My hands are my mother’s;
the veins, like earthworms,
roll beneath thin skin.
As if wringing rags in worry,
I massage the arthritis
burrowing at my wrists.
The ache wears me—
like a sand gnaws
old granite blocks,
until I, too, become sand,
indistinguishable
from the storm’s
final dry heavings.
(April 21, 2018)
by
“without—the power to die”
–Emily Dickinson
An ephemera scattered
like thoughts in dreams;
I am no longer subject.
I am object,
acted upon— chaff
allowed to fall,
disregarded,
indistinguishable from dust.
Yet, I must respond,
must go on.
Despite dysfunction,
despite predicate’s lack,
I stand here
to mark an empty space.
by
Time undoes itself
like an old man
who struggles to recall
why he left the house,
so he returns home
baffled and incomplete.
Each moment contains
its own distractions—
a turning away,
as if embarrassed
to be recognized
as someone else.
There is no time
to recoup, other
than what remains:
a gathering, like lovers
holding each other
against the dark
longing not to be alone.
(April 16, 2018)
by
she knew he thought she hinted
the words he wrote were heard
she knew he thought she wanted
him to speak them to her
he knew she thought he hinted
the words she wrote were heard
he knew she thought he wanted
her to speak them to him
they knew they thought they hinted
the words they wrote were heard
they knew they thought they wanted
each other to speak true
yet secrets left unsaid
are best left to the dead
(April 15, 2018)
1
Between the wild flowers
which have yet to bloom,
the orange tabby stalks through
the light of a spring afternoon.
2
Too cynical to listen to the gods—
I am not a Moses tending sheep; yet
flowers still enflame the yellow
rose bush with celestial light.
(April 15, 2018)
by
My story distorts
the line. The quick
break bends the more
reasoned with its
slow plodding grace,
until it too
puddles like ice.
Then uncertain
steps, upon the
open window’s
edge, slip to air,
and the long fall
feels like freedom.
(April 13, 2018)
as antecedents of us
you are me as we
as he and she are they
one can be apart
as two opens a third
into myriad spaces
thus between places
some other grows
neither you nor me
yet somehow more
than we or they
somehow something
more than other
than something else
(April 10, 2018)
by
Like pockets of rocks poets
carry with them into the lake,
I think of you again, and drown.
(April 9, 2018)
Rimbaud stopped writing
around the age of twenty-one.
I have become old.
(April 6, 2018)
by
“Good answers are wasted on a fool”
–Ann Carson, Dionysos, Bakkhi
Often when I look up from my work
lost in thought, I can suddenly see
with a transformed clarity. I shake
my head as if I could align my
thought with the banal world around me,
like a child peering through a knot hole
in a fence tries to see the wider
world beyond his parental control.
I have no answers for the questions
I am too slow to ask. I’ve wasted
days disentangling the tedious
explanations of fools who believe
if they plod through their expositions
one more time, stopping along the way
to dissect each obvious point, then
I will arrive at the mistake they
metastasized into long ago.
But I don’t, and I am way too tired
to answer why, too worn from shaking
the same tree to find the exact fruit
they will refuse, once again, to eat.
So, I shift my eyes and go along,
blithely humming my discordant song.
(April 4, 2018)
by
“to write against the ghost”
–Susan Howe
I am simply more nothing
to be overlooked, an absence
to be removed, like a hole
filled with fresh corpses,
then coyly landscaped
into an ubiquitous green calm,
easily assuaged and forgotten.
I speak in simple tongues
without need of translation:
such is my metaphor,
eraser crumbs brushed
aside without consequence.
Lost in the muck of language,
I claw across my margins’
sharp fractal edges, then fade.
(April 3, 2018)
“and the night is coming on,
which has no hope of dawn”
–Anna Akhmatova
I lost myself
out of myself
like a sleeve
slips over skin,
a new coat
to hide within.
One is more
than one’s
manifold
projections,
convex
reflections,
staid
contradictions.
I lost myself
in a storm,
my broken arms
flailing the wind
with a whirlygig’s
frantic clacking.
I lost myself
again, too often,
too easily—
donning disguises:
losing myself
out of myself
without myself—
broken, alone.
(March 30, 2018)
by
I’m not sure I do much,
but open doors, set up chairs,
provide a place to read,
talk, write; which is enough
and yet, is not enough
to beat back the belligerence
barking like a spittle-flecked
beast. I can’t save them
from what is to come,
nor always be there to speak
amiably into their distress,
and voiceless traumas.
But there is this room,
an open door, and a chair.
(March 27, 2018)
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