Tag Archives: love
White elephant
I Having outlived our reciprocal usefulness, we mull the stubborn residue of the situation: the nostalgia of remembering, the impunity of forgetting, how the past may persuade the present, but not indefinitely; how time makes plain what romance adorns. The gifts we cherished have become white elephants; gold spun patiently into straw. II Choosing honesty, […]
Barometric
Word from you aches like an old injury, a bone broken and healed but never again unassailable, ever sensitive to the plummeting pressure your proximity announces, the atmospheric disturbance of your many promises, breaking. Sheltered by time and space, I nonetheless roil at your slightest approach. An obstinate naivete persists, trusting as a newborn, set […]
Future Dog
Future Dog wags her tail in the passenger seat of Future Car, which can pull 3,500 pounds, the weight of Future Camper plus a buffer against the life we are leaving, my old cat dead and cremated, like her brother before; likewise my mother, like my father before; their ashes placed in Future Car for […]
Black Friday
Choose Before Me from the drop- down menu, then Parents, then Mother. Place in your cart her tomboy youth, how she outplayed the boys through long summer days, cupped in small palms fireflies gathered by dusk, their light mirroring her eyes. Choose Memories, then Family, then Father. Add to your cart how he carried you […]
(First perform the operation inside the parentheses)
Say my love is constant and yours variable or the opposite alternately juxtaposed and irrational. A negative exponent implies a fraction. When will we quit complaining? Endlessly we divide. At 25,000 miles per hour an object may break free of Earth’s gravitational pull, bolt its closed orbit to traverse an infinite number of stars. Count […]
Star
I mistook your light for substance, though you burned out long ago, the celestial aspects of your small body subsumed by the dark gravity of one larger, and me forgetting how a dead star may nonetheless shine from an irretrievable past, a glory of extinction no astronomer could ignore, yet the core collapsing and collapsing […]
Digging the hen’s grave
on a day when I can, though barely, my own mortality implicated, excavated, spading through hardpan, carving space for the body she still inhabits, tail down, but head up. Eyes bright; a shimmer of hackle feathers she will not molt. Secretly, I invoke fox, bobcat, hawk: You may come now; she can no longer run. […]
Let our complaints
You haven’t long to love this world to claim the blood washing the awakening sky to feel the wren’s song swelling your open throat that later will clench to imagine the bewildered doe leaving her speckled child along the road where the car struck it. Now untangle the tortured skein of the life you’ve made […]
Timing
Sometimes I feel like a cicada who couldn’t count, all those seasons underground, burrowed in the sweet dark earth, my small nymph self growing and molting into a briefly beautiful thing for 13 years, or 17, only to emerge and ascend too early, too late, before or after the appointed time, counting only to one, […]
Catch and release
Because the hook is too cruel, I offer softer lures, chumming the surface of the rivers you love: the cathedral light, the refuge of rocks, the small ballet of water striders walking the sky of your shimmering world. From which I might lift you for an instant, to remember the iridescence of your delicate, dappled […]
Meditatio Ephemera 