Skip to main content

Hidden Weapons

















What of these jagged mornings. Two men pull the ropes 
from east coast and southwest to settle their mother's estate 
by telephone. My daughter builds an energy efficient house in miniature on her bedroom floor as confidence flags for the day's history test; knives and scissors hidden everywhere under cardboard.


Yesterday having eaten too much sugar, I rise with a headache and neck like a warped board. The dog dreams a heart attack in the chilly shadow of the 8 a.m. study. Her belly breathes a snare drum of staccato yelps.


For these minutes the mourning dove's calling is overridden with traffic streaming like water that I cannot hold back. I walk the hallway with my fingertips on the walls as if braille were the surrender. Signal to knowledge of what will arrive next. 'tis the season of concrete and hammers.


Taut wire will hold us together. Press down on the tongue and respect one another.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent                                                 mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes     from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew   She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow     (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender)   (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present     (anyone’s mother)    aging    when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin                         captures the sunrise light like   anticipation’s shower   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...
Post a Comment
Read more