I have kept what you whispered then,
I remember it now as I write this,
all the tenderness we could make
between the highway and the mountain
overlooking the rest of our lives,
the hunger in your eyes,
the crook of my arm wet with tears,
the impossibility of it all.
If you read this poem, write to me
while we're both alive.
 |
| Near Swan Beach, North Caraolina |
My sense of you,
As you were then,
Became like gulls
Following my life.
My little boat,
Take care,
There is no
Land in sight.
—Last stanza is the complete poem, "The Wind Has Died," by Charles Simic.
Once we rode winged horses
from edge to edge
over this coarse country
we'd found simplicity and tone
in love and thought
in solitude and poverty
imagination boundless
I think it could be still
despite the fall
I still think perhaps
the fences down
the stables in gradual collapse
wandering the fields in late September
month of partings and rapture
I never should have left.
—with a line by Adam Zagajewski
And a wave rolled through us
as you held my hand
a wave made of words
with a frightening buoyancy
lifting us on the swell
until everything else
looked small and distant
from our bright-bladed height.
Our fatal openness
to sound and to cadence
brought us down
unfinished thoughts
collapsing around us
with a thud that shook the margins
and left a tideline of rack
beaked by squabbling gulls.
—with influences and phrases from Chris Nealon's "The Shore."
 |
| Locust borer feeding on goldenrod pollen |
A sudden stop
to the reign of summer
the earth yellowing
in the September sun
Surrounded
by the mystery of otherness
in ordinary things
do not ask me
for my afternoons.
 |
| Neowise, July 2020. Zixuan Lin photo. |
Even then I knew
her gift to me
would be the void
felt so many years away
from the mountain and from her
in moments of emptiness and joy
and maybe she too thinks of me
if memory is light
traveling an endless universe.
—after a poem by Roberto Bolåno
 |
| French industrial, photographer unknown. |
To awake and lie back down
is another stairway and a choice
to climb or wait for your descent
the risky privilege of another dream
another passage through synapses
turning off the goosenecked little twilight
turning off the Bluetooth and the fan
to lie back down and drift
in perfect post-dawn silence
except as dew gathers on the shingles
whatever gnaws in the attic above us
as close as you will ever be once more.
Sunsets and hay wagons,
old barns, animals in shadows,
and a few country people,
wizened in faded cotton, quieted
by open sky and uncluttered horizons,
some filled still with flame and smoke,
grown old fighting the fire,
each leading his little epic life,
pausing to watch the sun go down
behind corn in tassel on the hill,
the sky the greater part,
then a little dab of earth,
the measure of a day
holding time together.
The day matters
because of the moth on the screen
The life matters
because of the words on the page
The words matter
because of the ache in the soul
iridescent in fluttering time
 |
Rocky Mountain National Park at 12,000 feet with the Cameron Peak Fire raging 10 miles to the west. William Mathe photo, 8/15/2020. |
We do not have to fear it anymore,
The change has already happened.
It is our fault,
We let it go too late.
Even the clocks have run out of time.
How to imagine the unimaginable—
Spent fuel, burnt wind, mute swans.
We, the Americans,
We watched it happen,
The all-consuming crisis.
Then came fire.
We drove out past the flooding
To watch the birds
In the lateness of the world,
And in the great transition
No one could tell
If we were doomed or free.
—Cento from "Poems from the Storm," Elisa Gebbert, New York Review of Books, with lines by Chris Nealon.
though the road is darker
though the night is longer
the owl in silent flight
what else can i do
women sing me to sleep
mysterious Pandora altos
and strings
softly sadly
soundest when light
first seeps
through dark curtains
in easy rain
another escape.
