This morning you looked down
and your coffee cup was a cave.
Last night I looked up--
everywhere, masks of owls.
It was beneath a bath of cold stars
that you told me about doom.
You said,
It feels like a pit.
Feb 2, 2014
Feb 2, 2014 at 12:18 AM UTC
Jacob hated the film.
He found it oddly depressing,
like a slideshow at a funeral.
The film gave the history of the valley.
It laid out the last hundred years of the land like dominoes.
The director had obviously tried to paint
death as something
inevitable and beautiful.
You know, like a life cycle.
The video was a gravestone.
But the worst part, really, was the narrator,
the way her sad soothing voice smoothed the whole thing out,
again and again, every fifteen minutes,
as if everything, everywhere, were okay.
Feb 1, 2014
Feb 1, 2014 at 1:58 AM UTC
Bags are everywhere
snagged in the fingers of dead trees
signs of last nights weather--
strong winds,
high water.
And so it is with life.
The breeze picks up
and we soar (the
thing about veins and roots is)
until we snag.
Flap like a husk
gutted
on a fencepost.
Aug 6, 2013
Aug 6, 2013 at 6:36 PM UTC
Its the cold time--
February, so we make
a holiday
for “love”.
It snows everywhere
but here.
The cat sleeps all day.
Which is sad,
because he should be humming.
Feb 4, 2013
Feb 4, 2013 at 11:26 PM UTC
For me,
flying is a bit like faith,
a willful suspension of disbelief.
I’m not afraid, but as I arch over the continent,
thirty thousand feet up, traveling at five hundred miles per hour,
encased in two hundred tons of metal, I know that what I’m doing is impossible
Jan 30, 2013
Jan 30, 2013 at 11:03 PM UTC
Check the details.
Next time you see a tree
look only at the edges
of the leaves.
I never was good
at those magic eye pictures,
you know,
you’re supposed to unfocus
your eyes,
whatever that means,
and then bam, dolphins,
floating in the air,
inches from your face.
Anyways,
this Devil thing,
it’s a lot like that.
Jan 17, 2013
Jan 17, 2013 at 3:54 PM UTC
*This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper*
-T.S. Eliot
October
The sun stuck--
hung in the pines all night.
It turned out--
forever was a field at dusk, frozen golden--
and the end is endless evening--
final fall.
November
Snow fell too soon.
The edges of life grew round,
golden, padded in ice.
December
The children hummed,
sat in circles, stacked the bones
of birds like sticks.
Their fathers built fires,
sat in circles, screamed
at the faces in the flames.
January
The ones with wild eyes slid
from their bodies, flared into foxes,
flickered like rubies in the ferns.
Only then did we notice
the shadows---
Long blue ghosts
slanting off our bodies
at angles,
angels
pulling us Eastward.
Jan 17, 2013
Jan 17, 2013 at 1:44 PM UTC
When you die
you walk on, shoeless,
your only light a nightlight,
and beneath your feet,
the carpet--
it’s so soft, it feels
like heaven.
Jan 11, 2013
Jan 11, 2013 at 4:17 PM UTC
Wild eyed, dark faced boys.
The kind of children not born,
but pressed from murmurs.
Every morning
on the way to school
I saw them,
just beyond the play yard,
in the woods, smearing
in and out of trees,
slowly, loyally,
collecting the sap
of desire.
Jan 10, 2013
Jan 10, 2013 at 11:00 PM UTC
*What did your face look like
before your parents were born?*
-zen koan
When I was a seven I wore a mask for the first time,
the head of a lion, hand-painted,
whiskered and grinning.
That night I prowled my childhood
neighborhood, clawed at doors,
took candy from strangers.
The world was small then, my face
encased in cardboard, thin slits for eyes,
and still I remember, even at seven,
sailing inwards, watching the dance of a candle
flickering in the belly of a gourd.
I watched it shift shape, twitch
to reinvent itself again and again,
capable in that green dim night
of blooming into anything--
cliff birds rising on warm
volcanic swells,
a fox in the forest, cackling
on its back in the ferns.
I grew light,
knew that I too was ember,
flickering mystery,
neither boy nor lion.
Jan 4, 2013
Jan 4, 2013 at 1:05 PM UTC