Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
The cause is not whether you pick
clumps of poison mushrooms under a new
moon or cast bread crumbs in a paper sack
on the waters. You lie on your back
as dry grasses rustle their profound
tristesse. There is nothing you haven’t
touched. Your mouth rushes through
the motions, making a meal of remnants.
Faithful, the pulse keeps feverish time.
There are many ways to inscribe
names on surfaces—ink on sheepskin
parchment, ink on paper pulped from the bark
of mulberry trees. Farther back: wet clay, ivory,
antlers and bone. Stone. The carving of letters
to leave a mark, a trace. Bright days drawn
with chalk, pigments scraped to smear
with fingers the memory of the lost.
For what are we but smoke and dust
churned from one cruel season to the next,
kissed then spurned, knighted then expelled?
Write my name on something that will last
more than a day—not to be immortal,
but to have some of my history survive.
What happened has barely cooled into a memory.
The ladder’s gone, the ambulances, the yellow tape.
What can we do in the aftermath of difficulty?
Flowers and words say Look here, look now.
The ladder’s gone, the ambulances, the yellow tape,
but a pall blankets the spaces we walk through.
Flowers, words, say Look here, look now. Not away.
Chalked tributes on brick in late afternoon sun,
a pall that blankets spaces we walk through.
Will elegy and eulogy ever be exhausted? Chalk
meets brick to offer one more, in late afternoon sun.
What have you ever loved enough to mourn?
Why aren’t elegy and eulogy ever exhausted?
We are stunned in the aftermath of tragedy.
Have you ever loved enough to mourn? Mourn.
What happened has barely cooled into memory.
Early 15c., “something which occurs casually in connection
with something else,” from Old French incident (13c.), and directly
from Latin incidentem (nominative incidens), present participle of incidere
“to fall in, fall, find the way; light upon, fall in with; fall upon, occur;
happen, befall”
– Etymology Online
To fall or befall, to occur or to happen. Infinitives
that may be used as a noun, an adjective, an adverb.
In and only of itself, an incident requires an act of
relation. Something against which it becomes possible
to say here it derives from, is a mere instance of. A minor thing.
An almost randomness. But what of taxonomic hierarchy?
Class, genus, species—steps for organizing living things
according to broadest, then broader, then more individual
categories. A species not a minor form of, but unique.
Not incident nor accident, this expression of life.
If something were mere incident, would it be assigned
nomenclature? The genus name, followed by the epithet.
A system for recording physical traits, provenance or
origin. Traits. Habits. Appearance. A body. A significance.
Within a furniture store, labyrinthine trails
wound through draperies of green.
Oh the enticements packaged as tufted
nests, aisles lined with luminaries
voluptuous as menageries. Beds with no
bodies in them, wrappers and quilts
baroque with scrolls and windowpanes.
Glass blown into acorn shapes
beckoning eternal winter, next to bins
of stuffed red pandas and raccoons.
When we passed back through the automatic
doors, the sky was ablaze like a high
contrast movie poster. Every edge hummed,
just short of a strident register.
In the stillness that follows a great
abandonment, the smallest motifs
acquire consequence. Once there was
a patch of milkweed where now there is
raked gravel. The woman in the workshop
tonight spoke of what she called red doors—
those threshold moments that tick like a lure
and like a warning, and after you've crossed
into them you realize there's no returning.
The scent of spores, of old musk, lines the air.
How many more calendar squares are left
in the year? To be cocooned in cold, to slowly
run out of words. To surrender to a force
and without the least bit of guile say
It appears you have won—for now.
The students put up these signs in front of the building
where yesterday, one of them fell to their death
from the eighth floor.
The signs are lettered using their own hands, fingers
curled around markers.
They tape them up on the glass panes
and you can see every finger smudge.
The signs are unafraid of using words
like suicide instead of incident.
Like accountability. And care, community, humanity.
They are composed on the spot, fueled by feeling,
by anger, by sadness, by fear, by frustration.
Nothing a machine would understand enough
to generate something real.
Something not immediately trying to isolate
and contain.
I distrust what preaches of progression toward certain resolution.
It was a blue and gold day. The first of many tinged with the growing colors
of autumn.
Leftover blue of a wing; a wave, cold and crested by a lone surfboarder.
A sky that looked almost like memory preserved whole. Almost.
We stood on the periphery, craning our necks upward.
Afterward is not just what or how much might remain, not just
the message of consolation as repair.
Sirens moved down the boulevard as trucks and buses moved aside.
It is rumored that there are now only two custodians assigned the cleaning
of one building.
The labor of love is equal to the labor of grief.
Someone has to climb the ladder.
Coats in the hall closet look like they have kept the shapes of
shoulders that have long slipped out of them.
There are messages left on office phones that do not ask for a reply.
Messages made entirely of silence, and yet take up time.
Taking inventory sometimes means only fragments remain.
They still matter, beyond any account of their usefulness.
That pause in the weather. Half a sentence carried by wind.
The scent of soap, the trace of oil on a sleeve.
can be the longest bone in some
mammals’ bodies—for instance,
the walrus baculum can be over 2
feet long and thus the longest bone
in its entire body. Strangely, as well,
the blue whale—not only the largest
mammal but also considered the largest
animal alive on earth—doesn’t have a penis
bone. During late night TV shows, it’s surprising
how many commercials seemingly target an older
generation of viewers concerned about their blood
pressure, weight gain, fading memory, or erectile
dysfunction. Ads for the latter used to roll out
images of crooked cucumbers and language
overflowing with barely disguised metaphor—
You’re either going to lie down or you’re going
to stand up, or Don’t let being unable to get it up
get you down. In some of the world’s largest
natural history museums, mammal skeletons
have been prepared for display without one,
for reasons of modesty or prudishness.
Elsewhere, collectors whittle them smooth,
might even use the ones from raccoons
as toothpicks. Behind glass, a tray of impressions:
curious bone that’s often not attached to anything,
that just sort of floats in the soft tissue. Dog, fox,
coyote; otter, black bear, badger, mink, skunk.
As I turned into
my street tonight, a pair of
small emerald eyes
for a moment glinted back
and morphed into a raccoon.