oh sun
Oh sun, where you shine opening my eyes—
Blind is the night that passes without you.
At a time when all is a flourish, still it lies dead.
What does your brow knit when blankly you stare,
Not a thought for naught. Blunt and unmet.
When love is not an option and women abound
In toward grey matter, spark the hull.
From eye to brow, cross a jeering,
Still you lie motionless, unmet. Are you waiting?
Narrow, winding gaze to concrete boundaries
Push out, lapse over.
The book is closed. You’ve finished searching.
Here we sit embracing our hesitance, penitence, impotence.
When will our time come?
breathe
a cool soft huff
highline
When the stone casts its shadow against the grey sky
I feel the moon on the high rise, heavy as dank dew.
This grassy knoll along steeps of highway, way up, up high,
Blocking the sunlight.
Yellow tombs of molten statues drift –
Way low, down low
To where we shine.
Death avenue it ain’t, because we’ve been revived.
Papaver Proud
A curious red stalk in a vast field of poppies protrudes.
Striving manifestly among the delicate plumage,
it reaches, it grasps.
Projecting upwards and stirring wonder,
Others raise their faces toward the cardinal crest;
It is bold, untimid, composed.
Swept by a sonorous tide,
The poppy casts its petals one by one.
The flurry of petals flips, furls, and tumbles.
Specks of dusted pollen mark its path redder than red.
A knelling impression of rogue joy, sustained.
(In memory of David Buschmann)
snow
Notes to Emily Dickinson’s “It sifts from Leaden Sieves.”
It strips its Queen of her fleeces,
Winding her joints, wrists, and ankles.
A sovereign silhouette,
It stills her quivering ruffles.
Her wrinkles—and every crevice,
Those “it fills with Alabaster wool.”
And, silently, as at first it entered,
Denies they ever were.