Looking Ahead He Looks Back
Those things we leave behind.
The rooster’s full moon crow
or the blue enameled cast iron pot
bearing the scars of a thousand
meals. Hair on a brush. Harsh
night words and the photos of
a wooden lighthouse from a
discarded life. We choose some,
misplace others. How does a home
curdle within one night’s orbit?
The answer is not your truth. Or mine.
I measure my life in hours lost.
* * *
“Looking Ahead He Looks Back” was first published in Juke Joint, in March 2020.
The transliteration on Chinese-poems.com reads:
Spring sleep not wake dawn
Everywhere hear cry bird
Night come wind rain sound
Flower fall know how many
My poem “What Stares Back” has been published by Line of Advance. Thank you, Christopher Lyke, for taking this piece.
My poem “In That Pause” is live at The Elevation Review. Thank you, Thomas Kneeland, for taking this piece.
Letter from Austin
Michael, when you say moons do you see
cold stone floating in the firmament
or phrases frayed in the mouth and spat on paper?
And does the Spanish moon simmer at a similar
pace to mine or yours? Which embers blush brighter?
But let’s turn to estuaries, to salt and clamor and gun-
running poets and interrupted words sold in stalls
between parenthetical gates, to incomparable cavas
and the deterioration of envy and intervening years.
Or perhaps mislaid passion – a friend claims love
is merely a bad rash, that we scratch and scratch
and inflame but never truly cure what ails us. Sounds like
politics to me. Or sports. And business. Or neighborhoods.
On my street people should cook and play music together,
laugh, raise chickens and read good books. They should
brew beer, swap tomatoes, recite each other’s poetry and sing
in tune. But we’re different here, preferring instead electronics
glowing in dimly lighted rooms. I reject this failure, as I also
reject the theory of centrifugal force spinning off the moon’s
body from the earth’s crust, preferring to imagine a giant
impact blasting matter into orbit around what morphed into the
earth, and somehow accreting the stuff into this orb we
sometimes worship. This, to me, is how good relationships
form: explosions of thought and emotion followed by periods
of accretion. But what I mean is I hope this finds you well
by the river of holy sacrament. Remember: brackish water
bisects our worlds. Turn. Filter. Embrace. Gotta run. Bob.
Originally published in Heron Clan 3, this first appeared on the blog in July 2015.
My friend Michael occasionally sends hand-written notes or letters to me, and I respond with poems. This is one. You might read some of his writing at Underfoot Poetry.
I’m delighted that four of my shakuhachi poems are up at As Above So Below, which also includes two poems by Stephanie L. Harper (one of which was written while under COVID-19’s breath-crushing grip) and pieces by Kate Garret, Sarah Law, Mark Tulin and others you might recognize. Many thanks to editor Bethany Rivers for taking these pieces.
I Live in My Winter
Removed from the junipers’
fragrance, separated from
prickly pears gracing
the hill, limestone slabs
jutting from thin soil,
and smoke drifting from
a well laid fire on a cold
night. Old, today, I
call the clouds my
birthright, want only
to merge with them
and rain through
another black coffee
in this unfamiliar place,
this new home,
this welcome peace.
Sault Ste. Marie
Too often you see yourself and wonder
which bodies ancestors navigated
to gather such glorious scars and wrinkles
in one place, both noticeable and unseen,
little waves in a great lake of flesh.
The mirror is not unkind, you think,
with proper lighting — in candlelight
or late evening’s peppery glow,
after a few drinks. Then you recall
crossing the equator three decades
past, how the deck’s non-skid surface
scratched your knees as you scrubbed
the twists and currents that’d buffeted
you to that imagined line on the globe,
and later, the following points and clock
faces withering down the long queue
of jobs, the spilled beer and incomplete life
sentences. Even now, Superior washes
through its locks, filling, denying, allowing
one’s depths into another’s space with equal
regard, promoting passage, flooding past with
future, present with then, balancing tomorrow, now.
“Sault Ste. Marie” won LCk Publishing’s Spring Poetry Contest in April 2017.
Another untitled poem from the 80s…
wood and water
the wave of
fragrance so perfect
we seek to
obtain it as
if we could
be windows open
to a light
the gentlest cloud
would obscure still
spreading like one’s
final exhalation which
travels only to
disperse and become
at last another’s
This first appeared here in June 2017.
Memorial Day, 2015
I turn away from the sun, and drink.
Every window is dark.
No one hears my song, not even the guitar.
When the rain pauses the grackle rests on the cedar picket.
Etymology: from Latin memorialis, of or belonging to memory,
leading to home and family, their connotations.
Remembering is simple, she says. But forgetting…
The coral snake slips by, unseen.
Nothing lives in my shadow.
* * *
“Memorial Day, 2015” first appeared at Picaroon Poetry in July 2017. Many thanks to editor Kate Garrett, for taking this piece.
O at the Edges 