corvid dreams

endless december he said
staying in to avoid the hard 
darkfall. nautical 
weather has arrived 
made sailors of us 
all. tidal clouds 
unscarved me on 
slate tongue tunnels 
straight through 
the leafletted ash 
of unplanned city 
silences. i am 
followed by rogue 
sky, repeat 
to increment what was 
too fleeting to grasp
on this epiphany escalator, 
take me to the next floor, 
i'm done 
shopping here and also 
done knocking on 
rocks for notes to discover those 
enslaved with prehistoric 
marimba, dreaming, 
gathering antique shadows 
worn like the night's 
cool cloak. i am a crow 
who has learned to collect 
the pebbles of his thoughts 
to fill the jar. i have passed 
aesop's test.

the day after the day after

walking home from the cafe
almost noon but the sky no brighter 
the day after the day after 
christmas is ash cold. 
i just stole a picture, 
a flower i was surprised to find, 
a flower emerging from 
cracked concrete stairs, 
as if the effort to blossom 
through concrete had hardened 
its resolve to continue 
blossoming through- 
kneeling where it hovered 
above the lichen splotched steps, 
i look up at a crow 
perched on one of several 
diagonally crossing wires, '
pause to admire the symmetry, 
wonder if they appreciate such things,
and notice, suddenly, the rest of those 
dark pauses scattered indiscriminately among 
gnarled limbs, crossing wires, rooftop edges 
and realize that the peculiar feeling i just had 
was the sensation of being observed 
by a quiet aerial collective 
and then the entire murder 
lifts, in a few strong flaps, toward the soft low sky 
as if all the commas in a story you were reading 
abandoned the page together and all at once
as the mechanical gate of the oregon institute for 
clinical investigations slowly & quite dramatically 

opens 
and i laugh out loud. 

eve of the darkest day

black roots twisted up-
ended, the stripping's
completed drip
sculpture wears its
violent blue rain on
the eve of the darkest
day her joy
relented her
misery was pure
twang-
what will you do
when it's too dark to see
through this aquatic day?

*

beauty gash
some petite feathered thing
shivers in the drip cage
among the more feral pine
elderly elm waves a fern
boa, its blinged fingers
studded with the sky's
ones & zeroes
triangular hints of baby
blue
blink through the languid
droop of the tangled
limb maze skeins
the tidal cloud
pillow stars emerge from
this sultry stew

when you don't want to emerge from the warmth

when you don't want to emerge from

the warmth you have hoarded when

it's winter and you don't

have time for the usual

and you don't have time

to shoot the couple

playing with their little dog

fenced in gorgeous sun-

light hurries you up

the empty street wondering

why am i the only one

and almost miss the abandoned

cardboard sign on the grass says

help

i'm homeless

and forty
help

and you don't have time to be

pierced like that

when it's morning,

when it's winter,

and you don't want to emerge from

the warmth you have hoarded.

quote from "Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes" by William Bridges

    In fact, the transitions that punctuate many people's careers after the age of forty or forty-five are the unmarked ruins of this natural time of transition. Whether such transitions take the form of a time when everything "goes dead," a time when things keep going wrong, a time when long-successful strategies suddenly stop working, or a time when the gray fog of depression covers whatever was once bright & interesting, this natural (if often delayed) time of transition starts with an ending, a sense of loss. And after we have acknowledged the ending, the sense of loss is replaced with emptiness, meaninglessness, a feeling that all our accomplishments actually mean very little. We say (if we have the courage to talk about the experience) that our careers aren't going anywhere; we may wonder whether we've been in the wrong career all along; we may consider an early retirement, although we probably at the time lack the funds to pull it off.
    Those questions come from getting caught up in the content of our situation and from overlooking the underlying pattern. The feelings that we encounter at such a time are best understood as signs of a life passage that has been stripped of its rites and tossed aside as no longer useful. We are so distant from this sense that life has natural chapters, along with introductions marking transition, that we hardly know what we are missing. But life remembers . . .  and tries to remind us. 

White Wind Poem by Douglas Spangle (35th Anniversary of Mount St. Helens Eruption)

White Wind


Listen,
just listen.
Intolerable with fusion,
                                            the world is erupting into silence.
The wind and the ash have blasted
                                                                our town into white sleep
like Utrillo's Paris;
                                   not so much blank and barren,
                                   not so much cold
as blind and reflective.
                                            You can feel it with your fingertips.


