Pitter-Patter

It’s not torrential
or even steady,
this moderate rain,

more from the eaves than
the clouds. I’ve long closed
the blinds; I hear it,

not see it. Like
the tentative steps
of would-be visitors

killed in car crashes.

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Wildling

Comfortable in the cold,
mist tendrils rising
across morning garden,
dew-dampened boots
dry in the rising wind.
Cracking this year’s journal,
I release pleasure to the river.
Behind a dome of December clouds,
the sun struggles.

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i forget i fell asleep with you and can’t think of anything sweeter

you fall asleep with coffee breath, & the rain starts, hitting the sidewalk
as the dog whistles. the dog is whistling next to you & everything is
silent still. i imagine the noise of nothing sliding through the house. at
our world’s end, olive bread. so we ripped it off the loaf. our last meal
in the big house that no longer feels like ours. scattered we are,
segmented. yeasty fingers finding mouths & tasting only closeness.

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Last Chance Road

A light rain washes clean the leaves, the green melody of freedom from the city’s nightmares. Time rolls past, fast or slow, no one knows, like the mists that rise up and settle down upon the Smoky Mountains. Days lose their distinctions, their names. Dust, thick and heavy in the sun, embraces the rain like new love refusing to let go and calms the road down, clearing the air, the sky, the pathway love must travel to embrace a new rain.

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The Secret Lives of Things

The Secret Lives of Things I want to learn from slime molds How they take the shape Of tapioca or icicles or pretzels Pink toothpaste, brown cigars Sucking nutrients From rotting leaves and wood And then become blue crusts Yellow splotches, tawny curlicues And vanish. Their weird diversity and transience Speak to me of beauty […]

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An Animal or a God

An Animal or a God Paint glistens yellow in the night rain, dark Bacardi pours easy over ice. Like the ghostly colonials of Apocalypse Now— lost to France, dying in Vietnam, I’m stranded in this tiger wilderness. Half-awake, sleep leeched by dread sense, I avoid the sun, seal doors and blinds against mutations of neighbor […]

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The Middle Verses

The Middle Verses the past bleeds, a black river the future stretches out, a winding sheet, and all that lies in the sun bears witness to the soft vowels of the earth the sky is a radiant flower a camellia rain falls like petals like broken bones chasms open mountains echo a lost word in […]

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