Tag Archives: past

Piracy (at the graveside of the living I bury my poisoned thoughts)

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Piracy (at the graveside of the living I bury my poisoned thoughts)

I have prepared for their deaths for so long
That who is dead to me among the living no longer matters

As much as the living spark, like a match at the edge
Of a cigarette on a cold porch where the night

Before moving a couch pushed from the second
Floor window turned on its way down and landed

Half inside the window below. It stuck there
Like an impossible place. Those versions

Of my life thin enough to break on someone’s faith
Never broke my faith in them, in my versionless them.

It’s not up to me, the gangplank of the past
Keeps getting longer. The sea turns to grass,

The foam to the dirt I kick onto my buried selves,
Albatross to cricket, an old house creaking in the wind.

[#fullmoonsocial] Waiting for the moon to rise over the power lines behind the fields by the old school for the deaf and the blind

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[#fullmoonsocial] Waiting for the moon to rise over the power lines behind the fields by the old school for the deaf and the blind

Home of the cardinals.
The train sound twins as it passes through

Echoing off unresponsive brick and glass
Over the darkening grass. It’s like there are two

Trains, the past casting an echo of the future
And then it’s gone, both of them

And still no moon.

In an Open Field

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In an Open Field

 

Late afternoon. The hills behind me
obscure the sun yet as I walk across the field

I can still see my shadow on the grass
a faint whisper of motion on the ground

always before me touching everything first
coloring every step I’m about to take

towards the new day so I turn around
it is still there larger and darker or is that the shadow

of what killed the old day standing up
to shrug off its sleep

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

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Note: another of a series of poems with the same title, to be scattered throughout a larger project called The Drift.
 

To the Tune of a Song Not Yet Written

Now we enter the season of our age
before summer’s end yellow leaves drift

haze floats between us and the foothills
still the sun is strong the rain when it comes

like the same words over and over
is not yet cold and when I look

between birds and hills I see the past
and am reminded of the future

The Future

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Like a terminal bud, the future sits in dark resilience, weathering the present’s timeless winter, wrapped in the protection of tight embryonic leaves of the past, of memories packed in but not yet ripened which will unfold at the right moment, under accidental warmth or the persistent downpour of circumstance, they will unfold, crowning and surrounding that which has not yet happened in sudden green gestures growing as they are revisited and directing the warm rain of the mind to the center where the fruit is forming. All the colors of the spring are memories blooming and feeding the future. All this time we have misunderstood the past, blamed it for distracting us from the task at hand; it was never like that. Wasn’t the task at hand always shoveling snow? Wasn’t it always salting the walkway?  Still we could not escape the present as we cannot escape a blizzard, the white-out of no context, the compulsion to turn one’s head from a cold wind. And when the future is finally ready, when the memories darken slightly in their turn across the sun’s ninety faces then the present will come, not knowing why it is coming, as bee or bird or squirrel come but do not know why, and take the future on the only journey it cannot travel itself. And if we wonder why we lose the memories it is because their work is done, they can finally loosen and twist away in the tug of the present. Already we will have forgotten what it was specifically that was done, the hand on your back lightly, the walk through the teeming streets,  but it will have served the reason for that touch, its continuing love, it can be forgotten for the love is still waiting, just ahead, it has never left you, it has always come back, even as the ground beneath you stiffens with frost, it is what makes you see beauty in the momentary lapse of attention to the present which we mistake for the present moment, beautiful even in the coldest full moon of the year bright on the metal roof of an empty house.