for all the sad country ju-ly crooners
love is just the lightning
flash
between old
bitterness and the new,
a thunder that tastes like
antique lace catch-
ing in your throat
as if you had swallowed
spiderweb under a honey-
suckled sky with clouds like
cotton-bolls behind a river city
summer choking
with angry greens
& browns, river current
swollen and diverging.
in the low sky
june fireflies wink still,
flashing for loves
of their own.
buoyancy
tequila-truths
float to the top
like ice in the glass,
their density more than that
of water, river- or canal- -
would ice float in a tumbler of tears?
i wonder, but the sun
is already slowing,
its journey through
glassless windows
illumining the last
of the graffitied detail, lights on
the guntower (or so you call it;
though surely it was once
an industrial smokestack,
surely…) reflecting
in the slight dark waves.
enough crying, you say,
and we sip on, our
tongues searching
for the edge
of happiness,
the point at which this
boathouse tips. the sun
now well and truly
fallen & the place
full up with suits, we
take our leave; i run
my fingers over the dark
murals of you, feel
the lingering
warmth of cement. we
used to know this place,
the angle of its suns.
now in the dark, in
the wind, i find again
the poems we may
write tomorrow,
and then, and then.
reflecting as we turn from the water
there was such hope
in this morning.
there were springs
and summers all
jumbled up in our eyes.
there were poems
scrawled in neon, winding
between our fingers:
binding, not bound. now
they slog through wet
descent, flailing, &
here we are at the back
of the notebook, a single
leaf remaining
before october ends.
cold settles in
like a low fog,
like tequila hung-
over, like
responsibility.
the river keeps rising,
and i will miss it.
there was such hope
in this morning.
& i am waiting still.
above Mayo Island, late March
waves run against the shore below the bridge, longing
to be the ocean. herring make their upstream leap, and
birds fish languidly from the rocks: geese, ducks, long-
legged Great Blues and a single, bleach-white crane. i
walk the beach barefoot, breathing the air sweet with
new green, watch him perch serenely among the highest
squirrel-eared branches, think this must be what it is
to be in love in spring-time, and alone.
linked to dversepoets for Meeting the Bar.
love by the river in springtime is a perilous thing
the sky is bruised
with purpled patches,
gauze of white cotton
cloud strewn unsteadily
across the southern horizon.
many have come
with their beach chairs
and their expensive long lenses
to watch the herons
chase each other round
the naked winter nests
in the farthest branches.
i watch them watching
from the pipe bridge over
pregnant waters, the little islands
sunk beneath the brown and the rushing,
tree roots emerging from the current like
strange seabirds that reach
for the sky. from the squawk
on the other side of the river,
i know the herons aren’t
in the trees. they’ve found higher
ground among the shallows and
play their love games, as we do,
amid the rocks and the shadow.
The Slip, deep winter
in
shockoe,
foul waters run
downhill, trickle-drip
through cobbles like
tears on stony
cheeks.
canal-shadows
lie like fog ink
in the footprints
of the devil’s half acre,
glutted with the browns
of swollen January.
the river dreams of escape.
seabirds cry grey laments,
the beating of their winterwings
stirring blighted hope
as they careen homeward, away,
and,
for the first time,
i am
afraid
to walk the water-paths
alone.
Consider
consider this
the heartbeat of twenty-
seven stolen seconds, dead
reckonings in
bitter January birth-
pangs; consider
this the end
of beginnings, letters
upside down
on an unfinished
page written by one
who breathes the last
gypsied breath
of penance wearing
chipped midnight
on her toes, walks
the iron-dark canals
like some soulless
wild thing, all the while dis-
(re)-membering:
once upon a
time, i knew
how to write
love songs.
capture no.2
Don’t hide
behind the language,
hesays,
& means it:
sculpt your words
into the grumble
of trains
that rail in
sympathetic
overdrive
beside a silentrunning
river, gray
Decemberdepths
like black
ink
on a wet page
& verses punc-
tuated
with the mourning
warningwhistle
as she slows
on the outskirts
of where yesterday
meets tomorrow.
That crossroads
is all there is.
quarter past two
An owl-
eyed moon hangs
low like overripe fruit,
menacing the hot
horizon with her glowy
berth. Sweat
beads on the skin
of rooftops, perspiring
night-dreams of a dirt-nailed
city bent on creating
itself. The river drowses uneasily.
It smells
like jungle, and sex.
There is good mud here, and this
is no time for sleeping indoors.
Wild things
etch their names into wet
downtown cement, pile
old bricks into hillforts
from which they fling love
songs at one another
and think slyly of revolution.
