poem ex nihilo
we burn
as the sun sets.
i am watching smoke curl,
feeding sticks into the flames
one by one by one, searching
the shapes of autumn’s shadow
for a metaphor fragile
enough to carry trust
in its silky, river-
fed palms;
for the words to drip
down your open-mouthed
throat like a benediction
and swallow naked, like a sword;
for the way silent twilight
fills the negative space
and becomes a poem
ex nihilo.
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.
Between May and December (II)
The fifteenth. Almost too early to be called morning.
A last wide-eyed breath, oxygen
lines not enough to pull life
down into lungs riddled with what is no longer lung,
nolonger her.
There are no witnesses except the roses
beginning just to bud. He plants a miniature, pink,
in the side bed she had wrested from dust.
Her side of the bed lies cold, stretches
south. The phone rings again,
and again and again. He isn’t
told the day they put her in the ground.
Her carefully tended gardens bloom
once more, fade. The pink thrives
in caked mud through hottest summer,
slight scent of cloying memory.
September brings the burden of storms,
hurricanes. The side bed is awash,
and he is hundreds of miles away.
Wrapped in cold stone,
she can’t hear the wind as it cries.
First frost comes late, softly.
The twenty-fifth, Christmas morning,
a single blighted bud nearing
crimson
has risen shyly against the
white of Decembergrass, but
he doesn’t make it in time to see.
Between May and December
Between May and December
many things change.
I’ll do the falling
if you’ll clean
up the mess,
she says with closed eyes,
glowing. All the stars
in the universe
won’t save you from
breaking. Tamed,
she walks the snows
like lonely Saturday nights,
suffers too many li(n)es
woven into two-
hour unhung
afternoon
windows. Un-
heroed: she offers
the exquisite absolution
of her scars,
pale scalpel-sighs
on wrist & thigh & page,
stale redemptions in
unlit firelight.
I won’t burn
without you.
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.
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.
Your Metaphor
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
These days weather
changes overnight.
Smoke filters sunlight;
embers burn all
the more brightly
for the silenced
desire. Yellow
maple sky, old
cracked oak
carpet over grass
that hasn’t even
yet been born.
Dewed frost gilds
homecoming
mornings,
words like
“hunker”
sprouting in
untried accents,
“distrust” burying
its lips in glowing
ash. A hand
can be a hard
thing to hold
in such climes;
fingers all too
easily balled in
anger. Memory
just won’t burn
as quickly as leaf-fall
and faithlessness
doesn’t pass
with the dew.
an overstayed welcome
Feathered pressures
filter through the slightly
wilted scent
of hyacinths, a spring
reneged of its
promise before
bedtime, all daydreams
on layaway until
a tomorrow when
the threat
of snow is once
again passed
and Easter flowers
forget their bitter-
tipped Lenten promises.
Then,
then the poets
will grow like grass
fed on a sun in song,
open windowed-
coquettes batting
long-lashed verses
at the heart of a city
and spilling secrets
from bound pages tucked
in unbuttoned sleeves.
(Until then let
the runners run
and the dreamers
drink. You and I shall
close our eyes
and breathe deep
of dying hyacinths
as we
wring the holy water
from our best Sunday
sheets, making nests
from nightmares and
sweatstains where
together we’ll lie
down to
wait.)
thaw
Deep
footprints sunk in swift mud,
tire treads of a season
shedding loneliness like
unneeded garments by an
open door, shameless
and dripping and pre-
possessed. Beauty
unleashed with the
ferocity of tightly strung
pearls
suddenly set free from
a shapely neck,
tossed violently
to a ne’er-do-well of a wind
beside a skirt
puddled brashly on
cold stone.
Skin
braised
with gooseflesh
from the nascent breeze,
her secret
petals
unfold.
autumn landscape from a downtown window
This
is my world,
cut into horizontal ribbons
of dirty glass like some
perverted jail cell
set on its side and left
to mildew’s ruin in
a late September rain.
It’s five thirty
and the streetlights are coming
remorselessly on,
beacons of promise
or spotlights
preventing escape, depending.
The traffic pulses with an
irregular heartbeat as the hand
on the old clock
tower ticks past quitting time
and the dull cement of
parking decks becomes
breeding ground for ghosts.
Drops of wet climb up the sides
of crumbling brick
seeking release from an
overburdened asphalt
and the friction of
steaming tires as car
after car slicks past,
owners gripping
steering wheels
as if they were the leashes
of poorly trained pets,
tomorrow’s dry cleaning
hung like gallows
in the back seat. After a second
or a century the light
at the corner of Fourteenth and
Main clicks from yellow
to red, bringing life to
a shuddering halt as
wiper blades huff
back and forth in frustration;
brakes chafe; engines grumble.
