The vagrant, who had lost the means
to practise the art by which he’d once
made his living, stood awed at how suddenly
the sun had set, and wondered if darkness
would come on as quickly. As the rush
of winds abated he sighed the breath
of forgetting momentarily how to exist
without knowing what was to come next.
The nagging agitation [...]
Monthly Archives: May 2009
The Vagrant
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Seabirds
Seabirds fly north.
The piano music of the street performer
a tchaikovsky concerto
accompanies them as they recede
a bit more with each
wing flap into the horizon.
The scene is quite unlike
the soap operatic fin du film,
the painstakingly designed emotion
of getting in one last good swell from
the heart up through the throat
to the eyes before getting up
and leaving the theater
to [...]
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Night and Day
Night for some reason is easier to bear
than days the sun shines. Darkness means
the path is winding down and rest from wandering is near;
the burden of the heap of hours that make up the day
has again been stoically born. In cities
crowded with bodies ambling the streets
there is nowhere to turn to be [...]
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Off orange roses arranged in a vase
pinkish petals drop in a clump
and lie on the table inert.
Pneumatic breezes ruffle trees in
the intermittently drizzling spring
outside the open door.
The gently swinging branches of the weeping
willow tree are long, flaccid
leafy and in stillness precarious.
A leaf scraping the rutty street
doesn’t disturb the deadened quietude,
it punctuates it.
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A close examination of a broken eggshell
The object that fell through a tear in the awning
and softly smacked hitting the ground is half of
a bluish green eggshell spotted with brown and black
smudged matter of the mother bird’s patient incubation.
The edges where it broke open are jagged and the surface
that sustained the impact is cracked yet still intact.
Inside, chinks [...]
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Spring
Off roses arranged
in a vase as a centerpiece
pinkish orange petals suddenly
drop in a clump
causing me to turn from what
i have been doing and look
at them lying inertly in front of me.
Outside the open back door
trees shuffle, restless in the sunless,
intermittently drizzling spring.
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Atavism
Candles arranged in a ring on iron candelabras
are as if brand new; their rims are not misshapen by
the uneven heat of trembling flame; no wax drippings
have run down the cylinders’ sides to rounded congealment;
their wicks are white, not the charred black of fire
having been born by them. Inside this chamber,
remade in america out of stones [...]
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