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.
Category: 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
Caveat: Poem #1107 “The oldest house”
the oldest house hangs at the mind's edge where we imagine prototypes the fractal roofs extending piling up rooms like foam and we walk in dreams through cold hallways tasting dust breathing sighs
Caveat: Poem #1104 “Forever”
Dawn: brighter, in small steps, black to grayish, then changing to blue, out over the water, among the trees' silhouettes, the hills waiting like broken clocks, their feet stuck in the sea forever.
Caveat: Poem #1099 “Spoken”
there's an overcast fog covering the hillside across the water the cobalt-dark sea, they say bears the marks of the boats that pass here, they say scarring the world seeking fish they have said
Caveat: Poem #1091 “Misunderstandings”
When Arthur is talking to others, he likes to joke about my books, complains there are too many, cluttering his attic. The message I get from these warm words: "you are not welcome here."
Caveat: Poem #1089 “Redirection”
Completely remove pain from discourse. Don't lean on it as an excuse It hijacks our monologues. Don't pay it attention. Unavoidable. Don't dwell on it. Look instead at the trees.
Caveat: Poem #1081 “Unpleasant excursion”
It's not easy, with the rain and wind: The boat's propeller was tangled by badly aimed fishing line. I thought we would hit rocks. "Use the small motor!" he was yelling. We went east, rocking, slow.
Caveat: Poem #1079 “Perelandra”
the sea opens out beyond the point, and it thrusts its wide swells at you, devouring time with glintings that jump off the rumples scarring the edges and white-capped tips of the round surging waves.
Caveat: Poem #892 “The default mode of textual production”
ㅁ prose becomes difficult so poetry becomes the default manner of expression engendering ideas and capturing the images that a glance outside will give to me
– a reverse nonnet.