meditations on the death of summer
fog curling
off the water makes me feel
like falling
off the world; some-
times it’s damn hard
to feel at home here,
the drips of our lonelinesses
bubbling up from a depth which,
in august, is of consequence
to no-one. the sky is as oppressive
as oblivion, a smoky mono-
chromed sheet where
the saddest lines are typed
in a cloudy times new roman
and tossed in God’s wastepaper
basket. we dream
of dragons and decembers,
snowfallen starlight, autumn’s
bittersweet gold like sun
on dappled saturday
mornings, like the flamed tendrils
of my strawberry hair
in the dark field of absence
behind your closed caramel eyes.
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.
epitaph for the soulless
there are
wide-eyed whiskey
truths that trace
velocities, backward. this
was never about you,
the unfrozen intensity
of a moment stretched
into a night, a pair
of nights, sub-
aqueous drownings
in a river that knows too
many mornings,
inconstancy of under-
current winter
horizons & jagged
edges below the smooth
dark of summer waters;; an
itch inside my skin i
bury deeper with each
rasping handful of you
and that the sunlight won’t re-
wind; this,
this was never about you ex-
cept that it is.
between the rails and the river (keep swimming, girl.)
there’s a sun tangled mid-
winter in the confines
of your eyes, spilling out
over the rocks like sick
solace or liquid
lust & trestled between
either shallow
bank as if it alone
owned the hour-
glass dripping
sand into our shoes
& under our
pretenses but
i’m in love
with silhouettes,
you get lost in
the separation cry of
down-stream currents
and there are still
shadows in this un-
plumbed ever.
déjà vu
sometimes i
ache
for the darkness,
turn my eyes
before the ocean of his
mouth
has d(r)ied
on my
lips,
remember
distinctly
the thick taste
of charcoal sucked
through the brown
slatted shades
that hid sunshine
from the secrets
inside.
there are scalpel-
scars still on
flushed flesh,
mirror-marks
of time that
doesn’t pass,
connective tissue
knotted into daisy-
chains of white tomorrows:
where waters whisper
of salt and rust,
there is yet
frost
to come.
i accustom
myself
to the sound
of endings, learn
to hold my hands
close(d). sleep
is the natural
consequence
of over-
dreaming,
an exhaustive
star-eyed
lumbering
collapse. sometimes
i think i
think too much.
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.
when rivers die
When
rivers die,
there is
a silence
of stones.
Like all good pall-
bearers, they
carry the weight
down low, standing
straight while
the lament goes on for
miles.
The sun
unfolds
across old stretch
marks in soft mud. Slow.
Time breathes out
a dirge in oxidized
inspirations,
gasps a
violet ending.
Sentinel cancer,
the wise acridness
of dried riverbones
exposed
to eyes
that do not blink.
Slow.
A despair in sepia.
All graces
abandoned,
broken glass
dropped in faded weeds.
Brittle; brutal. Quiet.
None know her
suffering. None
can say
if she cried
out
at the last.
When
rivers die,
there is
a silence
of stones.
They keep watch
over what was,
blessing
each raindrop
in their stolid way,
dreaming
of waterfall
caresses.
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.
observed
herons stalk the edge of
civilization; the river
sings a marbled song
of fire and forgotten glory while
the sun casts about the rapids; geese
fish from the shallows, men
from the bridge. stones bake;
clouds come and go
like the old women searching
the banks for change and lost
youth while a train slows
with its mourner’s whistle and i
lean in on the verge of
wildness, watching.
as March unwinds along the floodwall
a ragged spring
plies her sunshine like
gypsy’s beads, yielding only to
the river’s raging
fists as it pounds
the footsteps of ice
and isolation
into shaky, shuddering
mud.
Hollywood
We hike through a gray Indian
January scratched by skeleton
branches looking down
over the rocks where
a train tangles its way
between the river and the
dead.
standing ankle-deep in broken promises,
i feel their fevered jags
slit the palmed flesh between my toes,
shrieks of mirrored staccato hitting a
frozen ground like
acid echoes across
the rain-abandoned parking lot
inside my chest; lysed
screams silting down on
smeared lashes, leaving silver-ashed
edges at the bottom of my jaw,
eviscerated hopes sliding off
my tongue and into the scrap
at my feet, silent and unearthly.
sighs along the north fork (oh, shenandoah)
the river up home
late afternoon in november
has no fishermen
to keep it company;
a new sign
by the old make-out lot
says you can’t
fish anymore. SUVs
and little old pickups
crush the causeway one
cement instant
at a time, indifferent.
the same cement
where i used to catch the sun
in a tank and cutoffs,
dreaming out loud at
the rushing currents
where you used to swim,
slipping over the
tricky sun-hidden bottoms.
sign says you can’t
swim there anymore, either.
even for november, it’s still;
not cold enough for frost, but
the leaves long gone,
husks of trees no
longer any seclusion
for a lone drunk
or a couple thinking
they were in love;
we’re the only ones here now,
the river and me,
both too old and careworn
for cutoffs or pretenses.
