Cascade
When the universe
pours itself through you,
open your mouth wider
and let it overflow
A selection of poems, ~2016–2021
Flex and reflex
How deep the flame scorched
That no water could soothe
Nor salve could penetrate
Long after, I would flinch
When the warmth from your skin
Glanced my white scars
Between
Love is not the point
Love is the line
love is the triangle
love is the rectangle
bent and skewed
No love story
is singular in perspective:
that impossible coin
that bears one side
glass bells
walking under
frozen trees
loose leaf ice
rings
glass-bell sweet
beneath my heavy
feet
My heart slows underwater
I did not ask to wake today,
but when I do,
I will emerge
in steady breath,
in quiet slow
Clarity swells:
blankets of morning mist
burning quick
by troubled heart
and mind's restless wind
Farewell the peace.
I prepare for the weight
of today's burdens,
collecting like burs
tenacious and thorned
impulse
when you hear a flie
buzzing
where do you reach?
Leavened
I saw you first
From far away
Captured your image
And ground it into meal
Time and yeast and water
Frothed to life
Demanding independence
From the pit of my belly
Live wire
Night never stills in my city.
Its deep and steady current
Hums above and drones below
And between illuminates
The witching hour
Lye-slick star
We flee the gaze
Of winter's languid sun,
Coercing earth's crests
into mirrors red and bright;
Her pale gases
Grow the darkling din,
Underearth and above
Through prisms elastic;
Shimmering ink
Between twilight and bone ash,
Melt into amber tar
And paint my eyelids
Shade in the window
My shadow, a fly
balancing
at the corner
of your eye
Submission
The hues of today
Slip through my fingers
Quicksand slick
Leaving the taste
Of dust in my mouth
As I sink
The well
Can I call them gift
these poems
that our woundings write
They pour from my fingers
from a place beyond my mind
the cavern much deeper
The way our threads wove
It was the night,
homeward I rode
the new dusk breeze;
it snagged a loosened seam
and threatened to unravel
the order I had woven;
our story,
I had already written its ending
tidy and hemmed
tomorrow
to wake up
and love the day
translation
poetry as the fog,
whose crests
rest different
on every horizon,
from any perspective
its hazy shape
coerced into words:
dreamlike cells,
themselves,
a phrase on the lips;
a gesture,
its fingers
Two sides of me
Hope is a desert hot
relentless dry and uncontrollable
It is the moon's cool light
dawn's path illuminated
Zero sum
I am
who are
the parts
feasting within me
starved and nourished