The heart is not here,
it can not, will not, be here—
in all this rain, more than
we’ve seen in several years.
A rabbit darts through
the overgrown lawn,
now gone to seed, each blade
a reproach. What hasn’t
been done, what can not,
will not. A sparrow ascends,
becomes untethered. Motion
is sometimes but not always
distraction. The clouds oppress
but containing is what breaks you.
In their garden beds
the radishes crack.
worms at the core
like you’ve always known
I’m sorry it’s take me so long
to see and to act
but if you want to tear it down
and build again from scratch
here are my hands
and here is a match
To wound the heart is to create it
I felt it flit across
the back of my hand
before I saw it
a fleeting shadow
a large spider
already gone
before the stomach drop
the untaught unease
I saw another stationed
on the orchid’s leathery leaf
another where the garden
abuts the foundation
another tracing the fall line
of the shower
I leave them alone now
some say age
make you less tolerant
but it is softening me like a blow—
house spiders
this as much their home as mine
and there are worse things
that linger unseen in the dark
not everyone does evil, but everyone stands accused
in the morning a dead spider
curled up and dried out
in a grave of sunlight
and dust
still small against
the floorboards
still mostly legs
and still a bit
off-putting
but less
without the menace
of motion
agency is what
we fear the most
The cold is a good counselor, but it is cold.
this is clear cold rain
no mists in this forest
just a deluge
increasingly insistent
saturated loam
and inundant bridge—
we walk on water
in water
one letter difference
sure, easily dismissed
but your feet still
get wet—
this the lesson
everything is as
it seems—
an earthworm
coiling in on itself
a question answering
a question
the gray river silt
the wind lashing
the osoberry—
there is no need
for justification—
the land slides
slowly and inevitably
down the bank
the bleeding hearts
trace the mud
with their petals
this day is cold
the rain makes it more so
ask a question
get an answer–
tomorrow the sun
will rise like
it always does
over grass
still damp
with dew
and your eyes
won’t quite
meet mine
and it doesn’t
matter why–
no word
could say it
more eloquently
but you went
and said it, too
the maple by the window
put out leaves
stretching down to the shrubs,
out to the pines, and aside
from all this rain
the house is dead quiet,
the living room sunken,
deluged, submersed,
and now
something weighty lit on the roof
but then took off
when I went to look,
and now
some robin singing,
unseen, calling out warnings
or conveying relief,
obscure, obscured
and suffused with green
I’m not sure what these keys
unlock, clearly some door
unused by me but still there,
somewhere, funny to find
a thing and then feel loss
BEST and SCHLAGE
in the corner of the drawer
and all of the places,
and all of the places, and all of
the places that I’ll never go again
Camel, dromedary.
Sure, a poem but why?
Even taxonomy
is too pliant for you. Extinct
or extant. If a line drawn
in the sand is too soft then
what use are words
that build and fall
to gently say no desert
no life begins or ends
precisely. It is a collection
of inconstant and
inconsistent forms that slump
or shift at best against
what confines them. Naming
things is such an act.
Bactrians have one
hump. To be exact. You
have hurt me
with your indifference.
Today a hummingbird
hemming the courtyard
corners, hail from slate
skies, sun falling in
heavy bars, the crack
shot drop of a dead branch
in the distance, all this
wind, if not harbingers,
still precisely sounded tones,
probably worth noting
OPTIONAL POETRY 