I hear it most when on the cusp of sleep:a whisperunlike a voicethat scurries from one ear to the next jittering something small and breathybefore slipping into the grey-black hum of a room bent on rest.Usually I turnpull the sheets to my noseand breathe the loving scent of yesterday’s warmth(something of lotion and laundry and…
Category: Poems
Eastward
I will show you something different from eitherYour shadow at morning striding behind youOr your shadow at evening rising to meet you. — T.S. Eliot We do, each of us, move like the sunfrom one crest to another. Though some have learned to turn,follow shadows in the evening,go where they lean.There, they say, in the…
Light Falls and Fills
Light falls and fills… – Theodore Roethke I feel for the switch,Stroking black air until myFingers find the light.
Holiday Cards
Scuffing through the kitchen, I stopped to right a slanted card slipping, as it was, under gravity and magnet. I pulled its corner to a wrinkle-black space, an open patch among the others, the red and green and gold and seasoned blend of photograph-news: a baby curling into its breath, scraps of gilded glass, a…
Windfall
I dropped a leaf along the path to see where it would go. The wind caught it, danced it to the high rock where she let it rest, orange-gold in the unimpeded light. Then, without warning, she pushed it with a rage-gust, tumbled it to a crevice where she let it lie, shadowed in hovel-decay….
One Word
One word from you and I would have–When I thought at lastthe sun was shining, the storm abating, and the colors returning to the world between our worlds (not as vibrant, but vibrant nonetheless)it took only a word–one word–to realizeI’d imagined the color, seen it glimmering through my own translucent windows which I’d taken great…
Sparrow
“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet I found a remnant of your lifewhen I arrived. Caught on the glass,it fluttered as I slowed until,stopped in the windless room,(like you) it grew still.I had drifted—the sun was behind me, pulling its golden blanket across the late-summer landscape,the war-room…
Reckoning
“Have you reckon’d the earth much?” – Walt Whitman I used to lay in the grasswaiting for bugs to traverse my limbsto feel their tiny rapid treadon my skinlift my head andcount the stripes on their backsthe dots on their underbelliescatch their gaze for a moment—perhaps it was to feel,to venture I belonged in their…
Weight
let the water consumelet my body sink beneath its weightuntil it dissolves behindthe tile, the faucet, the flickering lightlet the room, the world I inhabitbe everythingand all else dissipate with the ripples I makedipping my limbsinto the invisible filmlet the surface be still above meand let me be as the surfaceas the space that holds…
A Simple Text
careful am I with words but quicker they seem to be with thoughtsthat come to themreadypacked with a punchlaced with somethingboldwhile I sip waterin the minutesthat lengthen with each keystrokeand backspacethey send insight instantlyto the skywhere I’ve beenlingeringbusy for hourspiecing wordstogether block by blockwhen I ought to havefinished at least somethingnothing remainsthe bottomlineuntil I emerge…