Update After An Absence

Just to let everyone know (who might be interested) I have not vanished. In fact, I've begun drawing again, and will try to start posting my efforts here for your viewing pleasure. Tonight I'm working on a poetry assignment of sorts--my good, good friend SaraEve and I exchanged three photographs each to be used as prompts. It feels good to be creative again.

Check out my newest link under "In The Forest", called Auld Manhattoe. I found this blog when I was looking for information about an old tale I read back in elementary school, about a fisherman's daughter tasked with appearing before the king under a set of paradoxical requirements--neither riding nor walking, neither clothed nor nude, etc. I don't think it has any single title that everyone would know it by, but the story is sort of archetypical.

While On The Warm And Faraway

Enough of absence becomes a presence.
The void of your voiceless days
Becomes a pulse in the wrist, after a time
A throb in the wind in a bottleneck.
Broken green glass in chiming chips on the blacktop
Settles into the imagination
Like rain upon a parched garden,
And all the little million wriggling
Words surface to fit themselves together.

Photo Albums

Our ghosts are biding
in the photo albums of strangers.
We are background to life:
Douglas fir, canyon rail,
a concession stand,
your face or mine.
Somewhere I am holding a soda
staring off into the distance
while in the fore a beautiful man
is kissing a beautiful unknowable woman.

Job

It could be one cold interview at the end
And maybe that is why we get buried in suits
A gin and tonic and a sinner’s cigar
Dry-cleaning ticket taped to a security deposit

My uncle gave me Elvis, “now I’m dead, now I’m dead”
And I made an excuse for that rhythm
It could be one chair and a stern fatherly stare
At the end, or it could be sex with someone’s mother

Better list all your strengths and boyhood pranks
In the margins where a careful heart could see them
On the cover, dead center, an olive branch
And a decent guess of your worth

Between The Hours Of Cat & Bat

I.

blue-black wing thrashing
a thrush in the night

so my mammal goes unfed
the worm too far along by dawn

those subways of a vein
aflow with burning novels

the fruitivore in a field of nicked ears
who sees by screaming

in my sleeping eye
peaches bobbing on a river

and the raft of feathers
threaded dry through the rafters


II.

a pocketful of tokens for ferries
in a country I'll never get back to

gold hair spilling over the forearm
of the unwritten chapter

long thin bony arm
long dark empty night
thoughts flung far back into the lost

sunlight unexpected in the raindrops
spinning her back
the way the spinning top rebounded

I've been sick she said
crushed into a man attempting to hold
his planet in place with love

years and years hence the phrase
search forevermore
rings in the downy ears of a cat

heading to the window for entrance
and is tranced


III.

somnambulating in a blanket
a marionette in a coat of dust
never reaches the front door
but cocks ear to muffled birds
at dawn at the front window song