Winter Heart

Dear Jane,

The house is quiet

at eleven this evening.

I’m writing you

a letter on the piano.

The key is A minor,

the perfect pitch

for sunsets, red wine

and fog slowly dancing

across hollow waves.

My eyesight is hollow

these days. The house

is ill-kept. It tends

to ramble as though

it’s an old man,

or old woman and life

is divided between

the universes of porch

and bedroom window.

There’s always division.

It creeps slowly

in the fibres of subtraction

and addition. It haunts

every equation.

Perhaps I should pray

for sums. I dream

of summations and

conclusions. I long

to see a pier,

a dead end sign,

the terminus of a valley,

where dolomite is

a hundred-foot step.

I need a reason to

come to a complete stop.

With B flat, icicles

form in my memory.

Long talons hang

from the eaves of events.

Yesterday is

a Royal Dolton scene

on red velvet.

Last month lumbers into view

and I’m stopped

at a red light.

Diane laughs beside me.

The world crumbles

into snowstorm.

The key of C is summer.

It doesn’t exist

on this piano. I can

play a song in A minor.

Love, Carol.

Cat’s Cradle

Bound around fingers, a twisted ligature emerges
under March light. You bring your palms ashore —
prow cleaving a settling tide —

accept the cradle, commence
weaving alterations. I detect metamorphosis,
as though orange-flaked caterpillar

has scaled the milkweed leaf,
or sun crept determinedly to naturalize
the dusk in leaf-clogged eaves.

An ennui entraps me then
and stretched white yarn becomes
a snow-stopped plain, an enervating slap

of leaden waves, seagulls screeched over carrion,
dust on the sofa’s dark arms.
Clock drags the sun along,

shadows are a deceptive place, with stuffed corners
and secured doors, hidden chairs and alley cats —
smiles tooled to razor blades.

I slowly furrow my lands — uncertain terrain —
acknowledge your incorporated cities against mine —
carefully resift structure, lest the cradle should fall.

Defensive Wounds

Some days, I’m uncertain.
Oh, not of whether the sun will rise,
or the moon find a convenient cave
in the hind-quarters of
another blistered sunset —
no, not that, but rather if
my pants are on, my tie
set vertical and my words
understood. Words are,
after all, the only window between,
the only communication
my bottle body — floating
a southern sea,
asking to be saved — can find.

Games For a Tuesday Conversation

In a sentence,

wrapped shawl-like around our actions,
we’ve divided this bit of Tuesday

into segments of time,
constructing life,

a paragraph mimed in fast motion.

This Lego truth owes its existence

to the same architect who wrote
the song you love,

that vase of winter flowers,
a crinkled photograph

in a wallet without money.

Between the eye and the word,

asphalt is a snake,
and our cognitive center

plays bumper-truth,
always trying

for the highest score.

Two Nodes on Lines Which Will Not Meet

insertions/coat draped leisurely across
the arm of a minute/texture
to sun stroking sere leaves
clicking steel-mesh fence/and
word ocean/word soup/word
soul/word spin and weave
and dance and song/word waves
broken on twined fingers/twisted
stories/broken backs/spines
twisted on the point of ecstasy

when our dog ran down the street
and you pursued through back yards
and front flower beds yelling his name
with a siren cadence as though it was
again World War Two and the dumb bombs
were on their way to kill people too smart
to be the victims of anyone’s destiny
but their own I remembered a line
from that book you’ve been reading
the one you keep trying to read
portions of to me as if you’re again teaching
and I’m a first grader as comfortable with
mathematics as I would be climbing
on your knee/you know the part
about what love costs even if
it’s given away for free
and I recognized the dance
for what it is/two swans in sunlight
who are really motes on an atom
playing tag where the real intent
in not to meet but rather to dream

Security

entry allowed, denied, debated, defined

and partitions, isolations, closures,

representative catalogues

(we can compact them with rules

without variance) and road maps

to compliment the Grand Personal Self

but the artery carrying emotions

remains an uncharted veldt

where shadow creatures

fall from the perihelion of love

the world gravitates

in this direction -- towards dusk,

towards alone, towards

the twinkling point of black

Notes on a Possible Poem

The truths of any one nation are

the lies of another, yet
we continue to seek
truths in the same way sand
hounds ocean, clouds disintegrate
out of storms, cards are placed
on a table greasy with
a thousand meals
and as many parables about
children, hangnails, that dark
thread which chases us
from sunburst to sunburst moment --
a halo vibrating to
the rhythm of a timepiece
we will some day abandon,
along with all the answers
we were unable to believe.

MFA Candidate

sweep sere articles blowing
down sentence streets

bag experience and recycle
in alleys and cafe’s

become a colony of sentences
on eroding isthmus

extemporise the vanity of white
cuddling phallic black print

memorize the addresses
of experience and denial

the wind in time will blow
everything into a confusion

In the Hatchway of Probable Impossibilities

Time stops / BEgins stitched and RAGged
wobbly-HIStoried / DAYs weaned from
EXpecation /a bullet / a bomb / a ROAD
a ship and ocean / WHEN ocean still was
separation / Respite / and road was DEStination.

I mumble AUTumn flowers / the DESicration

Between coffee and a half-CENtury of desperaTION.

Can you NOT ImaGINE that your ISOlation was
as much an ABANdonment of me as it was
you / young GIRl / losing the world / Mountains
and SKY / not consoled / argumentative
in the broken TIME machine.

After the War

the bleeding never stops –
slow leak soaks through generations

one shot and death, change
creeping from the shadows of possibly

metamorphosis is a terrible gamble,
more often failure than wild success

she wasn’t there – on the corner
where buses exhale harsh air
and concrete waves break against steel
under an apostrophe of time –

but you were, print dress,
fresh smile, a jazz of motion

it’s still enough

Random Sunday Evening Thoughts


Freedom is not control,
but rather not needing it.

I am free
in September rain,

in how it slides
down asleep grass.

Asphalt is an expression
without speed limits,

without shoulders and fences
where the horizon falls.

I am free in sight
along the strong lines

of an idea opening petals,
thought sustaining imagination.

Consequence

after conversations concerning,
as hands cradle coffee cups --

in the crevices between
voices a physical presence

dripped from the cores of stories
which seldom evolve beyond --

in the years history accompanied
us through, as though a camera,

We, historical librarians cataloged
and the waves we witnessed

caressing and careening
the Tobermory coasts between

harbors became metaphor
for change freed from entropy

and our loves were chipped smooth
by wind, by waves, until they became ice