Sunday, March 28, 2010

Dissimilarity


Where gone the years
or those who peopled them;
perpendicular growth,
vascular wilt,
weevils in old wounds,
when cut to the stem
streaks of black stain.

Dendrochronology reveals
years sans summers,
lengthened, bitter winters
lonely spans of dry cold hours
the pressure of decades unknown,
or only unfelt in

cross-cuts
cut downs
slights
biotic or abiotic
xylem and phloem
weakened new wood.

"I wish we could be friends
like we used to be friends."
But there is this agony
in our outer armor
there are fatal flaws
in our superstructure-
dissimilarity,
unforgivable, I guess.

Why go looking for fault?
Why must we name each other such?
Why the need to lay down
whole forests
decades of speechless, vegetative growth
where shade and animal life once?

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Give Up Solitude


Give up solitude,
a promontory
where birds rise air-wise
singing to no-one
wav'ring, thronging songs.

Wav'ring, thronging songs
to no-one, give up
solitude, you've lost.
The road from the mount
goes back to the town.

Goodbye to my fields
imagined just so-
bluebells and lilies
among knee high gold-
late day's light dissolves.

Late day's light dissolves
descending the road
in fields imagined
so live fox and doe
in sighing shadows.

Goodbye to forests
where I alone roamed
in sighing shadows
picking white mushrooms
making deadwood thrones.

Making deadwood thrones
and moss blanket beds,
unfastening dreams
'round the canopy
soar and stretch their threads.

Limb to limb they spread
a gauze of daylight
a leaf-green quiet
an inward shiver-
a thought so resolved.

A thought so resolved,
"Give up solitude!"-
a perfect forest
imagination
uninterrupted.

The road from the mount
goes back to the town
descending I say
goodbye to my fields
goodbye to my forests

where I alone roamed,
a leaf-green quiet
within it I longed
singing to no-one
wav'ring, thronging songs.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Coastal Parallax (a poem in decasyllables)


It is just now that one can apprehend
the lengthening day, that one can begin
a retrieval of hours from oblivion;
nebulous transactions between seasons
and Habit, the rotating planet and
silent sunrise shadows lengthening prove.

It comes subtle, or as I've heard they say
"knowable to those on whom nothing's lost";
we came to be on such intimate terms
with daylight and with nightlight, conversely.
One night years ago extended to this
very present and a certain morning
disappeared, hid in shame, dropped quietly
into that which becomes unremembered-

that which makes us whole, and retrievable.
What worth actions unless rendered images?
Lessons of the day scrawled in a tattered
ledger of dreams (the inverse of lessons,
memories shuffled randomly and writ
and erased and re-imagined or lost).

Remember anachronistic kisses
and apocryphal hands holding empty
air in time? Was it snowing there as well?
Or am I superimposing, shuffling
the deck, rearranging the lettered blocks,
making anagrams of hours- dear, I think
it's snowing here, or it snowed, or it will
inevitably, as I was to know.

Letters rest, but might rise in later years
to agonize over a placement or
a purpose, or you may find half your life
was paralyzed wanting something ineff-
able (I'm tempted to write f-able)
under a bough where our coda began.

But the bowler you gave to me rests on
my dresser and dim memories of your
dresses dress my blessed recollections.
Then giant silence, then sunrise, driving
home alone stripped of all magnificence.
It bled out of the horizon, sadder
than the last drop of this winter's snowmelt;
the sky colored a rosé from Bouzy.