Home >  Monthly Archives: November 2014

140 / 37
 
Twenty gulls on
Clay-colored water
Bob a blockade
Across the river,

Too cold to care
About Dun Mallard
Crashing the flank
Of the embargo.
[130]

200 / 24
 
Sat up at six
  in bedsheet gnarl,
So she took a
  mental sick day.

By noon she stood
  under the hallway arch,
Pinned between the bills
  and cleaning kitchen. 

Worry is a vapor:

It fills any space.
It clings to nits
  and mountains.
[43]

140 / 38
 
When he came,
He came wizened,

As if I saw his
Life in a mirror_

Saw it, but
Could not stop

The pain from coming.
[107]

200 / 25

“If I close my eyes and clear my thoughts, and just feel, I sense there that same faint disturbance that I have always felt—the despair just on the other side of containment. And a mere touch, a mere word, could wreak the flooding.”

Anda Boyles / 1998

[46]

140 / 39
 
I quoted myself
  then changed the name,
Sat back, and
  watched it fade.

Even the nearest things
  I hold out 
for inspection.
[121]

200 / 26
 
Pogo picked the mouth, 
  Dwyer style. 
Wrote a note: 
  “Harder to be half than none.”

Pogo notwithstanding, 

Minny chose the heart, 
  Borda style. 
Always said: 
  “It’s the heart that hounds you.”
[32]

140 / 40
 
Khyber_
Chalk line road
  snakes into
the saw-toothed dare.
Breach the
  cross-wise blades_
Test hand. Test nerve.
[108]

1024 / 20

1024_20

RECORD – FEDERAL SUPPLY SERVICE, STOCK NUMBER 7530-00-222-3525.

Between 11 and 31 January 2000, I kept careful track of all of my activities in a green government supply ledger. I filled five pages and gave up. Took longer to write my workday than to live it. Over the years, I’ve found dozens of these ledgers like mine, fragmentary records stuffed away forgotten in file drawers and credenzas. Each time, these abandoned ledgers bring to mind two contradictory thoughts. First is the sad continuity of things—how much the same our efforts appear beside those of who came before us. The second is the impossible uniqueness of life, how a million sentient moments pass per day unrecorded, how our attempts to record them are inevitably overwhelmed by the demands of the moments themselves. How the flow of life is incontrovertible. How despite even our best efforts to account for life, it almost entirely disappears.

[152]

140 / 41
 
Where are we, widows?
Is there communion in your tears?
Or are we islands?
Sunblanked waters,
Distant coastlines_
An archepelago of fears?
[133]