Shadow

Genesis by omission
of light and weeded
words.  And shaped into
a memory, the small nick points
tumbling through an almost
recognizable landscape.

Like when the wordless sun
consumed two hours between
wine at four and the battle of six.

So much uninterpreted noise.

Some Mornings

The tickle sun along
the backbone of a dream is
not enough, nor is the
hum-drum chatter of birds

bivouacked in back yard spruce

enough against the weight of
words, the viscous spine
caged supine by ghostly bars

of memory.  No longer
enough, no longer the
musculature to heft each
syllable and pan for nuggets. 

 
No longer a realization, rather
just another moment in
the press, the juice extracted,
exhibiting a hint of remorse, with

a solid backbone of travail and
a long, fading finish of regret.

We Create

In the solitude of pen,
the structure of sentence, we
create.  And every idea is sand —
reconsideration variable, tide,
the work of wind in hallways,
meeting rooms, the voices howling
across the bones of truth;
the bones restive and resolute
with the power of a reality
set in stone.  As though there is
permanence in stone.  Speak
with any sandbar at the
terminus of a river and it will
tell you tales of the days when
it was rock, the cliff face,
the terminus of time’s advance.

Forty

A photograph of time never
has the opportunity to halt
anywhere, to linger like fog
on river or lake, like frost
on new-mown lawn, or snow
sarcophagus for a forgotten
finger of regret, that line
between two eyes longing
for retreat, as glaciers will
when footsteps of heat again
walk north, like mouths will
mouth a cannonade of words,
each clinging for just
a moment on that flicker of
events, on that color of
emotions, on that fabric
we wrap ourselves in,
adventurers forever advancing,
colonizers, world changers,
just mothers as well, just
worriers, just travelers on
this string between the womb
and one last breath somewhere
we never imagined we
would ever be.



A ineffectual attempt to capture what is expressed in the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/03/magazine/01-brown-sisters-forty-years.html?_r=0

A Too Long Novel

Black air forms rivulets
and flows down the bough of
your arm, meets the intersection
of substance and absence,
hesitates with feline grace,
trapped in that moment before
pouncing,  and exhales the way
sunlight might when introduced
to  a field of sunflowers in
August, a sheaf of wheat bleached
by its time in July, rain dissolving
into the fractions of a prism.

 
Graceless black air, ice,
void behind the fascia of eyes,
oxbow lips, the scripture of
a well-tuned cadaver, dripping
as its illusions melt.

On Watching Diana Krall In Rio

The bass player must consider
the music differently.  With
some diffidence he must view
the lyrics, free,
while he is similar to
a train constrained by the tracks
which wade through city,
cut a chasm into the drums,
trill-less in the piano’s grace.
It’s just the bass, footsteps
on a rainy November evening,
church bells on the hour,
coffee brewing before decisions
are made on a foggy morning,
the pace which never wins
the race, yet, like the timing belt
in an automobile, it is impossible
to function without.