This weather confuses the birds, I’m told.
Seventy-three degrees in January on a Thursday afternoon.
The trees talk of former windfalls, widow makers,
cradled for baptisms under Cherokee skies – bark stripped
white like antlers tangled in black hickory, dried
leaves the rustle of balled paper.
Winter is barely out the gate
but spring chews in our ear.
The trees talk and I listen.
This bar is lit year-round with Christmas lights
reflecting off the varnished oak, drinking glasses,
and liquor stock, and a dozen little tiki lamps
sporadically glow from their stationed posts;
an aura not unlike votive candles flickering
at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.
I’m redefining what it means to sit here
in the dark. It’s a shame they won’t be
talking about this in the next century:
the way he pronounced vacuous when
asked to describe the room, or the shot-glass
clank tuned in perfect collective pitch.
It’ll either be too hot or too cold by then,
and reading will be as ancient as laugh tracks
and patriotic cowboys, Monument Valley
now a beatific dementia that rises with
Abbadon and sets with Big Sur.
But I’m not thinking about that right now.
I’m thinking about you, whoever you are,
wrapped carelessly in a coral, melon-white
Mexican blanket on Zuma Beach with your
back to me, and whether or not it’s really been
ten years since I’ve seen the ocean.
Originally published in Sugar House Review: Fall/Winter 2018
Smoke tangles with tangerine clouds on the horizon
like an invitation sealed in a soft cream envelope.
The dying breath of day sends an empty beer can down
the street into fresh dark, where no doubt it’ll go on forever.
One by one neighbors shut their windows but still
the laugh tracks bounce off brick and concrete, knowing
good and well this life is syndicated.
Next door two boys punch it out in the mosquito glow
of the streetlamp – shirts ripped, cursing like their fathers,
the neighborhood in silence as this happens all too often.
The world just isn’t big enough for boys with two first names.
You would’ve pulled them apart.
Last night I saw you in Cape Canaveral as rockets became
raptured in ribbons of smoke and you tossed your hair over
your shoulder and waved at the camera, laughing with all
your body the way honest people do. Before the end you said
without Him you were nothing, but even in nothing you were everything.
Often I awake in the dark unsure of where I am,
too afraid to move for there are killers on the highway,
haunted by white noise from an after-hours television.
Maybe it’s applause.
Originally appeared in Art Focus Oklahoma: Spring 2018.
Link to digital issue
Leaving the marina, the blue heron stands
at the rock island tip and stretches toward blue
sky, focused on the water’s surface and what might
exist beneath, like a patron saint of silverfish or
shipwrecks. Its wings unfold and shade the water and
as we pass I wonder whether to pray to the bird or
bribe with bluegill. I lay back under the blazing sun and
cross my arms, hand feed cigarette butts to dented beer cans,
wave at passing boats like I’m running for office.
Anchored near shore we unload the boat
for lunch in the shade of a thinning dogwood,
intoxicated off one another, or sunstroke.
Deer tracks map between trees and naked roots
before they disappear further inland.
She laughs at something I said and for a moment I imagine
the gentle algorithm it would take to hold her hand.
Barefoot on the rocks, it’s hard not to
believe all this was made for you and me.
Later in the middle of the lake the boys bob like buoys
as the girls pull at their swimsuits, connect thread to tanline
with white and pink borders like European boundaries;
parts of the world I’ll never see. I watch the shoreline
for another heron, the patron saint
of wardrobe malfunctions.
Originally appeared in The 3288 Review: Winter 2017.
Evening Panoply 