Poetry

Too Many Drops

I died when I gave her the rose, hadn't ever felt so gravely dead. Warren—the brother— resented me, tore the rose (or so she said). The house of the dead is a mile long with candles: the moon is out but they don't talk about the moon. The marble I named doug has been dead…

Acorns

Last night some acorns fell and woke me as they struck the roof. Each acorn rolled, a die cast down the shakes, to tell my chances in the sun and in the snow to come. What might have been a grief, I didn't go to look for in the night. I closed my eyes to…

Folded and Refolded: A State of Being

I From the Harborview hospital window      the city seemed a predictable plaything. Component pieces of this high-rise map      left me chilly and bored. Two masked men bent over my bed.      With cave-dwellers' eyes they squinted, and cursed the imperfection on white skin—      a trail led cross-grained to my mood-swings. With bandages wrapped, the blood burst…

In Scarecrow’s Garden

Loosely bound and buttoned on a pole, clothed in the      gardener's cottons, the scarecrow stretches as if to feign sleepiness, and sparrows spurt from the garden, beyond his sleeves. He swells, and soft green light invades the narrow rib, a space to fit a      life in, but the breeze drops. It seems he needs only…

The World at Dusk

There are those I attempt to describe. The words always fail. One man has a face of winter and only summer words find me. Or worse: the words of spring which trample the winter face. It is not as romantic as a curse. I find my first two names in a cemetery. Every moment life…

Great Horned Owl

On a dawn walk I startled a great horned owl, wary, near, on a low limb of a tree downhill from me. Those slow wings opened, broad as a man, two men, and he sank fast down into the hillside in blank silence, a wall toppling its whole enormous length that does not touch a…

How It Comes

Like the small sound from across chain link, your briarhopper neighbor taking a long pull on a Bud then splashing a little on his hibachi that smokes like an old box camera, and spraying, too, his pale wife wearing a zebra-print halter over breasts full of sway and collapse, who ricochets back and forth, back…