1.
Long, empty days flee into the past.
No agenda.
No impulse.
No telos.
No soul.

My whitewashed angel claps
her silver hands.
I hear a dead man’s cry
sink slowly in the sands.

A mortar round pounds
the trenches at Verdun.
His heart stopped, Edward Thomas
blinks and falls.
Robert Frost tosses an apple
across the mending wall.

2.
Akhmatova mourns a faithless love.
Stalin disfigures her features
with a blood-stained dove.

Poetry extends beyond
the horizon of time.
Its foundation transcendental,
its meat image and rhyme.

3.
Empty days escape into the ticking void:
a metronome made meaningless,
a vacuum of joy.

Seeds sprout inside a driveway.
Dirt blackens in the rain.

Now knows no start or finish.
Eternity tightens its grip in vain.

We trundle down the wooden steps
behind the weathered farmhouse,
headed toward the orchard
planted in yellow grass.

Only one tree still bears fruit,
the others desiccated from unwilling
neglect, the bequeathal of old age,
the dark turning of nature's cycle.

Looking back at the westward window,
I see nothing but its vacant stare,
seeking the setting sun to reflect
its waning light.

You stumble past the lonely apple
hanging precariously above the ground.
When it falls, your legacy of husbandry
will be complete.

I glance into the dull glaze of your
ancient eyes, seeking a light to reflect
my image, hidden neatly in
the folds of your wrinkled face.

I am the only fruit left hanging
from your long, English lineage.
I ****** the wizened apple
and lay it lovingly in the grass.

It will wither with the winter winds.
Next to the sun's slanting beam,
I feel the frisson of autumn's chill.

Dusk settles on the fields.
I stare at your stooping frame,
my arm hooked precariously
through the tree's crooked branch.

1.
Memory blankets the past
in a neon green meadow
dappled with gray bits of matter.
They ooze and coalesce into a brain
brimming with unconscious narratives:
glottal globs clogging the gaps
of personal history. Tales of sound
and fury signifying nothing but the living self.

2.
The Transcendental Ego reigns over all,
smoothing the way for a unity of experience,
smoothing the way for a universe of sense.
I stroll alone through the empty patches
of meadow, waiting for Wordsworth's
daffodils to bloom. Waiting for poetry
to usurp the role of narrative, metaphor
crowned as the foundation of knowledge.

3.
The past besieges the present like Time''s
Trojan Horse, teeming with shadows. At their edges,
light lines the darkness. To try to remember now,
the tabula is a noirish rasa, staring back
through dull, heavy-lidded eyes. We see as we are seen.
Memory dances before a mirror, an image so close
to our touch, yet so far out of reach. Starved for imagery,
we strain toward the black. Only connect. Only connect.

1.
You speak the word
that will hold back
death, muffled along
the forest path.
I seek a clearing
to hear clearly
what was said.
I seek an opening
to liberate
meaning. Nothing
shows itself, save
the flittering of birds.

2.
The poem is not yours to keep,
nor the others, who so eagerly read.

It belongs to the earth,
fated for the forest floor,

sifted through mounds
of leaves, yellow and brown,

buried by a hiker's boot,
unwilling to be found.

3.
Poetry fortifies the bond
between spirit and breath.
Each verse an exhale.

Poems dwell in the dank forest,
silent, thick and dark.
Our hut hovers high in the sky.

In the sky, exhales dissipate.
The word thins, death thrives.
Poetry fortifies the final whimper.

1.
Stone castles float high above the moat,
rising in the empty sky.

Colonnades of clouds pummel the shoreline,
but plunder only Time.

The silver lake reflects the face of God.
Forsake its lifeline,
trace its outline in darkness,
then dive, dive, dive
to retrieve your destiny.

The horizon sleeps at the end of the road.
Light turns, but withholds its blessing.

2.
Pilgrims clamber over slick, thick cobblestones,
combing the ruins of history.
They slip, slide and slither back,
only to lose their way.

A baby-faced mountain bends low
to brush a raindrop off a rose.
The rose reddens, the mountain shudders,
and love blooms —

even as older peaks,
streaked in early snow,
grind their teeth in envy.

Obey your nature.

3.
A crown of fog settles on the silent village.
Wet cobblestones snake back upon themselves,
pooling castles on the ground.

The road plummets to the shoreline; the horizon weeps for no one.

Light turns; Time tires; and infinity seeps into the soul.
Bruised pilgrims withhold their blessing.

Beneath the love-struck mountain,
a lonely traveler gropes homeward.

Patches of empty sky carry scents of welcome:
There, unbidden, tranquility awaits.

Experience absorbs mind, shapes its ethereal body.
The invisible encircles the straining atoms
of thought, expands until there is space
to fill with my mind as your mind.

vapors coat the night
mist rises to the heavens
stars pulse light and life