ㅁ We, the assembled, drift and declaim: We permit your wind to bring us - a conspiracy of clouds, in collective action - to your continent. Your straining trees, your cold rocks, told us: stay.
– a reverse nonnet.
Category: Nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1409 “An otter on the question of boats”
ㅁ I, a bold sea otter, witness the boats that cross the sea's roof and that scare our children; the boats drone their hot dirges in their unusual straight lines, interrupting our happy repasts.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1405 “Optional philosophy”
ㅁ Watch the world, through windows, from a distance, keeping perspective, avoiding confusion, constructing mental models, testing them against what happens... or alternately just sit and watch.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1399 “Snails”
ㅁ Snails have found radish leaves in my garden. They are so happy. Still, the radishes grow. The snails rush from leaf to leaf. The radishes seem unconcerned: new leaves appear daily to feed snails.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1397 “Guardian”
ㅁ I was told I was quite eccentric. This was in this dream I was in. My friend Bob was there, talking. He had an unreal farm. There were outbuildings. Within, some boats. A woman. She slept. Safe.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1396 “The long view”
ㅁ Yes. It's true - what they say: I am a tree. Let's focus on that. I cling to the damp earth. The skies taunt me day and night. I'll get at them any year now. The days are like seconds spinning by.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1394 “No one is watching”
ㅁ The tree was leaping into the sea. It tangled its branches, flailing. The sea was indifferent. Eagles were witnesses. The tree's roots were caught. Moss rode its flanks. The clouds watched. Birds sang. Jump!
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1392 “Bespoke geographies”
ㅁ Maps. Fictions. Diagrams. Imaginings. Strange realities. Bespoke geographies. Alternate universes. Linear agglomerations. Maybe just a way to pass some time.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1389 “Past and present”
ㅁ In the city, there are many sounds: subways hum; sirens sing; trucks pass. Sometimes I dream these old sounds. At three-forty A.M., to birds and rain, here, I snap awake. Already, it is light.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1384 “Road’s dust”
ㅁ Sun replaced all the rain that came before and dried out the road making lots of gray dust for the trucks to kick around coating the leaves of the bushes which are drawing bees with their flowers.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1377 “Presentation”
ㅁ The deer stood at the top of the rocks, looking at me as if surprised. It had come down that steep path - the one I'd made last year. It browsed some green leaves: blueberry plants reaching out to feed deer.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1372 “Epistemology”
ㅁ Sight constructs images engendering thoughts hopes dreams doubts plans which swirl in vast spirals on the field of perception sweeping conceptual gestures like galaxies of damp greenery.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1368 “The new house”
ㅁ In the dream I visited a house. It was a vast house, modernist, a tall central room, columns, an incomplete kitchen, filled with cut firewood, oh and classrooms on one side; the name: "Light."
– a nonnet. This was an actual dream I awoke from just now.
Caveat: Poem #1363 “A garden’s genesis”
ㅁ I built a greenhouse on the corner; my garden isn't very big. I just laid out plastic tubs, and filled them with dark soil. I planted some seeds, water daily, keep watching, shoots sprout, grow.
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Poem #1289 “See”
At first light, sometimes I take a walk. The road is dark and the trees loom. I see snow stained lavender. The stream rushes nearby. A puddle wears ice. Gravel crunches. I return. Birds speak. See.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1288 “Chill”
I look out the window by my desk. Tiny pearls of rain hang, breathless. The sky threads the trees' branches. Purple trapezoids dance. The moon has left signs. Snow has melted. Gravel rests. Fog drifts. Chill.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1158 “Transubstantiation”
Specific unrealities surge, emerge from apophenic thoughts, caught in virtual gazes, await capture by minds, wind through fields like birds, heard like the wind, in your hair where we sleep.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1149 “A one-sided but earnest conversation”
Rain! You, me... we should talk. I'm just trying to get something done out here under the clouds but you keep interrupting forcing your damp fingers at me full of naturalistic hubris.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1148 “An effort to structure time”
So... Sunday. The thing is... the days, they blur... a string of mornings, awoken out of dreams, undifferentiated. Then the calendar lays guidelines, steers thoughts away from simple being.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1147 “Extinction”
I'm wide awake, middle of the night. With an aggressive staccato, the rain perforates the air while I watch the darkness. I consider shapes. The night crawls by. It dissolves into dreams.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1146 “A poem hostile to the reader”
lines displace surfaces manifesting into abstractions and hypotheticals painting obscure paradigms which distort representations and make you want to stop reading this
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1145 “A typical day in nether Commonia”
I saw there were strange things on the map: mysterious towns and highways, inconsistent land-uses, geographic glitches, unknowable lakes, hazy outlines, lost cities, portals, holes.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1144 “Luna’s dissolute moods”
Just at dawn the moon gazes downward. She turns her bright eye to the trees. The clouds thin and part for her. The rocks reveal their dreams. The sea is bashful. She watches birds. She tastes air. She slumps. Pale.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1142 “The day’s prelude”
at some point before the sun comes up, before the looming fog brightens, above the waiting forest, behind the slate gray sky, with eagles' assent, but bears' surprise, it begins: purple light
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1141 “The origins of meaning”
pain expressed like desire internal states with utterances perturbations in air or glyphs projected with light hopeful, vain intentions to use an apparatus known as language
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1139 “A speculative solipsism”
A speculative solipsism: I imagined being a bear. The world was an endless verb. All objects were nameless. Feelings thrummed through me. The seasons changed. The trees drooped. Leaves fell. Bare.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1138 “A fiction emerges from and disappears into nothingness”
"True," she said. She sat down and looked around. "The gods can't see us." He just listened, musing. "Perhaps when the sun comes out..." A deer poked its head out at them. The clouds made the sky a dull, gray slate. He stood, restlessly, pacing the ground. The deer, now startled, disappeared. Droplets of water scattered. "What if we..." he began. He gazed mountainward. She shook her head. "There's nothing." He slumped. Wept.
– a reverse nonnet followed by a nonnet, an effort to tell a compact (and fictional) story
Caveat: Poem #1137 “The dock arch’s denizens”
The cormorant sits on the dock's arch, but it maintains a sidelong gaze as if unsure where to look. Other times, two ravens, or some gray seagulls, socialize there. Mostly, though, no birds sit.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1136 “Well”
Pipes arrayed in efforts to control things providing pathways to distribute water pulled deep from under the ground cool and calmly indifferent meeting the world after long dark years
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1120 “The cartographer’s delusion”
streets: sprawling creative impositions, engineering feats, landscape alterations, geographic abstractions, connections between unseen nodes, or just unthinking lines on a map.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1114 “Planning stages”
Yesterday the wind kept the air cool. It is that moment when you think: Fall is waiting, at stage left, planning its grand entrance, anticipating, reviewing lines, upstaging sunny days
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1109 “Things”
the history of things lies buried down beneath the present moment scrabbling like bored zombies or predators on drugs seeking to come out sniffing at now kicking dirt: grinning things
– a nonnet
Caveat: Poem #1108 “Another roadside attraction”
First, place a big rock beside the road. Find another big rock to add. Balance yet a third on top. Now step back to admire. Think about hubris. Contemplate art. Find meaning. Raise doubts. Dream.
– a nonnet
