I run my fingers
across their surface
i bury my nose into
their scent drinking in
the odor like a balm
to my tired senses
i wish that I too
like the hummingbird
could flutter my tongue
deep into the flower’s heart
and be enveloped in
the primal fury of love
(June 2011)
I’m drowning in metaphor, the words flow
Like water breaching tightly-packed sandbags
Flooding my thoughts with too much to say and
Not enough talent to make them cohere.
Beneath these words I hide myself from you
Too embarrassed or bashful to speak plain
I float up yet another abstraction
Praying for a transformative response.
When I finally break through the surface,
Breathe in the cool life in great gasping gulps,
Coughing out my silent lungs to the air,
my focus follows the flow of your mind.
In waves I am lifted enough to see
The momentary salvation of land.
(June 2011)
the heat whips the trees
shade pants crisply beneath leaves
not much chance of change
a sharp demarcation
between me and you
as if a copula
is enough of a word
to engender a metaphor
this is not this
but yet it is
grammatically independent
but phonologically dependent
on another word
my meaning depends
upon you
(June 2011)
by
“Wow, I felt like I just entered a black hole,” she said.
In open air beneath the sun
I open my mouth and speak
What words I can into silence
Stripped of small talk and idle chatter
My speech forms its own horizon
Abutting up against your silence
Between all the stances I can take
Amid the ambiguity of reception
Falls a monolithic silence
All my lonely lamentations
All my whispered secrets
Mean nothing to the silence
All my words and talk
All my confessions of love
Mean nothing to the silence
(June 2011)
I desire to dance
arms raised
to the stars
praising the night;
instead,
I talk to walls:
my voice
echoes the space
I pace between.
(June 2011)
by
orderly rows of trees
lie fallow
after the harvest
apples full-red and crisp
fell alongside others
some green some gnarled
i tend to the trees
lopping old limbs
a necessary pruning
there is always more
than the season allows
the trees are here now
the fruit will grow
despite ourselves
the work remains
(June 2011)
“a responsibility to the trace of the other”
–Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
you move through your day,
like a bird through branches
bending between the briars,
oblivious to the consternations
of others as they talk around you
you remain caught up in
the net of your abstractions
“the absolute alterity” of everything:
colleagues, clients, trees,
squirrels, clouds shaped and
dispersed across an endless sky,
the reduction of the world
to your purview, the horror
that what you see is you
(May 2011)
Last night I dreamed of making love to you
I awoke and could still feel your smooth back
And soft brown hair between my fingertips
During the day your soft smile from the couch
The way your smooth hair falls framing your eyes
Makes me desire to press my lips to yours
This vision as much a dream as at night
Slips away among the constant tumult
Of the separate lives we lead alone
So I write yet another poem for you
A soft lament for possibilities
That hover on the verge of my waking
Thoughts of you interlace my days and nights
Softly like spider’s silk upon the wind
(May 2011)
If what I have to say is of so little import that I have to say it repeatedly, like an ad blaring from a newspaper or television, then it is worthless enough to write down so that it may, possibly, be read more than once. Is it fear of being misunderstood that drives me to scratch my cramped hand across the page with such diligence? Or an obsessive desire to control the message, if any, or to exert my will upon the text? And what about all those metaphors embedded in the words: scratch, cramped, desire, control, exert, embedded? The message, if any, takes on a meaning of its own like the darkness a thief cloaks himself in after slipping out the door. Yet now as I paused to read back what I wrote – – I stumbled on the stairs, thinking: That’s it, that’s the point! – – So I missed a step, (both literally and metaphorically) as it were, and wound up on another tangent without hope of reconnection to my original,yet banal, thought.
(August 2001-April 2003)
by
I have a student’s father who wishes for his son to pass the year. His son never comes to class. If he does come to class he comes 20 minutes late, so he is technically absent. When he does come to class he does not bother to find out what the class is doing; instead, he plays with his phone, or puts his head on the desk. I have talked to the father repeatedly, both in person and through email. The father, at the end of each six weeks, comes and gets work for the son to make up. The son does not do it, or does not do enough of it to pass. I am meeting with the father tomorrow, the father wants his son to be able to make up the work for the the six weeks that have already passed by. I feel it is an insult to my class and my students; they have worked all year, coming to class, reading books, writing essays. They are passing. He is not.
I run through my obsessions
Like penitents over wooden beads
Chanting the same words
Until all obliterates beneath
The mortar and pestle of language
How can I trust others
When I cannot trust myself
So many layers of belief
(all true) to move through
like archeologists through
sedimentary rock
What was once seafloor
Shows sea life on mountaintops
There is always an explanation
If I sift through enough silt
Finger each thickened lump
Until it dissolves in my hands
I might glean some truth
Upon which to layer like an oyster
A balm upon all that irritates me
(April 2011)
I, of course, instantly notice
The bare skin of your back exposed
Between the top of your blue jeans
And your blouse as you, oblivious
To my wandering gaze, sit reading.
I wish, like a boy on his first date
Longing for a kiss, to lightly run
My finger tips across your patch
Of skin as a prelude of caresses
Still to come. Yet, as is too often
The excuse, there is too much to
Do for the day: another paper to
Grade, a dinner to plan; so I move
On toward yet another distraction.
(April 2011)
