No One Knows
There, the dream of flying
cars, and the next,
tumbling through soft
glass, inconsiderate and
hopeful as a child
on his birthday,
hands outstretched, waiting.
Unsmiling. You might ask
where this story turns,
whether the glass reconstitutes
or the car crashes,
reminders of a childhood
reconsidered and the simplest
truth, which is no one knows.
“No One Knows” was first published in The Pangolin Review in March 2018.
Laocoön
This figure of complexity
persuades a lingering
glance, the two-fold
inclination entwined,
horror expressed
in tandem, the sons’
limbs compressed
as the father struggles,
realizing true
sacrifice, the inward
grasp of storm and
wrath and serpent,
his face
echoing those yet
to come, breached
walls, a city in
flames, the cries
of warnings unheeded.
Laocoön, through Virgil’s Aeneid, is the source of the phrase “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” The poem, which first appeared in The Blue Hour Magazine, was inspired by the sculpture “Laocoön and His Sons,” which resides at the Vatican. You might find Wikipedia’s entry of interest. Originally posted on the blog in February 2016.
Windows: A Theology
They capture no light, but allow admittance.
Nor is darkness their prisoner.
Opened or closed, their purposes change,
like water trickling downhill, gathering,
absorbing, dwindling, pretending.
Looking at them, you see past, into.
I have taken glass from its source; I have
fallen through the hard edges and emerged
unscathed. Smooth to the touch,
yet transparent. The words mean nothing
or all, and exist only within structure.
So little to believe, everything to defy.
“Windows: A Theology” was first published in the online anthology Igxante: An Ontology. I am grateful to editor Kate Morgan for taking this piece.
My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain
When I look up rust scabs flutter from your clicking
needles, subsuming even the brightest link in this
moon-drenched room. Communion’s possibility
perished in that wicker basket, and we hold close our
secrets, looped within circles, joined in these most hidden
stitches. Will you ever detach? I recall losing myself,
stepping from darkness into the white afternoon beyond the movie,
finding only strange faces on a street unraveling from
a wound I’d not yet felt. Now you pull apart the gatherings.
Yesterday’s scarf lies incomplete on the invisible shelf,
and tomorrow’s tightens uncomfortably around my throat,
even as I read aloud, proposing family life on a scale
we cannot duplicate, in a house lost long ago in a city
I’ve not yet seen, in a decade before my birth and a pearled
atmosphere of cleansing air into which my body longs to rise
but can’t, tethered in place by love, this terrible, beautiful love.
“My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain,” was first published in Issue 14 of Panoply in January 202
Track (after Tranströmer)
2 p.m.: Sunlight. The subway flows
beneath us. Flecks of darkness
shimmer madly on the wall.
As when a man cracks a window into a dream,
remembering everything, even
what never occurred.
Or after skimming the surface of good health,
all his nights become ash, billowing clouds,
strong and warm, suffocating him.
The subway never stops.
2 o’clock. Filtered sunlight, smoke.
* * *
I’ve been dipping into Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, Robert Bly’s 1975 translations of Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf and Tomas Tranströmer, and I couldn’t resist playing with one of my favorite poems. A different darkness, a separate space, another landscape…
This first appeared here in April 2015.
“With These Nine Figures” is included in Purifying Wind (now available as an Ebook for $4.99, and in print for $12.00), an anthology of pieces about or mentioning vultures.
With These Nine Figures
… and with the sign 0…any number may be written.
Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci)
We attain from emptiness and the Sanskrit shoonya, from safira and sifr, zero.
As in unoccupied, as in void, as in what brims the homeland of null.
I once counted thirty-four black vultures orbiting my neighbor’s hill.
Despite appearing in Mayan codices, they neither sing nor cipher.
Fibonacci’s Book of the Abacus introduced the decimal system to Europe.
Regarding the tyranny of mathematics, is nothing something?
From alterity to belonging, its provenance assumes an absence of being.
Which is not to suggest xenophobia or superiority in order.
Whether depicted by empty space, wedges, or hooks, it held place.
Representation not of the object, but of its purpose, its path.
Black vultures do not smell carrion, but pillage from those that can.
Obliterative in the west wind, subtractive, unbound, they spiral.
Are the circlers in the sky symptomatic or merely symbolic?
Comparing negative infinity to its positive sister, I observe their way.
* * *
“With These Nine Figures” originally appeared, with a companion recording, in Clade Song in summer 2013. I had asked a friend for five or six words to use in a poem. She provided tyranny, emptiness, xenophobia, pillage and at least one other that I’ve forgotten. But it wasn’t nothing.
Still Life with Silence
Not two, but one,
invisible
and stretched between
stump and fence,
filled with
time, defining
implication. Empty
the pitcher. Accept
its limitations.
Listen to what is not.
“Still Life with Silence” first appeared here in October 2016.
I have four poems included in Purifying Wind (now available as an Ebook for $4.99, and in print for $12.00), an anthology of pieces about or mentioning vultures. I’m proud to have these poems published alongside those of fellow poets Sudhanshu Chopra, Stephanie L. Harper and Jim LaVilla-Havelin, among others. Thank you, d. ellis phelps, for taking these poems.
Staircase at Fifteen
Ascending, her centrifugal
influence captures me
and I follow,
breathless,
witless, wordless,
despite all longing
and shared
discretions, in spite
of the thundering
pulse
and the incessant
demand to act
or run.
She pauses, looks
down, sees
nothing.
Suddenly freed,
spinning off
and slowing down,
shrinking,
far below, on equal
footing but so
apart,
never to meet
in truth, unable
to define direction or
motive, I remain
fixed as she moves
higher, far away, close
but up,
always up.
Nothing More Than Everything
O at the Edges 