Category Archives: New Writing

Another Reason Why I Wish the House Next Door Had Not Sold, Though It Is Still Abandoned

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Another Reason Why I Wish the House Next Door Had Not Sold, Though It Is Still Abandoned

Out my second story window I would see great branches
flowing from an unseen maple’s trunk, striding on the air

to the roof of the house next door.
A month ago two men climbed the tree

to the roof. I watched them slowly saw, saw away
anything they could reach. The new view’s an old metal roof

snow sliding down its creases, winter’s white sky
and a single wren on the tip of tender branch up

where saws could not reach. I used to see squirrels,
a dozen in an hour, traveling branches like highways;

now while I don’t see anything I still hear them
in the gutter over my own window.  But I keep looking

where they used to be: the deepest view an empty one

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The Morning After the Ice Storm On the Day After the Snow Storm

My children walk on the foot-high snow leaving no prints
I remember doing that the feeling of not falling through

of being lighter than snow I remember the days I was sure
I would never leave any prints that I could walk

on the surface of the world and leave no trace
then are the days where you feel you are nothing but prints

Nothing but traces and paths and trails and then the days
you wake up to another death and your son

is reading how it took two hundred million years
for trees to develop leaves and

then you are back to leaving no prints

Taking the Dogs Out One Night After a Snowstorm

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red

 

Taking the Dogs Out One Night After a Snowstorm

The dogs a brown blur against blinding
white barely visible ridges and striations

Patterns of falling and wind-riddance
the shapeless back yard a single unique

print of the storm’s finger but nothing
weighing in as evidence more so

than my daughter’s bright red jacket
so lively against this erasure

like my love for that life and
everything that came before it

and the blue of the twilight
and the black of what follows

Icicle

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icicle1

Icicle

Something that was something
else yesterday

with no place to go but down
but not quite enough

to get away
and so becomes a spectacle

to change caught in between
changes

increasing
like a debt or identity or

anything else imagined
but its own

weight is real enough
if you can

wait it out
that will be enough too

Under the New Moon There Is A Quiet Layer of Cloud And Beneath That The Coldest Day of the Winter Turns To The Coldest Night

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Under the New Moon There Is A Quiet Layer of Cloud And Beneath That The Coldest Day of the Winter Turns To The Coldest Night

 

Any enclosed space is a temple. While we turned away
the sky came down and delivered news of the moon,

it hangs there just above the trees, a white ceiling
glowing from the light of streetlamps below, it waits

folded like a newspaper delivered but not yet read,
thicker and more important seeming than it will be

when it’s picked through and thinned out
and in some cases like my dad used to do tied in knots

and thrown in the fireplace with kindling where
burning it rises through the cloud’s cold floor

and brings news of the hidden world to the new
moon in its temple of absence

Fear

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Fear

There is a door at the end of the moment.

At your signal everything you know pushes against it
and it is not enough

and when your knowledge comes back to you
shaken, injured by the force of your will

that is fear. Do not pretend you fear the unknown.
What you know has suffered and the damage

is what you feel. You must take them back
in your arms and understand them again

as if you never knew these things

and in a moment’s time the door
will be behind you

Midwinter Dream Fragments

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Midwinter Dream Fragments

 

A silent movie walks into a bar.
Far off to the east  fragments of cloud

hover in the foreground, closing credits. The clear blue sky
revolves behind them like a child’s picture lamp

before it catches on fire. But the sky does not move.

Only the clouds are moving, their vacancy signs
flashing as they pass the moon.

Looking at Sticks in Winter

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winter character

Looking at Sticks in Winter

After a light overnight snow grounded things stand out
like a character for winter

autumn’s fallen sticks seem arranged
a gentle alphabet of dropped and windblown things

are all alphabets constructed of things that no longer grow
snapped or broken things until the world made sense of the drift

do I know as I look down on them they are looking
past me pointing to all that is still living above our heads

to all that will be green again whether I look or not
are all languages a message in relief or is it my own relief

that words will never be in season the spring they sprouted
from long gone the spring yet to arrive as forgetful

as we are with each other with growing and shedding
that even my name is an accidental landing

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

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To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

 

The sun departs through a throng of clouds
on the horizon– an overexposed photo

of an old explosion. Did it happen in our time?
the cold street wants to know. The street

which is always asking, asking! An amateur’s
snapshot, I tell it. I am always on this street

that happens to be going the way
I am going. It knows only one question

but has the patience to repeat it.
Without that question to what purpose

could a street put itself? I know eventually
the pavement will give way and the question

through the voice of dirt and rocks
and sun-warmth escaping long after dark

will sound like a song without words
or the faded caption on an old photograph

someone took of us looking at the sun
standing still against the pathless sky

Morning, After the Ice Storm

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Morning, After the Ice Storm

 

The bluejay’s query from the previous twilight
hangs in the mostly empty air between branches.

On a brown maple leaf last night’s tear
has still not fallen. Though in a few hours

this moment will be gone like all the others
even grief sometimes has to wait its turn