Just past the pier
a sea lion, briefly
and two dorsal fins
like piqued interest
very present and transient
only a few kids saw them
and exited the water
but at a certain point
there’s no longer
a point to reticence–
consider the odds
or don’t it still goes
out like a sigh, the tide
the pier stretching out
into the open Pacific
like the longest exclamation
worse than a promise
unkept is one
not made
only implied
no lie
technically
it rained
the evening hours
slumped into night
the difference
between dusk
and dark
said and meant
is gray and quiet
Moody rain all along
Lake Crescent, a fresh wreck
the flares like embers–
last night we kept
the fire going until
its bitter end coaxing
and coaxing a few
more flames
until the night
consumed the beach
it is immense
the lowest tide
the endless
starless sky
no clear line
of demarcation
just soft gray nothingness
and the faintest clouds
of breath to prove
our existence
a blue stroke
across beige paper
a river cleaves
two banks
look at this place
the contorted
topographies
red dirt roads
like open veins
and muddied waters
the stars at night
are big and bright
where does it come from
this possessiveness?
to take establishes
the precedent of loss
so choose
your hypotheticals
carefully–
why don’t they, if only
then the golden door
would open
simple, easy
another girl got swept away
in the Rio Grande,
how tragic, if only–
oh happy fourth,
tell me again
about manifest destiny
how all this was surely earned
it’s a bitter root
that twists
deep into the dirt
the dark gestalt
of things unspoken
and so retained
rehearsed
in lonely moments
was it the sparseness
offset by silence
or the roundness
of the number
eclipsing the rest
days, days, the lack
of antacedence
how do I begin
to formulate a response
it’s unsettled here
dry when it should
be raining
charged
with anticipation
a bee came in
the open window
and then left
nothing happens
of course I doubt
your fortuity
it’s still light out
early to bed
a headache all day
dull creeping thing–
absence too
spatial, temporal
the gingko trees
or the sky in between
I take it back though
there is no void
nothing is relentlessly
a thing
the streetlight comes on
a breeze stirs the leaves
thunderstorms tomorrow
no reprieve
and then summer
turned back
into itself
gray with cool rain
and mist in the foothills
violet arcs
in the talus field
foxgloves laden
with water
and the falls
falling audibly
again
were it so simple
fashioning a retreat
unease even here
nothing quite dampens it
surprising, the sun today
surprising, the sunset
dramatic on the rooftop
suffused, cinematic
and people being kind
genuinely good
it makes the worse worse
the same way presence
augments absence
the news is so bad
the night so beautiful
long
long notes from bitter
-plucked strings
more sudden rain
from the rooftop
a news ticker
wraps around
high across the alley
disembodied letters
top headlines, this city
turning into glass–
impermeable, deflective
burying the lede,
ample precedent here–
furniture in the basement
of the Panama Hotel
under decades of dust
left hastily
and never retrieved
a drawer left open
a child’s homework–
internment camps
extant, planned reopenings
and someone arguing
in bad faith–
semantics
willful callowness
a cage is
a cage is a cage
