Two years with no word.
The stick you planted
sprouted leaves last spring,
restoring hope. We had long
thought it dead. Two leaves
and a bud. A note
scrawled on a dollar bill,
unsigned and smuggled out
by some kindly stranger.
This is not much.
We can do little
but watch the tree grow
while you count steps
and deny the walls of a room
that light never touches.
“Return (El Salvador, 1983)” first appeared here in June 2015.
You Are the Wind That Trusted
The barriers I could not place, the incomplete lines and unmouthed
verbs registered in stone, saying I am here,
as if taw were born in evil, and not the fruit of the need to mark.
At what velocity must sand scour these walls to obliterate the hand’s
intent? How may we gauge design? Galileo’s thermoscope
crudely measured temperature variation, but in 1612 Santorio added a numerical scale.
For centuries, T did not produce a miniscule and stood tall in its singular representation.
Hydrated iron oxide, mixed with bone marrow and charcoal, yields
ochre, a formula that predates writing.
Development, not invention.
T’s varying structure may be one of sequence and slippage.
Thermoscopes were open ended tubes dependent upon air pressure.
Celsius originally proposed a scale with 0 at the boiling point.
A cruciform. The capped spike. Blended tongues.
Complexity intrudes with every step: smoke-darkened ceiling.
***
This appeared on the blog in February 2016. A slightly different version appeared in Otolith in fall 2013.
After Reading That Dogs Relieve Themselves in Alignment with the Earth’s Magnetic Field, I Observe and Take Notes
Perhaps Ozymandias is an anomaly. He shows no
preference for the north-south axis while pooping,
and may hedge his bets slightly to the east when
urinating, especially at twilight. Clara the miniature
Schnauzer, ever Germanic in her manner, preferred
true north, always, while blind, deaf, humpbacked
Maury pointed his rear right leg forward, to the south.
Jackboy the cattledog was an omnidirectional reliever,
as is the Chihuahua, Apollonia, although she twists and
snaps at blinking fireflies in mid-squat, never connecting
with the dancing, lighted beetles. I do not recall the
bulldog’s habits, but Scotch trended towards the untidy
in all else, and expended as little energy as possible,
often leaning against the house while peeing on it. I
cannot say which direction my next scientific inquiry
will take, but I will, as always, follow the dogs’ lead.
This poem last appeared here in December 2017, and was written during the August 2016 Tupelo Press 30-30 Challenge. Many thanks to Susan Nefzger for sponsoring the poem. She is NOT to blame for the title or the contents of the poem…
Hummingbird (3)
Arriving from nowhere,
its mouth opens
but what escapes
comes not from within
and is never complete.
Words, too, falter
in this space,
struggling to remain
aloft, challenged yet free,
an exchange
between air and wing,
of sound and thought,
occurring as it must
without design
or desire, simply
there, then gone,
a presence one notices
in its absence.
* * *
“Hummingbird (3) made its first appearance on the blog in December 2014.
Forever
Our dogs hide under the bed,
escaping thunder.
But the sun shatters
a cloud and I know
we will live forever.
Each hour is the sky,
every day, another
star. Now the trees
join the wind
in rejoicing. This
is what we make,
they say. Only this.
* * *
“Forever” made its last appearance here in April 2018.
Hummingbird (2)
It embraces what the mind cannot.
To touch, to be
acquired in the way that light
is drawn to the seed’s
core, one must imagine
silence in the purity of
space – that emptiness between
thought and utterance – filled
with what precedes
intent. The movement
has no end; it is
the breath inhaling us all.
Elegies for the Night (2002)
for W
1
You might palm a small token, damp and misshapen as the words
you expel, never admitting the dark truth.
Or the plundered life, neither black nor white, invisible yet whole.
Someone prays, yet all around silence reigns and the snow melts.
Possibilities cleansed in the light of misplaced certainty.
2
The charred wind’s fruit bears little resemblance to its predecessor.
And later, within the garden’s stones, what remains
but an acrid taste on the tongues of the speechless?
And if the bones have dispersed where might their thoughts reside?
The wind takes nothing it does not want.
The wind wants nothing.
Nothing remains.
I am afraid, she said. Please tell me.
3
Though the moon returns in its diminished
state, I shall not listen. Words
turn back and eat
themselves, exposing intent
behind form, consonants beneath
vowels lying in wait. Abandonment.
And further senseless
debates: gain from loss, shock and awe,
the incessant demand for others to do
not what you would do but what you would have them do.
I claim no insight,
but even the light you reveal burns unclean.
4
Despair and its siblings fall to mind.
Scarcities: clean water, air, the simplest meal
when ashes swirl and fingers burn long after
the rain. My son, my son,
and other cries lost in the sand.
If he listened what sounds could he bear,
what sights, which odors? I tremble and lie still.
* * *
“Elegies for the Night” first appeared in Boston Poetry Magazine in April 2014.
New Year
How transparent you’ve become:
even the leaves blow through
your pockets, and penitents
line up, awaiting the latest word.
Those who have, fear the most.
Each day collapses under its own
weight, rising again into the new.
Surgery brooks no illusions;
this house, too, will fail.
Owning little, I pour tea and wait.
“New Year” first appeared here on January 1, 2017.
Hummingbird
The thought makes
trembling so
incomplete, a consequence
of knowledge attained. I look out
and see leaves flitting in the dusk,
the air closing around them
like the mouth of an old well
swallowing light. Such
hunger we find difficult
to comprehend. The wind shivers
through our lives and repeats itself,
though differently each time.
Every departure is a return.
“Hummingbird” made it’s first appearance on the blog in December 2014. I wrote it in the 1980s, probably between 1987-1989.
Endurance, 1946
Unaware of the day’s movements, she paints her
reply to the bracelet of light flaring above
the horizon. Tomorrow’s edict is gather,
as in retrieving a sister’s bones in black
rain, reassembling in thought
a smile that could not endure despite
its beauty. I seek a place
of nourishment and find empty bowls.
What is the symbol for peace, for planet?
How do we relinquish the incinerated voice?
Under the vault of ribs lie exiled words, more
bones, and beneath them, relentless darkness.
And whose bodies mingle in this earth?
Whose tongue withers from disuse?
The eight muscles react to separate stimuli,
four to change shape and four to alter position.
Turning, she places the brush on the sill
and opens the window to the breeze.
Exit the light, exit all prayer. Ten strokes
form breath. She does not taste the wind.
“Endurance, 1946” first appeared here in January 2015, and was published in Fahmidan Journal in November 2020. Thank you editors Ranna Kisswani and Anthony R. Salandy for taking this piece.
O at the Edges 
