What Won’t Last
Before they put me in a grave or an oven
to be taken up by the power of elements
chewing or burning away my decaying flesh,
I’m putting words down that won’t last
through the drying of one or two shed tears,
Category / Poetry
Nightcall
when night presses down
and muffles all sound
when your wings are weary
and you would be chained
Books, Boots, and the Blank Page
We’ve been dumped unceremoniously
into library’s book drop
pages splayed, crumpled, exposed
left on airplanes in the pouch next
A Meditation During a Massage
Toes up—will I be ready to ascend?
The world of dirt and roots is at my back,
and though I feel my shoulders twist and bend
as if I have to carry it, in fact
I know I’ll reach a day to step away.
Face up, a shrug will loosen all these straps,
reversing all their gravity. I’ll pray
for levity, to dump all my perhaps.
When I rehearse this passage late at night,
face down beneath the blanket of my fate,
I wrestle with the darkness in the dive.
But mercy rolls me over, up towards light,
laid out like this and rinsed of all that weight,
when I’ll be hearsed, so ready to go live.
Shadows in My Hand
With no new information, only time,
I shuffle memories with a few old photographs.
The camera that we rarely took along—
or someone’s—caught us, here and there.
Neglected Apples
They wait in the fridge with sprouting garlic
and baggies of curry leaves, a season
trapped beneath their skin like a jinn.
No one eats them, yet we keep stocking up
When a Good Cheese Dies
Cheese dies, you know? Not like forever
as an entity. More like a family phasing out of existence
from genes gone awry, uncalibrated miscalculations,
horrible matches in matrimony, substandard maintenance,
perhaps climate change.
One
It’s not the sweeping rain that never reaches
dry-topped mesas buttressing the river,
and not this rumpled bed of hills around us,
or copper flashing wings of the flicker
that feeds on berries in our junipers,
Time Stops. Everything Stops
everything stops. tide
for ten days
doesn’t throttle
the shoreline – sits
quietly, like water
at the base
of a toilet, waiting
for visitors
in an emptied-
out house.
The History of Art
standing with naggins,
discussing art, poems
modern literature
on a corner
in stonybatter
near the lilliput