Friday, November 14, 2008

Life Expectancy

It was expected
That we would be
Channeling however
Unskillfully.
We had a few layers of living
And that was why we
were channeling and not conjuring
Whatever we were
Expecting,
We were expecting
to recover
We were living
on less and less
moderation.
We were walking
out of the movies feeling wronged.
We were listening to music
We were hoping something would
come out of it.
We understood.
We were kissing
In the afternoon.
We were astonished
We had more
To do with it.
We thought casually.
We were across
from each other
We knew more
than we first thought
we knew.
We were living.
We were expected to live.

Friday, October 24, 2008

When Wednesday Walks Home

I know I’m a loner
with a fine bottle cap collection.
And I know you call me honey
and trespass anytime you like.
But when Wednesday walks home
tousled like a young pilgrim
I could do her laundry.
Bake pies just to keep the heavy
scent of pastry in the room.
She has as good to me as an extra sandwich,
a Chilean stamp with fountains
and look, Neruda in the distance.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Circling

The narrator knowing the spinning
of the world appeared to know that we’d been lacking
a boyfriend on the rebound, a chance to memorialize
or address the issues in a rather open
imagining than between a rotating
of dampened sun screened principalities.
The interpretation circles back to an
unexpected monsoon. Slowly a repetition builds.
A monsoon kisses the little homes of children.
This is the point when someone turns off the projector
and that’ll stop the circling. But it rains repeatedly
in torrents over the roofs and leaves, over
the children’s homes and turning
the fish who breath periodically
above the stream’s smooth boulders.

There is a moment while the character in the circle circles.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Just Below the Adirondacks

You prefer the visions of the gardens with the venders in sight
The Adirondack chairs that are still for sale outside the barn
with a few early stars opening to a New England down town
If we weren’t at war I’d think that this poem had permission
to have a few oranges strung about it. Out of our navels
Come the blue organs. Come the nice book stores that you might
find this poem in. The floor boards creaking a little as the
many shoes step and pass, a girl who should be the next Carrie St.
George Comer stops by. And through the pie and coffee
and sometimes tea words sparkle like the dotted lights
in the harbor. One by one the rowers row their fragile blades
downward into a sea in hopes to sully something more generous
like tiny white twigs, or elusive shoals of wolves until something smaller
caves in. We are all reading and reading nothing pasted. Not even a noteboard
with things happening, happening, have happened or ending soon.

Plea in Autumn

Lover, common scrap of paper,
I didn’t mean to throw the interception

The crossing pattern never came together
Not even being reflective in a private

Reservoir with trickles of melancholy
Photographs helped. Time was the snow

Battered the afternoon and little
By little the whole field got all wound up

We didn’t even have to be clever or
give a cent to the drunks apocrypha.

Culture would occupy the clover and that
would be as fine as an old movie on girl’s night out.

Besides, the good luck committee is selling garland
Someone fetch a ladder.

Like someone knowing the price
Of a relic, I can’t wait until the next

Scrimmage. We can carry our cleats
Down to the goal post

And should
we pause at the beginning of this

long pilgrimage we could jot down a
beautiful childhood.

Tiny Seed Notebook

Tiny seed ideas:
at the Beach

Christmas Morning
a movie

At School

Snow
Library
Christmas Eve

Tag

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Spain

And it is because of you that the universe just might go on forever

Or that just the kiss fetches a climate of formed companions
with a mouth full of moths

We were walking outside of the apartment store,
That was when we lived in apartments
And thought less of the young men
On the streets and more of

Yes, my dear nitrate
This seems like we are near the end.
But someone will come to save us.
So it won’t seem like
Such a disaster.
Just like my son leaving on the light of

That kiss
will be the only motion of what one may want
even shadowy against the canopies
even in Spain.

Tea

My fear is that this will turn out to be another poem.
with its limited and sheer range of brilliant human temperatures.
It sweeps in the droning silence out in the exploding
Escarpment. May begins with its striped shirts
and people look by at its becoming loss
in the false points of space and someone typing
the fateful “s” helplessly featureless like a good
meal really, like one looking at things
through someone else’s words or something.

Not that that is my fear
It is the fear of the one-eyed animal that sits beside me in the cage
And how it just looks at me expecting something
Both thinking. Come up with
something beautiful
Come like one that is well read or has expressive intonations
Like every syllable counted
and almost has a story but then reverts
To imagery before the truth can be told.

This ice feels good in any tea.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Image

I have been very happy in my desert.
More than you know.
You walk to the end of the street
The earth is a little rounder for an hour.
The faces pilot under the power lines.
The snow has been killing for a week

Ceremoniously the janitor’s clothes
have just tried to waltz.
There’re avoiding what happens when they get older
or something better comes along
We put on our costumes of poems
the stage after the sickness if over
rolls to a stop,
meanwhile you’ve jiggled all these messages

summomed down by the creek
accepted back
The air still has plenty of heat.

The difference matters
because we are too worried about conclusions
This just didn’t happen
No, not in this house
It started in the front row
and against a map of luck,
of occasional measures,
taller grass.

On some nights there is talk
like this. Like the night the dead
drove me to the peace gardens
in Manitoba.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Coast

This is the beach where the fiddler crabs first drew the outlines of their slanted homes among the eel grass. The beach where catapults were first used on people. Where the wind would kick up the writer’s papers forcing him to run home to his slippers and cognac. The beach where William the conquer set out to bring Shakespeare a dictionary. The beach where there were a few suicides, and murders and where people got caught in the riptide. Where every day for a few weeks a boy was swept away. It is the beach where the war added casualties. Where Borges added a mythology. Where I added a few stones and you your Dansani as this ever expanding horrible world of seaweed swayed.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

As I Do Now

I once wrote a line in a poem
That read, “I am afraid like I
Am at home in the darkness.”
That was when I was younger
And didn’t fear the darkness
As I do now.
I know it’s kind of dumb
But I fear more criminals
Are lurking around each corner.
They might be in dark clothes
Or something I can’t see.
And recently my eye sight
Has been going
But I haven’t mentioned it
To anyone, because sometimes
I imagine I can see everything
Clearly and am able to
Fool myself for a few days
Thinking that everything is in focus.
Until the next street sign comes along.
Don’t you notice how mostly every
complaint begins with a certain level
of blindness?
Last night someone drove past my house
Stopped in the front of my driveway
And opened the door to his car.
All the while I was looking out my window.

All Life is like this Afteroon

All life is like this afternoon on your young sandy face the weight of the stars the body tasting like snow a slipcover of communic...