The Long Cry of Autumn
Blustery morning winds are driving low lying clouds and three days of drizzling rain into a gap in West Virginia mountains, and I walk my dog under an autumn sky so perfectly blue no words can hold it. I’d like to hold this moment though, the way my wife holds fragrance in dried leaves she keeps in a dish on her vanity, but the dog cares nothing about past or future, invisible center pulling hard against the leash — all nose now — brain gorged by smells far beyond my imagining, enough to quiver sagging lips of half-bark dreams he’ll dream in front of winter...
Read MoreCast About
the wind blows like a zither leaves, branches, flapping, the house banging against the house you would love this time of year your favorite growing colder, the pumpkins at the side of the road like small flames skeletal winds, I’ll stand looking at this world you’ve left Passion...
Read MoreNorth Dakota Blues
I’m as shriveled and dead as an autumnal leaf I’m a-blowin’ through life on a gossamer breeze To a ghost-ravaged town on the edge of the world Where the rain never came and the wild winds blow Through a sun-whitened skull on a sun-whitened plain Only thirteen are left only seven are sane Where the Indians roamed and the buffalo fell And the hide hunters struck with a harbinger’s knell. Then the homesteaders came with a robin’s egg dream And they planted their towns like a field full of wheat Till Depression and Dust like Colossus in black Left their...
Read MoreTombstone Softly Standing
I quiver gently, these proud useless minor days, dead tree still standing wickedly, too dumb to fall, the sap of life upright by chance alone, each breeze a potent ached for force of quick release, but no, I stand, I stand my ground, decay before your very eyes, no wisdom left to sparkle this dead day, a victim only of my own sweet human lies, a criminal in my waste of others’ time, their fervent secondary thoughts. Not here, not gone, too quick to bury, a furtive prisoner in my own polluted shell, I whisper sigh hiccup my visionary role of yesterday, a monument to...
Read MoreThe Mirrors
We are the frail ones. We’re the feather pillows the other kids used for their fights, the pencils they threw across the room. We wouldn’t even learn to walk until they made us; we said the the grass was like needles under our feet. As adults we still wait around for blue princes, still stand on the roof expecting to fly. We’re the ones who can’t hold down a job, who cry so much it seems we were made of rain, who give our last coins to the tap dancers on the street corner until we’re the tap dancers on the street corner. And you cross to the other side when you see us: ...
Read MoreDali’s Last Dream
By the signposts of the mind he reclines in the cradles of melted watches, a strand of moist pink gum winding between the liquid mirrors of convoluted canyons sweetness faded to wash line grey. A cold wolf howls at the blackened moon, below, the naked bones of whitewashed beeches stretch their brittle limbs, claws bared to rake the sky, bleeding harmonic dissonance through the ruptured hearts of buffo toads floating, face down, in limpid pools of marginal realities. Passion...
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