In That Winter Meadow
clapboard sinks into its colorlessness. Pale drift- wood’s banked by leaves. The year fades with the frost. The last maples camouflage where there were deer tracks, leaves eddy around the new apple. Acorns carpet pewter stones. One patch of scarlet hangs on, blazes like a fire into darkness.
Read MoreTonight It Looks Like Someone Forgot to Turn Off the Lights
Moonlight’s yellow blanket covers trees, leaves cling to branches like lovers, the grass too is losing its green. It’s my pulse that keeps me awake at an hour when even the sleepless have shut their eyes. I used to think I was a romantic. Now I know the truth. I stare out the window and hope at least the wind will stir. Or I wander to the bedroom where my children sleep and I listen to soft snores and whimpers, music enough. I know someday my heart will seize up, grabbed by an invisible fist as my father’s was that first day of winter when nothing was green and all the...
Read MoreAgainst Black Riders from the Desert
after Stephen Crane’s “Black Riders Came from the Sea” A half-full phenomenon— endless russets of dirt horizoned & drinking generous, bottomless blue. Godlings with shakers sing the chink & clink of hard wet ice. This doleful infinity meant no harm. It is only wight in your eyes, or blood from some tongue. Our sadness wrings the mop -up of the cropless & the cloudless. Life is delicious, slow-cooked at 98° F. Wedged onto God’s rim— a lemon wheel coated in bitters, some...
Read MoreYet Another Year
Another year is lost. Another looking forward in the hope that all roads would lead to the desired end. Another face, which had almost found itself as if for the first time in its own place. Only the increasing winter has stayed through a quiet change in dates. A winter more harsh than remembering the nearest things, more sure of itself than every kind of foretelling. I have been waiting for yet other things to sail into the frozen cavities of the mind—the morning noises of children perspiring in spite of the cold even as the grandmothers pray for their own...
Read MorePet
My wife elbows me awake. Clawing and chawing up in the ceiling has stirred us out of slumber again. In the quiet dark the critter sounds more immense than a mouse— maybe it’s a fisher cat, or a raccoon. The gnawing and clawing and chawing panics us, flat, prone, staring into the universe of darkness— frozen in fear over aware of the thin fabric of our PJs, (we whisper because we are afraid it will hear us), we imagine the animal will bust through the ceiling in a shower of sheet rock and splintered wood, land confused and angry right on top of us attacking with shredding claws and...
Read MoreThe Mad Girl Remembers Leaving the Old Year Behind in Madrid
flamencos past the catacombs, gypsies past the monastery of cloistered monks. How little she supposed years past those days her hair hung past her wrists she’d ache for nights when it struck midnight and everyone who mattered to her would be a moat around her aloneness, wildly swallowing green grapes as the clock banged at each bell and cheers and sparkling white wine filled the ink blue air. Those dozen grapes gulped in the square, fast, faster to insure a good year to come. How she’d look for the smallest green grapes, giggling and swallowing for luck and love and then the...
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