Yesterday on the dunes he felt hollow, dark. He drew up the hand of an old love. Her fingers were long and brown. He could make songs with them in the warm light off the lake. He used her fingers to sing, call for rain next day on the dunes.
In the course of getting ahead of himself, he parted a screen of brittle grass and saw a blue pool with a whale’s eye moving across its middle. The whale reminded him of a boy, how he could see birds and bears in the water stains on the walls.
It will be a Saturday when all the soldiers drop their guns and knives and wave the battlefields away, leaving them to the croaks of birds and creaky leather and the somewhat confused spirits of the dead who hear the moon scream at their backs and the anger of those with nothing better to do […]
Often if you watch the birds you’ll see them bearing olives and maybe a grape tomato to their chicks who don’t quite understand the story of circles. The shape of their lives through the air and time is like sleeping in a cabin where the villages are remote. Bears watch the lights go out one […]
When his mother died he saw frogs on the window sill The smell of old love followed him through the hallway to a bright door where a girl stood behind the screen with day lilies bursting from her hands His father was with the doctor asking questions about the speed of light Years later he […]
one day he imagines a million silver fish assembling a pond as the day burns a single star into its surface permanently now he gets down reaches soon his finger attracts the dry heat on the water then a fish weaves dark to startling dark like something that had once slipped out of his hands […]
Out of dreams now a woman steps into a dawn where blue shapes cut the sky into outlines of leaf and branch, yesterday’s whispers marbling the shadows where they’ll dry, bake, and disperse with the sunrise. She had shed names over the years. They fell away from her like notes spoken into deep places where […]
She suspected many shes in the eyes of the rat who watched her from the edge of the table considering the many rats she must be thinking, even in dream. And so a thousand memories and a thousand more at the edge of the table in the eyes of the rat and in the eyes […]
What is white but black bursting over a warm July lake in the eyes of woman remembering how her mother hung her sneakers on the line to dry in the sun by the laces The memory is flat until the wings of a swallowtail turn around the sole and open and close its wings and […]
Again we emerge from water in the shape of egg whites with blue stars slashing over the bulge of the yoke. See me rise over a dry red dune with the wind tossing blood devils to the east where they shred like early mornings cradled by lightning. Such energy in the shadows cast by grass, […]
At the gate to What Might Be, the green tiger knows better than to cross. He’s been followed by a rat who carries a stick and a bandanna in which wrapped and tied and hung he keeps a can of mushrooms, olives, and radish. The green tiger lays at the threshold. He beads his eyes […]
I know a man who fell through the ice and was taken downstream a quarter mile before he found a crack back to the surface. He told me that as he felt he would die he watched children play under hot suns, his hands buffing the slick underside of the cold, bubbles blubbing about his […]
The spider watches me as I pass. Steady, typically, from the ceiling or a kitchen corner. I know what he thinks “The last time you put me out I had to swim rivers, dodge those chipmunks you have with their dirty tunnels under the garage and patio, the ones that explode at any hint of […]
Orange is an unfinished pen mark dividing a white field into fresh territories ripe for blue skies, thicker rains, and more than one moon watching the evening fall. A shout formed by letters written 100 thousand years ahead by a woman with love and sunsets in her mind, wood blocks burning slowly black into the […]
I is funny because it can be we or us or me or them, depending on the swiftness of the dawn as it interposes with the shadow and the light reflected on gems of raspberries in a glass bowl. “Come with me,” she said. He (that could also be I), followed her (that could also […]
