Nature Morte
A goblet of Ruby ichor, Immortal quiet. A long-necked Jug, bedizened With golden straw. Peasant’s summer plenty: Bread, terrene-tan, Green figs a-split, Vulnerable. Basket’s silent meekness. Dried sea anemones, Stiff above. A pied nautilus, Fluted clamshell, Perlucent sheath. A starfish, Dessicated. Desperate. Groping for the wet. All still. Still, life. Still life. Passion...
Read MoreA Moment
a hover of crows over mossy horizon, small against the underbelly of a skywide dove. the bay so still. hills soft as deer. beyond their chert flanks a few rufous flecks of cranberry. and always the spruce, those scepters comprising scepters, lithe in the wind, exulting, with their great green wings, beyond the curve of the Earth. Passion...
Read MoreDried Herbs
she catches the moment of herbs moon-high or tide-low picks their fragrancies leaves them drying in the dark before they can blossom into streams of sunlit dust their patterns of wait droop wither crumble retaining through dormancy echoes of last year’s flower Passion...
Read MoreThese Apparent Prodigies
You can hear everything from my porch — gibbons railing and teething through visitor spines, ...
Read MoreThe Flagellant
“… and the flagellant gathers his strength, his wounds burning, blood purging; his tiresome spirit tightening.” And he’s down to bare back, the swish, as he walks, of areca palms around his waist; on his head, the flaming swell of hibiscus on weedy greens. He’s yoked short, wooden sticks, crowned with iron points, and bound with a leather leash, the better for the scourge. In the air, blood and sod fret the mangosteens to turn, red fire thickening — and you whisper, sweeter… The ash-gold on the penitents’...
Read MoreThe Last Salt Kingdom
She eased out of a group celebrating a fiftieth high school reunion — her wide set and still blue eyes taking me in an instant back to summer glazed bodies swimming away whole afternoons at a bend in the Sandy River in John Yoakim’s pasture, where current cut a hole deep enough to swim, where silk black river bottom land grew dark green corn behind us, and wild plums in the fence row between, released sweet juice of rose colored flesh, sliding mouth to breast, feeding the madness of sixteen in a 1936 Chevrolet...
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