Bone to Bone
He claims two sides frame every story.
I count three, sometimes more,
believing in multiplicity,
threats concealed
but never
buried. A dust devil twists across the path.
What ascends, what dies?
Heat, ashes. A shadow’s flesh.
The earth, restraining all.
“Bone to Bone” first appeared here in June 2016.
Still Hands (Cento)
I let it burn, rooted as it is. Now
nothing else keeps my eyes
in the cloud – get close to a star,
and there you are, in the sun.
What about all the little stones,
sitting alone in the moonlight?
Silence complicates despair.
I have believed so long in the magic
of names and poems,
and I know that you would take
the still hands to dryness and
loose rocks, where the light
re-immerses itself. It’s not the story
I want. We cannot live on that.
* * *
Credits:
Sharon Wevill, Julia de Burgos, Francis Ponge, Mary Oliver,
Alberto de Lacerda, Robert Hass, HD, Jacques Dupin, Francesca Abbate, George Oppen.
Read Jeff Schwaner’s exquisite poem, or live with regret!
When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth.
When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.
-Dylan
Strike through the mask.
-Melville
For years I tried on my father’s face but it never fit.
I did not know how many faces I had left when the word
Found its way through the eye holes
And I saw the future blink back
As if it were the one surprised, as if
It were anything more than the grit of time
In a tear. My mother had vision, my dad had clarity
Like a pair of glasses you forget is there
Because to see the thing that made it clear
You’d have to give back what felt like yours
All along. Seven years after she left
The surface of the world my mother died,
The one who’d told me the only time she…
View original post 131 more words
What the Body Gives, Gravity Takes (Cento)
As if what we wanted
were not the thing
that falls,
as what was given
to answer ourselves with – air
moving, a stone
on a stone,
something balanced momentarily.
Or wheels turning,
spinning, spinning.
The waters would suffer
at being waves,
but nothing of their dream
takes place,
nothing that is complete
breathes. But the world
is peopled with objects.
You grow smaller,
smaller, and always
heavier.
You can think of nothing else.
Credits:
Jane Hirshfield, Gustaf Sobin, George Oppen, Joy Harjo, Alberto de Lacerda, Jacques Dupin, Francis Ponge, Denise Levertov, Jacques Roubaud.
* * *
“What the Body Gives, Gravity Takes” appeared in Issue Four of Long Exposure, in October 2016.
Steps
Up or down, it’s all the same.
How the knee or hip strains under the planet’s
surge. Opposite, and unequally felt.
One knows pain, the other does not.
Forever spinning, we remain still,
moving in place. Wanting.
As the heart pumps,
stronger for its labor,
accustomed to the effort.
Forecast
Does the peach
blossom
count its
numbered days
in the lure of false
spring?
Smiling, you admit pleasure
in cruelty,
in assigning lots
to the relief of those
never called,
and those whose answers
remain open,
unfixed.
The freeze is coming,
you say.
Let us pray.
This first appeared here in January 2017.
Scarecrow Questions
Though my tongue withers from disuse and
drought, I taste from across the sea astringent
smoke and the progeny of a hundred bullets
buzzing by like misguided insects through
the theater of the dying, and I question how
pride and greed, hubris and fear, unwind their
cords to detonate these differing yet tangled
lines. How to fathom such depth of mistrust?
The Christian paints her door frames azure, a
Muslim carpets his tile floor, the Jew panels his
walls, yet among each, various segments clash,
and all of their houses implode. I feel nothing,
yet shiver throughout the sun-blazed afternoon.
Then I consider the structure of zero, whether its
body contains or extracts, negates or compromises,
hollows out duplicates within duplicates, exorcising
with a blade so sharp as to peel away memory from
those it crosses without the faintest murmur. Gone.
Erased. Banished to never having been. I neither
breathe nor digest, but I absorb and recall. How do
you so willingly forget history? This post determines
my destination, but not my destiny, not tomorrow’s
promise, nor the returning birds and faith, the long
nights, their stars, their deaths, the following days.
“Scarecrow Questions” first appeared here in February 2016.
Forgotten
Is it simply forgotten
or not remembered?
My father coughs
through his days,
asking for answers
only his brother knows.
Some books are better
read from the end,
he says. I don’t know
what to do.
He tries to spell his name
but the letters elude him,
teetering between symbol
and thought and choice.
The chair tips over
when I lean too far back,
replacing memories
with hardwood
and a new bruise
coloring my thoughts.
This word, that one.
A face, the date.
Last Tuesday’s crumb.
The floor accepts us all.
* * *
“Forgotten” first appeared in ISACOUSTIC* in January 2018.
I Have Answers
But the questions remain.
A little pepper, some salt,
butter. Our rosemary needs pruning
and the music’s too loud
to hear. The lizard basks in sunlight
eight minutes old, but I forget to ask
what else we need. Or want. Just this,
she says. Red, like your favorite sky,
the in-between, the misplaced one.
“I Have Answers” is included in From Every Moment a Second. Available at Amazon.Com and Here
Some Answers You Never Considered
At the cusp of night, before the sun steams out in the ocean,
and blues abandon the reds.
Nothing rests at the core of zero.
Cerulean blue was first marketed as coerulium.
What we consider sky includes only its lowest reaches.
Even considering a dense history with kites, I humbly concede,
and admit sacrifice as atonement, with grace.
No. I say it again. No.
Your visual system constructs the colors you see.
Only when the wind unbuttons its greatcoat, or at the tip
of an icicle, just before the drop catches itself.
Release the line and know the freedom of loss.
Transparent yet wide, unfolded like a fist freeing
a swarm of bees into honeyed air, it contains us.
Your inability to see it does not refute the horizon’s base.
If I knew I’d tell you.
* * *
“Some Answers You Never Considered” first appeared in Underfoot in October 2017.
O at the Edges 