The New Year

I’m an old hand by now

at promises paid forward earnestly.  

Too soon broken,

like fortune cookies,

we are always looking

for favorable predictions.

Black Dog

I am too cold to leave my bed these mornings

I linger but not too late in the day.

Black dog makes the leap

Then settles down beside me

As naturally as if the bed were his,

As if I had called him up when all I did was stir.

The light is still dim in the room. 

When he turns his head towards me I cannot see his eyes.

As morning light filters in, he studies my face

As if he were contemplating my disease.

He seems to be messaging me a great amount of sympathy with his stare.

This morning he lifted his paw and landed it heavily on my chest,

Like a hand, like a bridge.

Looking for Poetry

Silver light, warm through the window,
warm over the table and across the page.
The words make shadows
in me like empty oak branches
jittery in the wind.

Poetry is

Poetry is a window looking out and a door leading in.

It is the steps cleared of snow, and then the walk.

It is the hollow near your heart that echoes.

Poetry is like small fishes schooling silver in the shallows, water and light and pulsing life that lives longer in the mind than in the hand.

Poetry is a clutch of small black birds noisily springing from the bushes like notes newly released from the sheet music of the day.

It is the whip-snap of sheets on the clothesline.

It is the green memory of spring to the fallen red leaf.

Poetry is the crow-shaped caa that pries me from my sleep and picks at the kernels of my dreams.

It is the derisive emptiness of choices.

It is you, alone in the kitchen at midnight cold, and you underwater, holding your breath with your eyes open.

Poetry is like my first son’s infant fist firmly wrapped around my finger, telling me in that initial moment, I am everything and I am nothing.

Poetry is like the turn-over of dried leaves skipping down the street, the rasping footfalls of the wind.

december

 

a collection of shudders

skeletal

in the early winter

the alder trees react
to the cold breeze                                  

rain drapes and drops

fat tears washing down

limbs and trunks     

spatters

to the color drop  

below the knees

saturated leaves

pressed into each other      

like steeped journal pages

this is the record

the progress of a year

Yellow Jacket

Yellow Jacket

He sat on the dashboard, in

the sun tidying up, stroking

the long antennae

as if combing them into place.

Nothing menacing but

looking at the sturdy striped body with

the undisclosed stinger was enough to

remind me of the danger of small,

quiet things;  those blended thoughts,

packed full of their unexpected power

until someone leans into them. 

after e e cummings ...works in progress....

Dec. 4th


once

i was calling out   comfort

handing out anything warm and dry   

once consolation of  only i while

you 

        sowed displeasure

 reaping stones 

i was   while passing out pillows
weary among the in-depth of 

between you throwing

assured of  wreckage 
while I  weeping sweeping my glass house
   -in front of  strangers of broken-

was gathering dinner 

swallowing rocks




Dec. 5th

to Jon

handsome however you grow
to love you is to know

    you of the once small
 hands  outgrowing   all

my ideals lost on maps of
napkin and drawn of

sticks in sand wave-washed
out-tide rushed
your new face blushed 

    my youthful sketches  

thoughts like  twining rosy vetches

i am clinging   salt-soaked seaside
love-draped   nodding tide

of mother