Moonprint
With a moon not yet full behind a sky not yet clear
a glowing handprint floats over the house
holds emptiness like a drifting welcome
closed to nothing always open to you
Moonprint
9 Replies
Category Archives: Poetry
The Stones
The Stones
Winter begins in the stones. In a dream the sky house
gets closer as if it is trying to hear a secret or tell me one
but when I can read its lips I see it is just pretending.
In the car: stones from a trip to the beach.
A thousand miles from where we found them
for months they have rested in a drink holder
with no discernible nature acting on them,
no car tides or car gulls have hampered their stillness.
Now when we pick them up on a drive we marvel
at how cold they are on this mild first day of November.
You can press them to your hand, your neck, your cheek
and they stay cold. They are telling me a secret
without moving their lips or pretending to tell me anything.
They are coming closer without moving, like snow clouds.
Wind Intervals
Wind Intervals
In a space under trees I can hear the wind that is not here
like a can kicked across the street by a boy still coming
or as if the act of the boy shaping his mouth to shout
made a sound before the sound of the shout
What is the word that I hear before the trees
above me shake and give the wind a momentary word
What is the sound of a loosening of leaves
like forgetting hands just before they drop
to our sides? The interval of apprehension.
The time we are alive. The boy stepping up the curb.
The Sound
The Sound
Today the sound of rain is over my head, in the leaves.
For a month it will get more and more silent
As the canopy thins, even as each drop more directly
hits its mark it will be more and more like a whisper
of something going away, until the level of leaf is ground
and then in the first cold rain a new sound like a cough
rattling to life instead of death, louder and colder will
arise from the earth, for a few times anyway reminding
us that nothing not even death stops talking until the
first snowflake tells it utterly and quietly to shut up.
#FullMoonSocial2014 Anthology, Free and Coming Soon
I’m putting together our first Full Moon Social anthology, based on the posts to the #fullmoonsocial2014 event on October 8th.
The anthology will be FREE and available as both a PDF and epub. Each page contains a poem and a link to the author’s website or Twitter page. Where a contributor is only known by their WordPress or Twitter handle, I used that in place of an author name. It will be a nice way to honor the hours we spent together writing under the moon.
To be on the safe side, I’m asking any contributors to the event to email me at jeffrey.schwaner@gmail.com to confirm that you give permission to being included in this free commemorative ebook. This will also help me if in my collection efforts I have missed some of the poems or photos posted by you.
By Friday I will be finalizing the anthology based on the permissions I’ve received. It has been fun to revisit these poems as I’ve been placing them in the (admittedly very basic) book design, and I look forward to sharing them once again in a more book-ish format.
Psalm
Psalm
So where is the past? Is it the terrain
in periphery, never the destination
but whose contours shape the weather?
Is it the icy light the moon reflects
on the tracks of things before me?
Wonderful deeds have we done, and
fearful things. They lay across the path
of parting like roots or over-hang
my steps with shade and snakes.
I do not wish to look
back. I only need to know
from which direction will come
the monster-god it has nurtured
to replace me so that I may stand
before him in the breach to turn away
his wrath, convince this pale reflection
that it could be a kinder god
Lines Written After Encountering a Cat in My House, #1
Lines Written After Encountering a Cat in My House, #1
The darkness of a cat sliding past me on its way
up the stairs as I descend can seem symbolic
of a missed opportunity or something passing by
I should have paid more attention to on my way
to put out the trash but in reality I still got the trash
put out and a cat passing by in the dark on the stairs
is never an opportunity even in this ankle deep silence
The Present [#FullMoonSocial2014]
The Present
O star you should have known
not even your memory will eclipse you
No distance will establish a shadow
between this heart and yours
The light that comes back to me
from something larger—is it
not my own joy which without you
I would never know?
Framework [#FullMoonSocial2014]
Framework
You sleep beneath a quilt of moonlight.
As I cut off the lamp across the room
and walk into darkness the heavenly
body brightens. There is just enough
room for me, pushing aside a dog
or two, to press against you, fall in
to the rhythm of your breathing,
our dreams mountains on the moon
Suggestion, Just Before Sunrise, Cemetery Hillside [#FullMoonSocial2014]
Suggestion, Just Before Sunrise, Cemetery Hillside
Loblolly pines peel away from the paling sky
looking back on their roots.
Over one’s shoulder the full moon
eclipsed on the western horizon’s
almost an after-thought. As indirect
light rises from the ground below us men come,
constructing the canopy tent for the next
funeral. Ground fog further east glows
red and headlights are no longer
necessary to see where you’re going.
Translations from the English 