A black swarm above a fallow field, or they roost in the street trees, and in the groves of eucalyptus along the Metrolink tracks. Are they blackbirds, starlings or crows? For three nights, our neighbors play Death Cry of a Crow to the trees and sky. How frightening, we say, waiting for the branches to empty. How righteous we’ll feel when the throng of birds takes flight, rowing through the air to new colonies.
Spring 2017 Season
Work from the Spring 2017 Season of concīs
Reverse Clearing
March 9, 2017 by 1 Comment
The flat clouds are a façade
of clouds, collapsed into
a comic book,
a sky that always
promises a cropping
(if given enough water)
and lunch on a park bench
with strangers
because even strangers
will converse
about weather—
all morning
I descend into other parts
of the morning
the skies partly cloudy
along the beaches—
by midday the gloom
will linger inland like fatty tumors
along the spine of low mountains
I can’t avoid the sky,
its ethos of haze or fog—
between allies of pavement,
the sea somehow
maintains its scent, always
this smack of salt
Salinity
March 6, 2017 by 1 Comment
Both of us gray enough to pass for blue,
the great heron and I, in the tall cordgrass
inspecting the silt for silver to sustain us.
I want to stilt with her through the mud
and glasswort, tidal and flat, our salt circling
the cracks in the cries we use to code infinity.
Soldier Child
March 4, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Two dark oak doors with white porcelain knobs. The dun plaster and lathe walls frame a boy of thirteen. He wears an unbuttoned double-breasted coat clutched at his chest by his left hand. His cropped hair is as dark as hardwood floors. A turned-up collar, his torn pants and bare feet. The white bandage wound around his left knee. The weight he won’t put on it. The way he stares back, his eyes black as the holes of gun barrels. The way he doesn’t blink.
Embracing the Bodhisattvas
March 2, 2017 by 2 Comments
Night sky with slivered waning moon. A river filled with flares and riven with flaws. Glow-sticks in underwater glass jars: a controlled burn of spiritual ambiguity. Flint and stone walls encase the Buddhist temple. Candled lanterns illuminate paired hands. An ancient tree aglow with sparkling seeds. The lush mountain range is tonal. Listen: raindrops make the brass bowls sing.
Aubade
February 28, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Well meant is insincere, turn out their pockets and whatdoyouknow. This one would be a marriage, this a different set of rules. Keys on the kitchen table and the milk sour breath of happiness. Aubade, so easy to criticize, I know, the ones you do not know. Their tone rings reminiscent of nothing so simple to correct. Dead language roped around their wrists. Time’s microscopic epic labels everything lost property. Less casual than formal. All on show.
The Last City that Went Underwater
February 25, 2017 by Leave a Comment
alone, now, you rose up,
held in humus milk,
caterwauled to the cacophony
of fluid strewn with silage—
with a coronet of frozen dark
and sequined stars held to
your head perched low,
Blue pickerel weeds snarled
glossy leaves into your hands,
caught in the swath of dragonflies
and great crested newts—
an almost brooding sound,
less wind-swayed in its journey
around the mist-rinsed pond,
bayed a rustle fainter than earth
over your skin: a pelt of wiggles-
suckled, algae surfaced, delicate light
hatched in tapestry of perennial
sandy loam, gilded with bare bones
of your city that went underwater—
At the End of the Last Glacial Period
February 23, 2017 by Leave a Comment
A herd flees,
fords the river’s sun-bright passage—
A white incised line follows a bone burin—
To accentuate the counterpoint,
a sudden turn to adagio—
A gesture preserved, a gesture alive in the act of making a mark—
Tachycardia
February 20, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Every father is
at some point
Saul with a fist
full of javelins.
Both of you stop this.
Stop hitting yourselves
with tennis rackets.
A vacuum balloons in
my chest. Presented with pricks, I
kick. A pilum lets fly,
skids on concrete in a comet
of sparks. My autoharp falls
dumb. Outside, meteors, metaphors.
Machine as Ghost
February 18, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Each fallen god looms larger just as
the windmill blade on a flatbed seems
taller than the windmill and the bough
the gale cracked off, wet and black on the
ground, is tree enough and more and
the Ding an Sich is not for you; you get
only one of its narrow dendrites, filament-thin,
reaching high, hungry for signal.
