reading room

A brief quarantine diary     -no alarm!                 the joy of second breakfast                 and the oblivious birds                 perhaps get dressed – for them   -haiku?                 entirely insufficient                 to experiment with impunity on rhymes                 for pandemic, quarantine, immunity   -trivially                 fare thee well, small talk                 not even the […]

Comes spring and the gibbous moon, draws washtub-bass plunks and plonks from the night frogs singing in the inky pond. The green hills are gray as shadow, the shadows black as void. The frogs sing in their way; the moon shines in its way; to themselves to each other.   By day you can see

  Admit it!  I looked better on the bird. Banded chestnut brown, I set tom turkey’s tail aquiver, reeling in the hens, though engineered with loftier design.   Now I’ve fallen and been taken up in hand to serve a slave to gravity, you! and your existential angst. We scratch the surface and each dream

the sky all sky empty of weather, of all but the bluest sky-blue   the land all plain sepia-tinted oceans of grass rolling on   the birds all black gloss in the sun and call in primordial tongues   the moss all soft feather and pincushion emeralds studding the duff   flash red tent spied

we are lorelei, draped on coral rocks with wet tresses. the rocks are sharp with the bones of the long dead, but the sailors are drunk and move off to waters that couldn’t be bluer. we too push off, away from the tchotchke vendors high on the hill, trying to lure us into ruin, with

time – from then to now to when – is thinner than   the blank white page the champagne haze   of last light’s ringing-in, now rung out, faded hour   why persevere to fete the arbitrary year   why not the day – the sun at noon! why not the month –  all hail

No Bones About It in the midst of this world / we stroll along the roof of hell / gawking at flowers Issa (1762-1826), Transl by Sam Hamill We drag our bones across the roof of Hell as lost, alone. We ache for cold death’s knell to quell the suffering of humankind, in the belief

The Window (after Les Fenêtres by Mallarmé) And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open and shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.   (Kahlil Gibran) leached of blood red tones the sturdy stones cannot be breached – the setting sun’s beyond the body’s

Swimming your slipstream I fall I float you plunge you slip along streaming you drink you kiss I love I live for the river the lover you are