Close your eyes
and follow the streets
where they unroll like bandages;
                                                              travel them like traffic
in the veins of last autumn's leaves,
                                                                   echo of the last cry
of the dead nestling
                                     crushed at the foot of the red cathedral.


Ash, the salt
with no savor,
falls indiscriminate as death,
crusting the eye and the nostril,
                                                           scoring a curse
on the steel of the engine armature.
                                                                  Ash torments the crevice,
tender junction of petal and sepal.
                                                                White powder twists
frail flames behind heels and wheels;

the cut rose forgotten,
                                          engraved gray with dust,
supine on the doorstep.


Close your eyes,
blink back tears,
just wait.
Wait and listen;
                              as it rasps your face to parchment
the white wind is grinning,
                                                  burning from ear to ear.


Non carpe diem,
don't seize the day:
the summer itself is a seizure;
the world and its death are so close at hand
                                                                        that they blister the skin
and the words spit like flames 
                                                        as they leap through the teeth.

photo by Carmen R. Andrews

http://oregonpoeticvoices.org/poet/379/

amphitheater of faded flower

shame in the house. shame speaking. blossoms wilting and it's not even warm, not yet. freak among freaks takes the window seat, tries not to think how his life would read. fathers & daughters arrive but pose instead of play, insisting every moment be framed. outside, a little girl in striped salmon pink twirls in circles with her arms stretched out, her palms up, a crimson colored blossom weighing one down as she turns round & round. there is a dead fly in my frame that dangles from a spider thread, also turning round & round precisely beside my day-dreaming eye. across the street, a family performs their affection for a hired eye, kneeling on the dandelioned grass before the rhododendron's amphitheater of faded flower. i take a sip of strong black tea, haunted by the knowledge of what i am no longer becoming.

lawn jugglers

if you wanted to
leave, if you had
to, needed to, flee.

lawn jugglers. candy-
colored blossoms.
the circle is full.

a young man on a scooter wearing a tangerine bulb on his head floats around the bend like a headless jesus. the neighborhood has staged a contest to provoke running. bushes shroud us where we lean forward, looking for change or sense. giving up rusts my esteem.  i suffer the curse of seeing too much, of being seen seeing and i can't seem to shutter my gaze is too cursive, swirls when it should ride the rails straight into oblivion with the rest of them. thumbed, thingful. clinking table. verdant swarms swell. eye relay. orbital bibs. i rely too much on both force & farce, trying to make work work, which i know doesn't work. dwarfed by the gleaming, steaming machinery she operates, black lashes feather her pale twin beds. outside, a man kneels on the bright green lawn, before the fuchsia amphitheater, repairing his inflatable rose. the juggling around him ceased. seeking a living conclusion, a denouement that breathes. can you do too many things alone? lap screens glass them, silica asks what's next, clicks. i watch a little girl enjoy some cake beside the reflection of her yellow plastic puppy. i notice her mother warms herself with the image of a winter tree. inside, there is a gang of half-empty water bottles that loiter on the corner of my heart. my hurt is thirsty, but has no lips to drink. the neighborhood's monk graciously smiles past, wrapped in curry robes. there is a cherry red car parked beneath an old elm tree, the shadows of its leaves shimmering on its flanks like a resting animal drinking shade. the music coils around inside my head as i ponder which failure to roommate with. a long thin shaft of darkness pierces the side of the bright green lawn.

buckman's robots are winning

ontological insecurity

consumption equals happiness is the massage people receive in our culture.

i am never so alone as when i am waiting for the bus

JESUS FUCKIN' CHRIST ARE YA GONNA STOP FOR EVERY FUCKIN' PEDESTRIAN DUDE?!!! i look up. there is a person crossing the street, neatly traversing the marshmallow stripes. crosswalks always make me think of marshmallow fluff, which i haven't had since i was a kid. there is a minivan behind an SUV. there is an older woman with a leathery face and a brown ponytail who is gesticulating behind the wheel. she is the one who shrieked. i laugh out loud and turn to look at the young woman who is also waiting. she is wearing an olive drab jacket that looks vaguely military, a coarse sooty gray skirt, red rimmed black sunglasses, and cherry red lipstick. she is leaning against the belmont's puce colored brick, her earbuds black & in. her head tilts slightly in my direction but she does not smile, she does not grin. we won't be sharing this moment. it is warm & sunny. i can see my bus just up the street and i sigh with relief, for i am never so alone as when i am waiting for the bus. 

