Saturday, November 30, 2013

Haiku 3

Falling birches roar
like a piece of missing time 
as they strike the ground.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Haiku 2

These lights are pinpoints,
trailing off into the dark,
never to return.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Haiku

I am alone in
the roaring circumference 
of twilight shadows.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

The Weight Of Years

The weight of years
all collapsed and broken in the yard,
left to corrode in a ruinous winter rain
between many draping stalks,
all stuffing-sprung and leaking
days months hours like black-tipped toxins, 
to ferment along the crumbling
banks of the drained and fallow stream-bed,
evaporates to fine dust when touched,
yet lingers like a hand pressed against
a curve of shoulder at the blue hour. 

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Across Causeways

I have left you behind, old ocean,
blithely erased your midnight churnings 
from down wind-tipped streets
of empty wood-panelled sandboxes, 
like typing a fence-line of black X's 
across a misspelled word on the page. 

These were summer nights
where bright-banded constellations 
seemed vast enough
to swallow our youth whole,
as we lazed drunk and bewildered
in the rickety lifeguard watch-stands. 

Or the blue mornings of February
walking to the corner for the bus,
rifles booming hollow and black
from the duck blinds out in the reeds.

Past hundreds of miles of 
snake-crawled swamp and 
woods and yawning fields,
I still wake sometimes and feel
you lapping your fragmented shore,
somewhere out in all that darkness.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Lonely Places

The wind-whistled Siberia of mall parking lot
that stands vacant and weed-strewn 
save for shopping holidays,
and where it meets vast tides of 
gray fields racing into a distant nowhere.

A pool crusted over by a billowing tarp
in the seasons of staying indoors, 
crumpled leaves clinging to the rusted cyclone fence,
the blue fabric flapping like a dazed ghost
as the gust lazily stirs its edges. 

The sense of absence between two homes, 
glancing resigned over your shoulder at 
whatever you're treading away from,
rather than a future's beckoning. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Afterimage

You and I, we've known the feeling
of stumbling across black and depthless woods
towards where a fire still churns listless smoke
into a pallid, dusky sky, 
chairs left empty moments before,
some tipped over as if in sudden flight.

Or, the lasting sense of disturbance
after all the players have left 
the baseball field,
and the last machine having towed its burden 
of shattered wreckage from
the cold nightmare of the highway accident. 

A bare intuition that something has happened
just moments before your graceless intrusion, 
now left haunted and lingering in
currents of force at the unsettled margins. 

This is what Burlington feels like in November.