Winds toss foliage in air.
Birds bend against frost
their wings catching the
last sunlight.
In cosmic dance snowflakes
light up evening.
Diminutive
galaxies circling abandoned gardens.
We hunch our shoulders with winter.
Our shadows are long now.
Winds toss foliage in air. Birds bend against frost their wings catching the last sunlight. In cosmic dance snowflakes light up evening. Diminutive galaxies circling abandoned gardens. We hunch our shoulders with winter. Our shadows are long now.
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Vain Reunion She tried to restore the top half of him once filled to the brim with her. In the end, they walked out a couple of talking heads denied the cracked cup of the body, but still slept in separate beds. Manhattan Oddballs The affair progresses in three-chord structure: what I want, what you want, what we never get. They consider having sex on a rooftop or in the mysterious city rain. He likes his listening to Morphine Flush, a thrash metal band from the late 90s. She likes hers without a trace. They argue, they gulp, they squeal, they flinch, they prop open their tongue-tied lives, they scorn undercooked Peking Duck, they chafe at the elbow, they sex-whine while his dog barks, they fall away during post-grunge anti-climax. Like raw, wet fish still shivering with death. In unison they flop, up down, clinging mannerly apathetic, Then separate, parted by the tide of time. I peeled away your anger and stopped building sand castles by the sea. The nation is riddled with thieves and no door opens easily. My childish dreams? Fulfilled, and laid to rest. Walking against the grain I feel the old houses remember me, the homely kid with glasses who spotted a ghost in the woods and got the town in an uproar. No one alive can name that ghost but the houses with their horsehair plaster ceilings hold their ground and the old cement sidewalks retain the footfall of Buster White stumbling drunk from the woods, his face a pasty muddle. Most people assumed I’d assumed him a ghost. Fifty years later I’m certain whatever I saw still lingers where the river trips over sandstone ledge on its way to the sea. The rain brings out the old cement aroma but also gives body to the ghost stumbling beside the river as if commemorating Buster and all the other local drunks I’d once hoped to emulate. Dry bear trees & honeysuckle fruits
crown the crooks of sipping streams, piles of spent bees & tufts of lavender pollinate stump hollows. A thirsty man with unknit bones kneels to fold his prayer into a knothole; there are flasks & remedies at the feet of certain healers. The Carolina turtledove gleans amaranth & pokeberry. He thrashes a broken-wing dance on a conifer needle altar offering himself to hawks & falcons; ransom for two pin feathered squabs: one is taken—one spared. with their mutual wrists slit and covered in gauze are falling in love between group therapy and afternoon snack they pass notes and poems to each other in origami sculptures kissing in the far corner of the smoking patio away from the fluorescent lights until one is discharged and the other wails into bedpans and undermines morning arts and crafts in misery, waiting to escape to the outside world for bitter delusions of a fairy tale romance slathered with bad timing slumbering into the dust they were beaten back into by the hand of winter; awaiting their revival in some other realm; but I would be anew in spring some months before them; and as winter waned and spring washed the stain of death from me, I awoke a new person; and I only hoped it weren’t some sweet dream to swallow me whole before dropping me to the ground like rocks thrown into the perilous sea —a streak of red shot the sky, painting me in the lilt of lilies. In a storefront laundry on North Clark Street brown draperies release this quiet man who has my shirts. He smiles and bows-- how carefully he wraps them. Before the draperies fall back, I see, for a moment, in a circle swirling almost out of sight three kerchiefed women, glistening black, bending, grabbing, sorting. Addy, the midwife cradled a crucifix. Your mother gripped a birthing chair, fragments of the hundred year coffee tree, towels boiled over fire, leather strap and guts - You emerged, glass slits for eyes. Blood pooled, then froze, on the floor. Steam escaped in a ghostly pale as if one soul entered while another left. She pushed you into the world and then never more. Addy sang softly in her work, words heavy with damp, drying what remained before what remained froze. In spring, burlap carried the seed that paid for the land, but this night men - who would never stand and wait - blanketed grief, filled gaps, kept back the cold. |