poemstoday

[poemstoday]

Re-enchantment

the window that looks out of me says what now?

raindrop-minded. that’s okay too.

this and that rain drop, this and that color, clearness itself.

here’s a day, green wet redyellow wet day, grayer than quiet. just

outside, pecking away, the turkey doesn’t know it’s wild.

this is new and delicious.

[poemstoday]

Stable

Was it a yellow-pine chipmunk or a golden-mantled squirrel, floating down there in the water, the tall white bucket of water? The horse was still drinking, it was still morning. The little thing must have drowned moments ago, you said, and told me how usually there’s a small wooden plank we keep in there so they can climb out. We looked, became mirrors of its calm stare—whiskered face, eyes fixed in everlasting heed, fully still, fully quenched.

[poemstoday]

it’s knowing that

it’s knowing that there could never be anything sexier than doing just what needs to be done just when it needs to be done and that most of the time it will be doing nothing at all

it’s lucy in the sky with mosquitoes

it’s the sounds of casual gun shots around the bend of this meadow and the soft wonderhowls of someone’s daughter around another

it’s joel’s larger, brotherly body around mine when I’m ecstatically cold

it’s the tao of christ

it’s plain saying but it takes so long o lord

it’s when the smartest most exquisite dirty dance music becomes the hollowed husk left behind by the dragonfly in the july morning

it’s actually asking for what I need it’s giving it to you good

it’s asking the man on his way out what he thinks about the whole scene and it’s him telling you that all the streams end up humbled into the ocean because it’s lower than they are

it’s carrying the light

it’s voguing to myself in circles around this fire under the yellow crescent lune with thom in the headphones singing how come I end up where I started how come I end up where I belong and then throwing the headphones off into the many-possibled sky it’s

abundantly clear

it’s what robbie meant when he said gone are the early stages

it’s learning to unlearn

it’s already knowing that I’m inside of love with you because you’ve come to know yourself and we know it’s the same thing

it’s the yellowwhite gestures of the meadow in the daisies and nothing else

it’s how you are it’s how you hum at dusk

it’s the gift of the wound

it’s these brittled, pixelated, mellow-red wood chips from a fallen tree in my cupped hands like jackpot coins of plenty

it’s knowing that the elephant in the room is none other than—

it’s all the good fights I should have picked with you, robbing us of the sweet intimacy of conflict it’s

none other than love

it’s unsecretly, unhurriedly becoming my father, my mother it’s getting away with it

it’s for the sake of synthesis of cross-pollination

it’s knowing that the escorting of the sweet alien honeybee from the tent isn’t, isn’t, isn’t to keep her out, but to keep her wild

it’s lookaftering

it’s knowing that you’re here too and how that could change everything

it’s lying skin-grass in the mute afternoon letting the ants know me

it’s the dried character of the wood you gather and in it the engraved longing of the wind surfing on itself before tossing it into the fire

it’s my pretentious (throw it) shallow (onto the fire) peace

it’s gathering your latest attachments (this too) to be burned (this too) to remember that what’s real doesn’t

die, and remembering and humming at dusk

it’s the oregon plainness this just-enough desert

it’s what rainer and walt and edward estlin meant

it’s what I wanted all along

[poemstoday]

you’re here too

dearest forager find in the bright pales of the very husk of it, holding (tall grass) held (light wind) folded (gasp wet) felt the very now before your very heart

[poemstoday]

nov.

sun grey up colors extra voiced subject to change let’s notice

[poemstoday]

pine, as a verb

as a wanting to need as a tall mumble, a transmission tended to tentative, coastal surrenderclear

[poemstoday]

islet

to toss                         until the island  into you words 

                        of us like sand into the water                         becomes                         continent

[poemstoday]

it’s perennial

to a room in my house I opened the door asked (plume) who you were you got who I was we (daylily) opened the (lilac) windows the tall (camellia) summer windows we saw then our garden (marigold why) for the first time (not) for the first time (yeah)

[poemstoday]

wildflowers of oregon

prairie mallow, from april on, checkerbloom. yarrow, lupine, the stuff of meadows, sidewalks, summer things wild openings, a western tiger swallowtail’s flutter. see yellow, pales noble in the green, see sundried violet, honeywhite o with scent the grass carries light, exhales swing low sweet the jasmine air I was there

[poemstoday]

coast walk

sweet sediment, rockaway low tide jasper, somewhere shore obsidian a sunday coast an oregon jade wet agates sand footed, a sunday. the wood's petrified, I’m petrified— dunes, tall green the pastel grass fragrant it’s windy. so what she picks up a stone of interest now? anything I said tossing another whose magic had dried we want 

[poemstoday]

aug 18

late after—listen: noon, blue

[poemstoday]

stars of the lid, live in brussels

the church fills with curious ears and upturned eyes of loosely composed egos dressed in black. begijnhofkerk, flemish baroque style, built for semi-monastic lay women to indulge in voluntary poverty. jesus is dying everywhere round here, between the mosaic windows, orange-lit by street light outside. and the stage occupies the altar, waiting strings and keys below a wall of moog electronics and I believe the old masochistic symbols will follow us into space (forty days of fasting’s the original drone sensation) and here they're starting now, with that ever ending sound

and I’m under a waterfall now of projection, faces made of light and I’m in a womb and the wallpaper’s pure rorschach, kaleidoscopic—I bask in the generosity of abstraction, places I remember putting the tired sounds on, releasing them up in the azusa canyon with robbie in the early stages, out there at joshua tree, out there with derek in montana, o jeremy in maine lying on our backs on hoods of cars I’ve since sold. brian and adam sling texan skies at a northern european october, dressed in blue collar work suits inscribed with ‘big ed’s gas farm’ and when it was over the house played moon river, and I slipped out before they could flip on the lights, scurried back in quiet and cobblestone.

[poemstoday]

rue antoine dansaert

ansgar's fourth floor brussels apartment: hallway shaped, wooden and white and punctuated by color coded rows of books, and delicate light carrying blue through the windows. a shower is tucked in the kitchen beside the dutch wall-mounted hand coffee grinder. I found rolls of film in the door of the fridge, found the heating to be fragile, tending to the little gas light’s momentum to negotiate between october comfort and the expense of it. it’s correct—the bicycle there on the wall, the records in their crates and plants and plants

[poemstoday]

tempelhof

following the overgrowth, which of the wildflowers first appeared, resonant along the abandoned  air field? picnics now, leisure between runways, a generation still  landing, unsettled  as refugees

[poemstoday]

(listening to) gigi masin’s ‘clouds’

and the clarity they allow, tender grey on a mid september's sunday morning passing overhead like thoughts I keep forgetting to share with you, diminishing and cumulative as the fifteen hundred and sixty sunday mornings I’ve known

[poemstoday]

(listening to) stars of the lid

ending begins to acquire a taste for itself

a blue growing bluer, a choir of yellow sings into tentative shapes light suggests, light presses politely wearing green now, subdued as grass, late summer

green at the dew point, flirting with blue and all the while devoted to soil, always to darkness first, for color’s in no hurry. this the sound of loyalty

[poemstoday]

(listening to) the national

repetitious as you’d expect a heart to be. this the sound of being down of being athletic about it. the studio’s a storm’s eye. the melody’s made of hemingway’s kind of courage. passion well spent rests in its resemblance to apathy.