there's got to be more below the surface
Soft layers scribed over
erasures, poorly scraped;
a velum saved for use
as if it were a silence,
independent of any thought,
original, and never spoken;
emerging fully formed,
like Athena, into the world:
I am my own metaphor,
a translation stuttered
from a transparent other
which I will never know.
My words hover over words,
like mist over a graveyard.
(December 11, 2021)
You see a mirror;
you are not there.
Upon reflection you think,
as countless doors open.
Nothing’s behind you,
except a mirror.
You are alone as I;
another door closes.
You are a wall,
separating away.
You are the way
through nothing.
You are the door.
You are the mirror.
(December 5, 2021)
The courage
to walk out the door
is too much
too often to flee
to the streets;
to leave the house,
this life, to wander
free, to live
without
this constant fear.
So, I stay put,
puttering about
my place
and await
my next breath.
(December 2, 2021)
Often as I read or write
a poem, my mind wanders
unable to track the line
across the page, or leap
with a dancer’s grace, as
the line breaks a short hop
down the page. I drop, lost,
between the melted words
as if in an antarctic crevasse.
The whiteness widens, and
I fall through my thoughts
randomly cracking my head
on a word which spins me
along a tangental arc
deep into the uncharted dark.
(November 21, 2021)
These are my mother’s hands:
wracked with worry, the veins
thick below the skin, soft
like worms in loam.
These are my mother’s hands:
holding my face, stunned
that I am still alive
to walk through another day.
These are my mother’s hands:
kneading the bread dough
for another Thanksgiving,
one more meal together.
These are my mother’s hands,
empty like bones in the ground.
(November 28, 2021)
Unintended, random like dice, or love
the stories fell into place, puzzle parts
as remembered, and retold as punch lines
to a deflected tragedy one night
late after almost all had departed.
You spoke into your anguish. I listened,
troubled in my failed attempt at reason,
for what you had said tore into my heart.
How can anyone know the genetic
strands of what we have said to each other?
where the safe world we have constructed shapes
us from the lies we have neatly explained
until the only truth we know is ours,
tangled in our hearts’ cold reliquaries.
(November 21, 2021)
subtext