“The Resonance of No,” was published in December 2016 in Gravel, and is included in my forthcoming chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, available for prepublication order at Finishing Line Press.
Music Credit: Cool Vibes Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
December Moon (1999)
If loneliness breathes,
then rain is its heart,
always falling to its lowest point
before receding. Water graces us
daily in all its forms – the slowest
drop, the line of ice on the wall,
your breath, so soft and even
in the cool night. But no one,
no thing, can fill the void of
departure. You exhale and turn
away, and the air, with its empty
arms, embraces the space
you’ve left. I feel this daily,
whenever we part. At forty-one
I’ve known you half my life
but have loved you even longer,
through the millennium’s demise
and all that preceded or follows.
The brightest moon for a century to come
is but a shadow in your light.
This first appeared on the blog in October 2015. It’s hard to believe that I wrote “December Moon” nearly eighteen years ago. Busy with books, work and life, I didn’t write much in the nineties. But this, the last poem of that decade, recently surfaced. The sentiments are as true today as they were then. I am a lucky man.
You are the name
I whisper
to clouds.
Excerpt from “To the Light Entering the Shack One December Evening,” in From Every Moment a Second, available for prepublication order via Finishing Line Press. The poem first appeared in Shantih, in December 2016.
…Red, like your favorite sky,
the in-between, the misplaced one.
From “I Have Answers,” in From Every Moment a Second, available for prepublication order via Finishing Line Press.
I’m experimenting with recording. This is a slightly revised version of the one I posted a while back, with a little music added. It’s not quite where I want it to be, but hey, I’m learning.
“Magic” is included in my forthcoming chapbook, From Every Moment a Second (prepublication orders taken here), and was first published in Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art.
Ikebana (You without You)
Between frames, between presence and negation, authority.
If your body lies in the earth, why are you here?
Limits admired and sought: the way of the flower.
I pluck leaves from the lower half to achieve balance.
Shape and line detach, yet comprise the whole.
My father, awake in his chair, mourns quietly.
A naked twig forms one point of the scalene triangle.
Starkness implies silence, resonates depth.
Heaven, earth, man, sun and moon invoke your absence.
As you trickle through the interval’s night.
* * *
Ikebana is the art of Japanese flower arrangement.
This first appeared on the blog in March 2016, and is included in my mini-digital chapbook, Interval’s Night, published by Platypus Press in December 2016, and available via free download.
Scarecrow Takes a Holiday
Having neither organs nor neural impulses,
I no longer ask why or how I hear and smell,
taste and see, feel. This morning I woke
to magpie song and onion breeze, in
a body not mine, yet mine, at peace
on Jeju Island, far from my crows, yet
still among friends singing the same
language. I know this: home lives
within, and no matter where we travel,
it rides with us. Like the man who
spoke to me, bald, bearded, a pale
foreigner in this land, comfortable
here, at home. He listened for my reply,
but unfortunately I’d not been given
a mouth, and my words dropped to the
ground and were rolled away by
beetles before he noticed them.
Perhaps I should have written a note,
but he wished to gamble and how
could I refuse? I am hollow, but not
empty, whole, yet not complete,
away but here. He took a coin
from his pocket, flipped it. I saw…
A response to Daniel Paul Marshall’s “Scarecrow Travels (after Robert Okaji)”
