Category: Memory
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Why is the woman with the dreadlocks looking away?
It came to me in a flash as I saw your black body escaping past the marsh, the others turned toward me, running too, that you alone saw away past the mire perhaps a thing to fear, perhaps a deeper knowing, perhaps the future unraveling like a flower, or a tornado whipping us under. I…
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On poetry and knowing things
Today a child tossed a white stone into green water. As it sank, it turned pale green, then darker green until I could no longer pick it out from the green of the depths. At that instant, it disappeared forever. But you and I know better. We cannot deny its presence, its truthfulness. We mark…
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Roman ruins lying off a square in Arles
Muscles of stone hold fast one on top of another, watch time slip by in tiny packages, endless streams pouring forward, memory perfect. When did this corner round off? How did this carving waste away? You needn’t ask; it is known. Rough-hew blocks exhale their millennial sighs, add rhythm to time, note each breeze with…
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Versa
specks of rain tap on dark window; tree branch lit by streetlight swaying we rest on shoulders of night breeze, hemming, hawing through hours, wet air, open window ego pulls this way, that; shadows rock up, down walls; ever stirs our little pot of storm — shame, pride, joy, disappointment, shame, pride, joy, tap, breeze,…
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It is a mystery
It is a mystery, some prefer to say. But this loss holds me still, years of confusion, hunching towards this, that — perhaps spiritual decline, perhaps a more ordinary plight. Either way, the residue stains. It is that purple stubbornness I cannot separate from, prevents perspective, cannot see at all if not through it.
Poems from in between 