Only the rain continues
to fall without surcease,
clinging to the skin of sky
and city alike and saying with its
every chilled breath
a farewell to summer.
it’s a process
head tipped back and lens out of focus
i sip the last dregs of sunlight
from a summer fast fading,
etching her colors black-inked into tomorrow,
tracing my words into the wet cement of eternity.
my steps quicken to match the fall
of the leaves over old brick in the city’s
East end, my footfalls small
miracles of blurry substance in a brittle
dream.
but the words
just won’t flow like
they’re supposed; they start and they
stutter over roots in the sidewalk, getting lost in the
mutter of leaves and passing traffic and sometimes
when the light recalls just perfectly
the way it used to fall
through your bedroom blinds in
September’s late mornings, then
the muscles at the top of my throat
close up and in the sudden rush of air
that i swallow to
push the memories back
down into oblivion, they
vanish altogether,
leaving my shadow to
walk alone through the early October
sunset.
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.
searching
She sips cold coffee
late on a Sunday
waiting for the week to
overtake her, ennui
and uncombed hair
pushed back from her face
by images burned like whiskey
into the clenched confines of her gut:
housekeys abandoned to
dewed grass one summer’s
violet ending; dying flowers
of a spring flung out wide
over barren shoulders;
the roughened heels
of her soul’s master
pacing always
three steps ahead.
Brushing back strands
and consciousness
an unmoved midnight
passes hollowly
and she swallows,
searching, bitter
all the way down.
unnatural
three days ago in a southern town
which never saw snow, two inches
fell through the bewilderment of
a false spring; a young mother
devoured the bodies of her-not-quite-still
pups and the chanak screamed into the void
left by a depleted heart,
his eyes the milky color of guilt unborn.
*”chanak” (also tyanak, tianak) is a creature from Filipino folklore, which, according to some, represents the malicious spirit of aborted infants and is said to prey on birthing mothers/newborn babies.
revolution
snowfall on last october’s dead leaves
fills the silence of a february morning
with unexpected longing, and
i walk slowly through the cold, forgetting
when these paths were green
and hopeful, their summers not yet
brought to bear.
expiation in flame
a season’s sublimated energy
blushes in the embers, rises
to kiss chastely
an indigo sky; rebuked
by a breath of cold night she
returns sullenly to earth,
glowering out briefly
at the darkness,
autumn’s air but ashes in her mouth.
coming of winter
frost fell for the first time
last night, softly threatening
like the absence of touch
after the hurricane of your hands
or the misstep in my soul
after too many sad love songs;
silent.
vuelo del otoño
la primera escarcha del año cayó
anoche amenazando, quieta,
como la ausencia del toque despues
del huracán de tus manos, o
la claridad de mi misma despues
de un exceso de baladas tristes;
callada.
lost
like a child in a cornfield,
unable to see over the ears
but knowing he should be
among heads of lettuce.
or like Christmas in a warm November,
tottering with cogwheeled gait
toward the brink of a wrong season
i find myself
running headlong
into the shoulder of tomorrow,
sometimes forgetting how i got here,
even why i came.
illusion
November crept softly
this year, whispering
caresses with the subtle hiss
of falling leaves, the door
creaking shut behind him; a child’s
sun-filled breathless instant
just before impact
on a playground swing flown
too high. Still
winter comes, the ground
unforgiving, cold,
immutable to graveled knees;
the moment of invincibility
crashed and vulnerable, lying
in defiance even with
her naked eyes.
as the year falls
the scent of secrets
lingers and i crush dry leaves
consciously underfoot,
listening half afraid
to their whispers of what
the darkness might bring.
insight
squinting at the
clock in the kitchen as it winds slowly
toward the end of an hour or an epoch,
i sit at my window, look away:
at the ground below bogged down
in indecision, up brooding at gray skies,
out at the flowers i planted
with so much care, coaxed in
by another season, another lifetime;
now they too are grown
wild and inaesthetic, incomprehensible.
isn’t this always how it ends?
abstruse
last night the sky lost
its normal shade of midnight,
shone a deep purple
in the orange-ish glare of
the streetlamps
as we walked through
late august
to the attentiveness of early fall,
me clinging to your hand in
desperate denial of
what eternity, for one
blind instant, might
just mean.
