These lines I wrote you
And rewrote you
Constant ending
On a far line
Of landscape
I cannot end
Can only drive
Category: Poetry
House
I wander around the house
like a ghost, like a mouse,
like a bird
looking for what
I once was.
Weight
The weight of forty kilos in the sack of flour I carried on my shoulder and you waiting in the no-parking zone on Wyndam.
Other things are heavier.
The notes in a song.
The traffic.
The sunlight.
Your small hands on the
steering wheel and their
bees-wax stain in my skull.
The question, what is it inside this
I haven’t said and that I’ll say once more,
to stamp out its flesh.
The maps of nowhere in
the side pockets of your door.
The weights of balances and off-balances.
The delicate china of your medieval language,
aşkım, aşkım, aşkım.
The emptiness of faith, its freedom weeded by the certainty of the barren things we walk beside.
The bicycle leaning against a stone wall,
I should have taken.
Like the million poets in a single flower,
each forgetful and beautiful and the
cleaned-out trunk empty
and ready to carry it all away,
as if I no longer cared who
witnessed me murdering
the thing that carried this thing
between the lines of a spot
where no one, heavier by the second,
waits this long.
Bird Watcher
All that’s left of the leaves are the birds of autumn.
In truth I’ve lost sight of my beauty too.
I feel it beneath me purring in the leafy ground,
muddied inside the dark paradise of my life.
Such as the two far-flung basswood trees near a river
where I walked between them and shivered.
Standing beside them, the sky was a window
left opened, both my boys leaping through.
The tracks of their fragile wings left in the air.
My girl cartwheeling from one to the next,
looking back to see if I was following.
Isle of Hoy 