unzipped memory

there are so many new people at work. i was never particularly good at remembering names and it only seems to grow more challenging as i age. attractive woman with wavy brown hair says hi to me at the end of my day. when i was in college i was friends with a guy from maine who had also served in the military. he had a thick maine accent, which is similar to a boston accent, but don't tell them that. his trick for remembering names was to call everyone buddy in that thick maine accent. BUD-DAY! he was popular. everyone thought he liked them. sometimes i like to see how long i can maintain a relationship with someone without using their name. for some reason this amuses me. but i like this woman, i like her energy, and so i confessed that i had forgotten her name. sarah, she said. oh great, another sarah to add to the pile. we need to start giving people nicknames, i said and she agreed. that guy over there? she pointed at a round scruffy bookseller. i remember his name because his last name is zipper. zipper's a wonderful name, it's already a nickname! zipper. suddenly i remember playing with one of my brothers, jumping up & down on a bed, wrestling, when i knocked him off the bed and he cut his cheek on the corner of the iron bed frame. he had an inch long zipper scar on his cheek. he told me that when he would go out to play there was a teenaged guy who would sit on his porch learning the bass lines to police songs but whenever he would saw my brother he would yell out in a thick boston accent, which is nothing like a maine accent, every masshole knows that, he would yell out: ZIP-PAH!

quote from a poem by antjie krog

my werwels loop uit in lig

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/23650/auto/0/THE-LONELINESS-OF-SKIN

quote from antjie krog

"the different life he might have led, had he grown up in a different and more just society. what would he and many others have become if they were not schooled in racism, indoctrinated through religion and educated into violence to protect an unequal social order? and how much of this violence perpetrated by past generations has remained in today's young men?"

-antjie krog

quote from Andrey Zvyagintsev, Director of Leviathan

"Imagine a situation where I work for a firm which belongs to a larger holding group which belongs to a certain person in turn. I don't need to be told how to vote. I automatically assume my vote has to align with whatever the wishes are of the larger thing that ultimately I belong to."

-Andrey Zvyagintsev, Director of Leviathan

stop the pounding heart

when something is so convincingly true and yet you know it's not quite, it's not quiet even though you can't hear anything. occasional furtive glances instantly withheld & punished, bursts of braces, her smiles braced to conceal teeth, lip offered instead. she lives in a kingdom of skin, given all the touch she could ever want, but she must always obey him & Him, and she can only ever be skin, lit within by the faintest light that is always just about to go out, a delicate fire tended by prayer. a dream in which everyone is held and everyone agrees on the story but you can only remain as long as you believe. i wonder where she got her doubt, what provoked the longing to be someone else, in spite of the pain when that psychic cord is cut. to live the rest of her life strangled by the narrative threads that keep them warm & together, or to dangle, cold & naked.

maybe sunshine if it's not too traumatic

maybe sunshine but 
out there it's all toasted 
bluster. sometimes 
their entrances arc too 
dramatically. still 
learning to stick 
my landings after 
spinning on each 
interaction's uneven 
bars. we service 
psychopaths sometimes 
but you only know it 
when you feel their cold 
brusque breath. woke up, 
stretched & poured 
the contents of this mind 
onto the floor just beyond 
my warm pillow. found 
a barista box, abandoned 
in buckman, the neighbor-
hood, upon glancing at 
the moist gray light
seeping through glass, 
has apparently decided, 
to stay inside & snuggle 
instead with a book & some 
tv, so says the lonely barista. 
last night i heard the rain 
smacking the window 
in the other room kept 
beckoning me up to investigate 
a frame filled with silvery 
infinitesimal drops each 
one glinting in the unromantic 
security light. felt like 
a child hiding in his bedroom 
while mom & dad fought 
in the living room, the slapping 
rain landing like a body 
with a thud i look up
from my sunday paper 
at the suggestion of january 
sunshine usually looks 
too young to sneak past 
the sky's bouncers, floating 
there with burly arms 
folded across pillowy chests. 
reading about post traumatic 
stress, i realize that i still 
refuse to sit in public 
with my back to the room, 
as if i might be attacked. 
i recognize it now 
as an old roommate 
i still live with.