Category: Chicago
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Old elm (revised)
Abandoned farmhouse, graying outbuildings. In your final winter, you stood with empty, cracking branches to tell us plain that your kind shade would be gone – My father, too, would warn us so in his gruffled, dying voice to give us time to account, to record, to not be frightened. Empty sky. Time unwinds. I…
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Early morning on Lake Shore Drive
maze of brown at the center, trees empty of leaves, row after row stretching to scattered hazel edging the lake, its soft fog settled, tissue-papers, still, grey, jade mist, dull pearl, kingdom come
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On healing and revolution
Gazing up this terrible mountain, you say, love is not enough, though when I add together everything else and stack it high above my head, everything else is not enough either. So I fall back on love, and it nudges me back to the task of gathering everything I can find – a pick ax,…
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After a long hot afternoon in the city
cooling breath tumbles across acrid plain presses away heat steaming concrete mental stagnation of shuttered windows, locked doors grass no longer sticks that way or browns, wilting crisp all the relief of life, a sometimes song, rolls in every direction awakening the lake white tips to horizon prairie, swaying sea up into sky encircling earth
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Karma
I sat here at this table many years ago. The door was on State then, not Chicago; three shops sold coffee here since. On Tuesday evenings, a homeless man muttered to himself at the window, staring into his coffee, while I ran through course notes at the next table, coughing on his stench, not knowing…
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Old elm
Abandoned farmhouse, greying outbuildings. Our old elm on the corner that died last year stood through the winter to remind us of its broad generous shade, kind relief now removed. Empty sky. Time unwinds, pulls me back to your year as sapling in crowded woods before this town, this house. Our kinship holds, deeper need,…
Poems from in between 