(Poem #361 on new numbering scheme)
A cup on the edge of the counter. I'll wash it later this evening.
(Poem #361 on new numbering scheme)
A cup on the edge of the counter. I'll wash it later this evening.
(Poem #360 on new numbering scheme)
It's better to refuse an argument with shadows and shades. They can seem to lack originality and anyway they will agree with all your rhetoric.
(Poem #359 on new numbering scheme)
Korea's been my home almost ten years and here I never drive a car. Yet still I dream the driving dreams: road trips of youth relived like films, a night or two each month.
(Poem #358 on new numbering scheme)
ㅁ The storm's bland aftermath dissolved and stained the air so that it tasted like burnt wire or moistened stones. At last, a lingering tomato-tinted twilight grasped the streets.
– a quatrain in blank verse (iambic pentameter).
(Poem #357 on new numbering scheme)
The clouds became a fortress hung against the rainy sky The buildings lurked beneath, alone like animals too shy.
(Poem #356 on new numbering scheme)
Some words come like air, others like sleep. Steam rises from July's pavement.
[daily log: walking, 7.5km]
(Poem #355 on new numbering scheme)
Apocalypses come and go like swathes of summer rain They sweep across the warm, damp streets and push leaves down the drain.
(Poem #354 on new numbering scheme)
At work, I sometimes get so angry. This tends to arise out of doubts: the quality of my work. Am I making progress? Students fail to learn. Colleagues don't care. Kids complain. I can't help.
(Poem #353 on new numbering scheme)
If I had said the rock was mystified what would have been my meaning? Would a rock have hoped to understand what I had said? Or would the rock just lie there, doing zen?
(Poem #352 on new numbering scheme)
the trees hang, depressed. traffic zooms through summer's heat and humidity.
(Poem #351 on new numbering scheme)
The two men fought in the wood. Winter's breath made clouds. They stood facing. The fight was no good. A rose appeared in the snow. Then another drop fell, slow - from the wound his blood did flow. He threw his knife to the ground and wobbled, spinning around. At last, he fell without a sound.
– three englyn milwr, telling a little story.
(Poem #350 on new numbering scheme)
On this map you see my dreams: look here at the X, it seems to mark my mind's random streams.
– an englyn milwr, i.e. “soldier’s englyn.”
[daily log: walking, 1km]
(Poem #349 on new numbering scheme)
The monsoon brought clouds and rain. I ate some oatmeal from my small glass bowl.
(Poem #348 on new numbering scheme)
The animals were gathered to discuss a plan to make the monkey their new king. The simian was giving them a grin - in fact, he felt an utter disregard.
(Poem #347 on new numbering scheme)
There's going down. There's going up. Which way you choose to go depends on your desire. Desire can lead, but those descents can stray: long corridors with many doors require decisions once again. It's better, then, to walk the upward path. The clouds can serve as steppingstones, and rainbows tell you when to turn, and when to jump, and even swerve. Well, all of this might seem fantastic news, but there's a problem still. You don't yet know where you might need to stop, and catch the views - that mountain for example, with glaring snow: it needs attention from the angels who you hope might tell you plainly what is true.
– structurally, it’s a sonnet (of some kind – Elizabethan?), but I don’t think it’s very sonnet-like, thematically, and there’s too much enjambment.
(Poem #346 on new numbering scheme)
To eat is not now any luxury: a dull task that's devoid of pleasure which I do because I must despite my lack of any sense of taste and aimless tongue.
(Poem #345 on new numbering scheme)
When anger surges into that small spot below my chin, I stop to think that that's the locus, coincidentally where a cancer grew in my throat, so I ask, "Is that what happens when I swallow it?"
(Poem #344 on new numbering scheme)
Perhaps the trees were happy with the move. The dirt was nice; the buildings gave them shade. At first, the rain was beautiful, it seemed. But winds appeared, and blew the young trees down.
(Poem #343 on new numbering scheme)
The raindrops tried to take my window's screen... a beachhead might be made, for further floods; the other raindrops offered their applause but gave them no material support.
(Poem #342 on new numbering scheme)
moss on dirt, under trees: sudden greenness; summer rain licks at the gray air.
[daily log: walking, 8km]
(Poem #341 on new numbering scheme)
Collected colors, named and counted now, and various important types of lines, arrayed on screens or paper so that when it all is fit together, you see worlds.
(Poem #340 on new numbering scheme)
It breaks my heart to have students so smart begin to show such weak but obstinate resistance: they've decided not to work and lost their interest in learning things. Perhaps instead I failed to reach their minds.
(Poem #339 on new numbering scheme)
inanimate things take on life when abandoned: a chair in the grass.
(Poem #338 on new numbering scheme)
The contrast medium went in injected by the nurse. The fluid flowed, wine-bright and hot, into my veins, and worse.
(Poem #337 on new numbering scheme)
Arranging words like little particles of light that bound through space like hunted prey that hope to flee those ravenous weird beasts imagined, I decide to take a break.
(Poem #336 on new numbering scheme)
The rain arrived. Each year's monsoon Begins about this time. The sky becomes a vacant gray. A gust finds some wind chime.
(Poem #335 on new numbering scheme)
The people were distributing their souls across the city, traveling by train through tunnels and among the buildings strewn around the elevated tracks like toys.
[daily log: walking, 9km]
(Poem #334 on new numbering scheme)
Representations will unfold. Then, mirroring moon's dusky gold, they hover with laconic tones until clouds can press them on stones.
(Poem #333 on new numbering scheme)
A tangled moon was weaving rough black cloth. The poets noted this, with their swift pens, but all their exploitations of the fact... they failed to yield a single line of verse.
(Poem #332 on new numbering scheme)
I saw a solitude in startled stance it stared at me across a gulf of space. But nothing more ocurred. Its silence forced my devolution into emptiness.
(Poem #331 on new numbering scheme)
There is a kind of microclimate amid the dawn redwoods that grow along the pedestrian pathways I walk to work, in the neighborhood, amid apartments and children. The air: cool.
(Poem #330 on new numbering scheme)
A single line across a blank page makes a line alone, which demarcates nothing But many lines together start to form a representation which shows the world.
(Poem #329 on new numbering scheme)
The angel polychromatic will come down rainbows, seeking to convey the host, in all its numbers, under kingdoms dark, until they fecklessly arrive in Oz.
[daily log: walking, 1km]