1. Amazing Grace
I mistook dysphoria for euphoria once on purpose, and it almost worked. When you live in the forest, winter—not summer—is the season of light. And so an empty plate became the full moon, and the mouse in my filing cabinet was a companion animal. I could sometimes hear her late at night, shredding my old poems for nesting material. I meanwhile was building a cenotaph out of cigarette butts. My disemboweled television watched over me while I slept.
last cigarette
as long as grass grows
or rivers run
2. Song Dogs
Three days before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, my friend L. and I get lost on a hike above a dammed-up river, too busy arguing about politics to notice that we’ve branched off onto the wrong logging road. The sun is going down. On the ridge above us, coyotes start singing. Their melismatic solos intertwine in a way that can’t be called dissonant, though Lord knows it’s nothing as simple as harmony.
no longer lost
that hole in the clouds
far upslope
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Self-Quarantine
- Pandemic Time
- Quarantine Walk
- Putting a Garden In
- Face Masks
- Flag of Hate
- Spring Evening
- Brachiate
- How to Care
- Public Relations
- Out of Whack
- Tadpool
- In the Fullness of Time
- Unrest
- Robber Fly
- Truncated
- Independence Day
- Drought
- Augury
- Descent
- Crickets
- Execution
- Arboreal
- Nuthatch
- In Common
- Undivided
- Antennae
- Presence
- Losing Maizy
- Heard on High
- Epiphan’t
- Smell Pox
- Winter Den
- 55
- Unforgetting
- Animist
- Exclusive
- Ephemeroptera
- Song Dogs
- Sproing
Pretty damn fine, mate!
Thanks, man. Keeps me out of trouble.