Tag Archives: memory

Ohio Rain

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Ohio Rain

Sometimes in the same way Ohio rain meanders
below Akron and Canton casually beyond Caldwell and

into West Virginia stopping in Charleston for a change
of luck and then on slowly eastward and along sharp ridges

to this Valley becoming a fine mist on my shoulder as
only a memory catching its breath can before moving

on with the ease of a spoken sentence between strangers
about the weather, one on vacation, one on the way

to work but with a moment to spare in the passing mist
for the soft vowels of hello, so before the clearing wind

I feel what moves me also moves along this way, resting
when it reaches me like a mist on my shoulder,

like the lightest part of a vast weather that decides to stay
until evaporation pulls me up too and a new entirety moves on

In the Month of Your Birthday

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In the Month of Your Birthday

Mid-afternoon storm hours behind me, on the walk home.
Slight breeze triggers rain in the maple, cascading

leaf to leaf in the layers of small shadowed sky, not a memory
of rain but the actual rain, retained, in the vast shadows, actually

falling, and isn’t memory an actual thing moving in a real space,
and like the rain in this maple, not touching the ground.

Last Poem of Spring

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photo

Last Poem of Spring

Boxing up books. It is almost summer.
So many different flowers are packed in

the small flower garden. Gin and tonic
in a jar with ice, as light leaks away.

There are the dead, the lost,
the memories floating in patterns

like fireflies, their season starting
with a wild inland storm, mountains

disappearing behind the gray wall

Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April

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Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April

Incense rises up the wall
in front of my mother’s painting

A village clings to a cliff a thousand
white rooms open to the sun

No separation of inside or outside
to me this painting is a memory

Of her, about memory about how something
no longer exists but still exists

Like smoke from an incense stick
it is entirely spent lighter than air

More solid than the air we breathe
my mother painted it from a photograph

To learn perspective

DMSpainting

Spring Wind

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Spring Wind

Old pine tree seems the only one
excited by the first warm wind

Empty-handed, the others barely nod
at his hundred foot tall child’s soul

Who remembers the world with no flowers
no leaves no bees who knows

What was and knows what’s coming

I Take a Picture of An Icicle Hanging from My House’s Gutter And Even Though the Icicle Drops Seconds Later I Write the Following Poem Composed in One-Line Stanzas I Am Not Prepared to Defend With Any Theory but Insist You Take Seriously For The Moment As If I Really Do Know Why I Did It That Way

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frozen moment

I Take a Picture of An Icicle Hanging from My House’s Gutter And Even Though the Icicle Drops Seconds Later I Write the Following Poem Composed in One-Line Stanzas I Am Not Prepared to Defend With Any Theory but Insist You Take Seriously For The Moment As If I Really Do Know Why I Did It That Way

Icicle depending from the gutter and clarity of tree shadow on a snowy roof

Sky the blue of belief though nothing to hold on to

Like us the icicle hanging on lengthened by what’s leaving its way

Beneath it five drops of water like a memory are frozen in time

No telling what is still and what is moving

In your memory like a memory that drop will never change

In an image all about movement nothing will move

The icicle’s shape never seen before never again when I turn again

It has dropped from the gutter like it was never there the blue sky showing no surprise

The shadow of the maple’s high branches on the snowy roof

#FullMoonSocial // (No) Reflection, by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner

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(No) Reflection

When you die it’s the dark moon
that keeps you company in the eternal evening.
No reflection — just deep space
rippling and bending around you.
No light can find you here
where the moon is a black stone
in a black pocket.
No increase, no decrease,
no connection to the flow of tides and time.
No time has ever passed. No illusion of light, illumination
or radiance. Not here among the dying stars
where memory spills its last drop
into the night and vanishes.
No vanishing. No dying. Only being.
Free of form. No form. Free.

Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

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Setting Moon, with Constellations, One Night Before Its First Quarter, Late December

 

When the moon sinks low in the western sky
I pour a day’s memories into its gold cup

as the old rules state. Evening is cooling off
but mild, as if between myself and

the stars there is an owl flying away while at the same
time a distant unknown bird is approaching.

When they pass each other I am finding the key
in my pocket and feeling blindly for the lock.

When the cup is locked in the cupboard
of the past for another day, in the quiet house

I take out the moments I withheld from the moon
and place them in the dark above me: your hand

on my arm, your head against my shoulder.
The phone ringing. The living warmth of you

like a foreign language I can suddenly read
as words pour into the room and we listen.

Seen in an Almost Empty Elementary School Parking Lot One November Afternoon at Four-Thirty

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Seen in an Almost Empty Elementary School Parking Lot One November Afternoon at Four-Thirty

 

Through the honest tree limbs a hundred vultures float
like a cloud of gnats. No like the floating ashes of burning leaves.

No as they get closer I see they are stitching something
into the air, shape of a common hunger borne aloft

and visible only through this inscribing of individual
wills in contrast and in wind, swirling like the last

sip of wine in a glass, up, down, settle, rinsed away,
all just a matter of perception of a form against

its temporary constraint, not ever really part of your
moment when it continues on, or ceases holding

your own thought against the edges of your world
as if the world was something to hold your drink

or your memories, or even your body in its form
perceived from two hundred feet up and a quarter

of a mile away as something too big to land on and eat.