Roof Charm
What is home if not exile to the familiar?
A serrated kiss at the closet door.
We duck our heads and cook meals undercover,
the sun’s rays deflected.
And every relentless day finds
our hands wanting.
The black shawl, unfolded.
Wax melted on the whetstone.
You say stars shiver despite their light.
You say one hand mirrors its mate’s arc.
I say warmth flows through you, the roof our sky.
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.
Knots
Who you are not seldom rises
beyond midnight’s
sum: one strand thrown over
another, looped through
and pulled taut, achieving
tension and a sour taste
at the back of your throat.
Everyone believes this
doesn’t bleed. I lock the
windows, draw the shades,
twist the cord. Even distracted,
nothing comes undone.
Huazi Ridge
Limitless birds merging
with the autumn-colored hills
all along Huazi Ridge
this sadness, too, without end
Another adaptation. I hope that I’ve not strayed too far from the original’s tone.
The transliteration on Chinese-Poems.com offers:
Fly bird go no limit
Join mountain again autumn colour
Up down Huazi Ridge
Melancholy feeling what extreme
This version of “Huazi Ridge” first appeared in June, 2014.
In the Place of Cold Doors
We have a word for everything,
or seven for nothing. Soon
you’ll enter and I’ll talk
on the other side,
watch for signs in every
dropped crumb,
every nailhead and
embedded phrase remembered
in another’s voice. The light
will dim and I’ll look for rain and
go on speaking. My words will wander
unnoticed. You hear only yesterday.
“In the Place of Cold Doors” first appeared in Gossamer: An Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry, published by Kindle Magazine in Kolkata, India. I was thrilled to have several poems included in the anthology.
Bone Music
But how to reconcile the difference? Consider
drag force, velocity at impact, position,
surface tension. Gravity. I drink more wine
and drift, trying to recall that last conversation,
those few sentences revised in the moment,
exhaled and consumed in passing. It’s
likely that fractured ribs lacerated the heart and
lungs, or severed major arteries. Sometimes
words evaporate, leaving behind only the faintest
residue. Or they might absorb the ocean’s power,
the beauty, the blackness of the deepest
nocturnal canyon or the weight of a dying
high mass star’s core, crushing any deliberation,
any attribution, with remorse. Sky above,
the earth below, silvered leaves. A shared moon.
This fluttering from great heights. The outward
thrust. The shearing. A fluttering within. Each
morning I acknowledge pain and fear, refleshing
the night’s bones phrase by delicate phrase into
numinous forms greater than their divisible
parts, their intractable sums, into bodies and
shapes extracted through a moment’s glimpse,
brief afterthoughts groaned across the opening
blue, saying I was right, I admit inaction, I
confess it all, water, water, I knew too little.
“Bone Music” first appeared in Gossamer: An Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry, published by Kindle Magazine in Kolkata, India. I was thrilled to have several poems included in the anthology.
The editor of Algebra of Owls has seen pit, er fit, to publish my poem “Your Armpits Smell Like Heaven.” The poem was written last August as one of my offerings to the Tupelo Press 30-30 challenge and fund-raiser; the title was sponsored and provided by Plain Jane.
Fellow poets might consider submitting poetry for consideration. Algebra of Owls is a new publication, and I believe their interests extend beyond body parts.
Letter to a Ghost
Had I not dreamed your death, I would have praised this day.
Your name rests in a wooden box on a desk
in a room far away and twice as old as we were then.
My penance in this phase: to continue.
I gather words close and refrain from admissions.
The clock on the wall seldom chimes,
like one whose vows circumvent convenience, or
a shade allowing the barest sliver of light
through the window. That tock preceding
a long silence. Snow blanketing the mounded earth.
Your scent never lingers past sleep, where you remain.
At last I no longer covet those sheets you’ve shared.
Your name rests in a box. I gather words and refrain.
In Praise of Time
We marvel that so much
produces only
more of the same,
increased yet
diminished, no two
alike yet never
differing, earth to
soil, glacier to rain,
stardust to morning,
open, filled, wasted,
lost, killing, preserving,
making more, wanting.
* * *
First posted in October, 2014.
The Echo is Neither Sound nor Hope
empty trees
a darkened
window
the void
between chairs
unchanged
as if you’d never spoken
* * *
This first appeared in April 2015.
O at the Edges 