I left my apartment windows open — I am wild that way — and the rainstorm ruined the place to teach me a lesson. I caulked the cracks in the plaster and found patches from before. I repainted the walls and noticed the hasty paint job; the corner’s curves giggled as I lay down the painter’s tape; my soul felt the healing of wet, tender bristles on the wood’s latex skin over cracks, bulges, bumps, and bends. This place was alive with getting put together and falling apart again. I beheld its incurable quaintness and brutal, undeniable charm. Forlorn, I came to understand I would only add my own mistakes. I lay in bed; the walls were mine. The apartment an awning of wilderness.
Where it’s at
The most important thing about a loved thing is it is loved
Dry Terms
There is something in spontaneous being that defies analysis. That analysis, set apart from spontaneous being, searches for cheating rules when, without rules, being one’s self is not the rule, but simply the way. One sells one’s self short attempting to package one’s self into something that fits when fitting is supposed to be the substance. The broad expanse of the self, the contemporality of the self is that most precious elixir of the self we fain would capture if we could without denying its essence.
Little
So much beautiful wild my little
Verdant
So startled to see vibrancy: the full tender flesh of the flowers; proud colors present themselves before the overcast sky faithfully to the sun. Fragile, these fall days; about to tumble… the wind wisps about me. I see a tree struck by lightening; a cloven branch clings to the trunk, its leaves at my feet, curling with burning crimson. I gaze up and blink at the tree’s green leaves.
Birthday
Though it’s getting late in the day, shall I skip over to the lake? My years do not count like those of a child. I go to the lake, overjoyed to see the sun has not set. The sunlight dances completely from one side to the other; the entire breadth is shimmering: the glory of the dancing sunrays on the water. That is what these fall days provide: an extended lifespan and, then, to finally see the naked tree revealed in the light.
Floaty
I saw a beautiful floating thing
rock–leaf–floaty, hovering
just beneath the surface of the pond.
My heart gazed;
my romance
always on
“It is perhaps a piece of trash;
don’t be open.”
I gazed
sunken rock, gold leaf, floating submerged
Then I saw it:
a turtle’s head poking out of the water
breathing with the whole pond,
breathing my breath,
so cute and innocent
at once my love was explained.
One turtle in the whole pond
breathing in air for the whole pond,
poking its head out to connect
the underneath with the forest.
Floating in earnest little grace
and so picturesque
I grabbed and shook my phone.
“You are going to miss him.
He will go should you take
his picture.”
I took it.
He was not in it,
just a pond and woods
so picturesque if there would
be a little turtle in the middle of it.
I gazed
and saw the turtle unchanged
and as I delighted
he ducked his head down;
a ring emanated over the pond
and a little bloop where his head had been
— gone.
I looked back at the picture.
He was there; his head
one little speck.
The sublime floating gold
unseen
hidden by the pond’s reflection
of the sky.
I talked with some people there;
they had seen the turtle, too.
Lightening Bugs and Lightening
Oh Universe, how am I so lucky to be your lover? When I breathe, I take you in; you take up my exhalations. You decorate your forest of curls with fireflies, don a cap of full moon; in the heavens of your eyes, your soul flashes around me.
Say It Isn’t So
The best words
hold aloft
that glimpse of self
shining through, unraveling
ensnaring words.
Google Glass
I relished your boyish whimsy: wanting, at one and the same time, to do no evil and to index everything. I snapped at a shrub to give to you, wondering if you would tell me whether it was shrouded in those same leaves of old that crown a good sauce. You guffawed and tutored me to consider man–made products: I would do well to avoid flowers and puppies. I lay in a patch of Quaker Ladies near the water as the Spring gusts garnished me with pollen. I strolled barefoot home in the mud as the rain came. You turned white when I asked the meaning of Stockton Gala Days; you produced the most delicious drops of technicolor: something in the red, green, and blue pixels of your blank screen shinning through the ensnared dew still waiting to connect technology to nature. I longed to turn you around to give you a picture of yourself, but then the moment would have been lost and somehow the algorithms that embed don’t capture it all.