Laughing, we
shake the moondust
out of wind-blown hair
and run to catch
the current,
kiss the river
goodnight.
True Story
Because I ruffle
more easily than the turtle,
I’m spending today’s sunshine
indoors,
picking my teeth
with the leftover shards
of yesterday’s poem,
flossing out
any subtext I
might have missed
when that
naked guy waded
over to hear my
verse-in-progress and sent
thought’s rumbling
boxcar right
over the side
and into the
river.
(The heavy-eyed reptile didn’t
so much as blink,
neither
at his unsubtle
arousal
nor at my muttered
reading. I
don’t blame him;
the poem wasn’t
half yet done.)
displaced
I woke up this morning
to the sound of seabirds
crying rustily above the clank and
heave of the Norfolk &
Southern’s
ebbing
dreams
a hundred miles
from the
ocean.
grandfather on God and Richmond, right-justified
………. I’m not sure about God.
I’ve seen too much of ugliness for it
to be intentional,
………. too much
of beauty for it not to be.
………. ………. Take,
for example,
……………….. the downtown silhouette
from across the Manchester Bridge
on a winter’s early evening, the
moon just shy of full, blushing
behind lit twelfth-storey windows, the soul-eyes
of a city half-wrapped in rivermist
and dinner plans, grinning teeth
of January jack-o’-lanterns reflecting
over rock and rapid.
……………….. Or
Fourteenth and Main
on a rainy rush hour, drops
………. spilling river-ward through traffic light
and streetlamp, tires
leaving splashmarks across
the footprint of cavalry and
………………………… slave.
Better yet, walk with me
through the whispers
at Belle Island, where the voices of fallen prisoners
haunt the college kids sunning like
………. sea lions out over the self-same
rocks. (Have you seen what they feed them in those cafeterias lately?)
……………….. When autumn comes,
the waters will rise in waves, creeping up
………. on the empty beer cans and cigarette
……………….. packs, washing them down
past Chapel Isle and the ruins of the Confederate boatyard
as the river runs home.
………………………….. When
I’m dying,
take me to the old hospital
where McGuire’s successors taught
medicine with stolen bodies; no
chain-linkedSaint-named designer cure
for this gentlesoul. Andwhen
I’m dead
take me to
Hollywood
………. and a spot
……………….. where I can see the river
………. from a grave
without a cross:
I’m still
not too sure about God.
Shockoe
My world
is the sinuous
curve of freeway
that flies under
glowering heavens
while herons wade
in cold waters;
the sound and
the peril
of stiletto on
stone
and the scented rhythm
of catcalls from yellow doorways.
Graffitied desperation
and the thunder of trains that run
beside old brick
under new construction
in a city that when
pressed clings
to its past as to a mother’s loving hand
but with the next
breath
dismisses her like
dog piss
on the master’s second-
best rug….
[My words
smell
of rust
and river-
rot
imbibed
not through the pores
of cortex
where
moments
become
memories but
through the primordial
pocketwatch
in the back of my
skull
telling me
when
to
breathe.]
In this land
of frozen locks
and thawed oblivions
where treachery and tolerance
sidle arm-in-arm
down cobblestoned alleys,
My voice
whistles a freedom song
to the same soundtrack
you fucked your girlfriend to last night;
rising broken-winged through the
dead smokestacks
as you haunt the canals
searching for loose virtue
or lost inspiration,
it will find you
undone.
Needle-pushers and nutmeg-peddlers,
you have been warned.
July landscape, mid-Virginia
train whistles its late-afternoon
warning over the banks, shooing
herons from their nests, dockworkers
from their reveries; downstream
an earthbound descendant of
graffitied cement and rusty idealism
derives the ebb of the river’s summered
bottom with circles formulated
around the circumference
of heaven and lines drawn
up by hell’s indifference:
equations like battlescars written
not in flesh and blood but in
currents and railroad tracks and cut
deep in post-modern
denial.
an orange evening
we take hold of twilight’s tail and
run with it, burning up
boredom and hydrocarbons as
we flee being beaten down
by the heaviness of the summer
air which sits
over the city like smoke
over a volcano and seems just
as ready to erupt.
at the river’s side
a rumbling screech in the background troubles
the stillness in its flow. stalwart reeds stand their
ground in the eddies; beer cans
litter the pools. rock breathes its heat
up through my skin, siphoning off pain dammed
for decades and centuries: graffitied faces and
iron piercings, a railroad’s refuse. i pour my salt
water soul back into her drop by sad sticky drop,
the miracle of rushing waters salving both our
senses, smoothing our edges while a
midday heat hunkers down, sodden
steaming blanket with an odor of regret.
