Shadow
walking,
crushing juniper berries
at dusk
the dog shadows me
in his absence
* * *
“Shadow” first appeared here in April, 2015. It could be considered a companion piece to “Mother’s Day,” which is included in the July 2016 edition of The Lake.
Music: “Thunderbird” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Ode to Bacon
How you lend
yourself
to others,
enhancing even
the sweetest fig
in your embrace
over coals,
or consider
your rendered
self, how it
deepens flavor
with piggish
essence, coating
or absorbed,
blended or
sopped. O belly
of delight, o wonder
of tongues,
how could I not
love you
and your infinite
charms, even
when you resist
my efforts and
shoot sizzling bits
of yourself
onto my naked
hands? I pay
this toll
gladly,
today and
next year
and all those
days to follow,
till the last piece
is swallowed
and our sun
goes dark.
Hyperbole
becomes you,
smoked beauty,
salted love,
and I shall never
put you down
or leave you
behind
on a plate
to be discarded
or forgotten,
unloved.
“Ode to Bacon” first appeared here in July 2017, thanks to T.S. Wright’s challenge.
Yellow, Lost
The forgotten poem, existing in title only: Yellow.
Which is a bruise at three weeks, or memory’s shade in autumn.
In what black folder does it hide? In which blinding light?
I take comfort in primaries, lose sleep at the edges.
Where fraying begins and annotation dwindles to scrawled lines.
Above the bones and flesh of the Egyptian gods. Above my books.
Within these lost minutes. Those moons, bereaved. The hours.
Desire germinates even after our rainless decades. Yellow, again.
The color of sulfur (the devil’s realm) or the traitor’s door.
Of cowardice and warning. Of aging and decay.
How to recover what’s sifted away, the residue of our loves?
Each day more bits break off, never to be reattached.
But you, I blend with the sky, perfecting trees, the grass.
* * *
“Yellow, Lost” was published in wildness, Issue no. 10, in October 2017. wildness is an imprint of Platypus Press, which published my work Interval’s Night, a mini-digital chapbook, in December 2016 in their 2412 series. If you’re not familiar with wildness, check it out. In fall 2016 Poets & Writers named it in their article Nine New Lit Mags You Need to Read.
When to Say Goodbye
If all goes well it will never happen.
The dry grass in the shade whispers
while the vines crunch underfoot,
releasing a bitter odor. A year ago
I led my dog to his death, the third
in five years. How such counting
precedes affection, dwindles ever
so slowly, one star winking out after
another, till only the morning gray
hangs above us, solemn, indefinite.
Voiceless. If I could cock my head
to howl, who would understand? Not
one dog or three, neither mother nor
mentor, not my friend’s sister nor her
father and his nephews, the two boys
belted safely in the back seat. No.
I walk downhill and closer to the creek,
where the vines are still green.
In the shade of a large cedar, a turtle
slips into the water and eases away.
* * *
“When to Say Goodbye,” drafted during the August 2015 Tupelo Press 30-30 challenge, was published by Oxidant | Engine in May 2017, and subsequently nominated for a Best of the Net 2017 award.
Magic
You give me nothing to hold, and for this
are blessed. Devotion
is a mirror and breath, one
solid and illusory, the other
needed yet expelled, taken, dispersed.
Which begs another question
not relying on tricks.
“Who traces names on the sheets?” you ask.
I roll up my sleeves and say “Words
conceal what the glass cannot.”
Source becomes deed, becomes habit.
In your hand a stone, a dove, the unbroken ring.
* * *
“Magic” is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, and was first published in Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art.
What Feet Know
The earth and its subterfuge.
Gravity and the points between here and there.
And sometimes the rasp of grainy mud
clenched between toes,
or a rock under the arch,
an explanation too pointed
for display on a page,
too hard, too much for flesh to bear.
No constellations foment underground.
Nothing there orbits a companion.
No light but for that darkness the heel scrapes away.
“What Feet Know” was featured on Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine in December 2016, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, available Available at Amazon.Com and Here.
Scarecrow Considers the Afterlife
Gathering threads, I join them with a central
knot, producing a sunburst flower or constellation
of ley lines spreading forth and connecting their
tenuous truths – megalith to fjord, solstice to
dodmen and feng shui, suppositions entwined
and spat out. And who’s to say which alignment
stands taller than the next, which rut, which energy,
defines our direction? When I cease to be, will I
remain or dissipate, return in another form or
explode and scatter throughout the universe, the
residue of me sizzling along the starways for eternity
or perhaps just the next twenty minutes. It is clear
that I possess no heart, no internal organs. My spine
is lattice, my skin, fabricated from jute. Eviscerate
me and straw will tumble out. I do not bleed. Yet
the crows consult me in secret and conduct their
daily mercies, and I think and dance and dream
and wonder and hope. Oh, what I hope.
* * *
This was first published at Eclectica in July 2016, with two companion pieces.
Self-Portrait with Knife
Lacking benefit of prayer or belief,
it slips through flesh,
praising its temerity. Or,
parting the onion’s core, reclaims
the right to weep.
How many nights have we shared
these pleasures? I smooth the blade
with steel, listening to the fine hum.
“Self-Portrait with Knife” is included in my micro-chapbook Only This, available for free download from Origami Poems Project.
Requiem II
To say what becomes: this word
bends in the wind of our
breath. Is this too simple to
say? Our bodies gather yet retain
nothing. Numbers, phrases, the way
the ocean rolls. Once I saw
a whale at dusk. Or rather I saw its
tail part the water and disappear
into darkness, an answer too complex
and sweet for tongues to comprehend.
But waves seldom explain. Imagine
something nearby but beyond reach.
Think of clouds and shrines, consider light.
“Bittersweet” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The Loneliness of the Last
Always exposed, never sharing the comfort
of between, you see only the departed
diminishing with each second’s passage, blurring,
shrinking, and finally blinking out, all points
erased in the null, an eye closing in the tunnel.
Or, inhaling the fragrance of an unseen orange
grove filtered through coal and thick, black
coils, you accept the limits of possibility,
known only by edges flowing past, lost
to touch and forever beyond reach in the draft
of the inadmissible. Departure defines
you. What lies ahead is not yours to embrace.
* * *
“The Loneliness of the Last” was published as a mini-broadside by ELJ Editions in February 2017.
“Trem Abandonado” by Rafael Vianna Croffi
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/rvc/29472173566)
O at the Edges 