Category: Poems & poem-like things

or is it the house that is like a letter?

Whichever it is, the mail has been delivered there
for decades. Drop the words into a rusty metal box

with a hinged flap, nailed to a wooden fence.
This is the way it is with poems, too: I voice

my salutations, compose toward a complimentary close.
Every now and then I’m seized by the urge to scour

everything from top to bottom, to gather the junk, bits
of hoarded, useless matter— and throw them into the street.

At the height of summer, I’ll even want to start
a fire in the grate, just because I know for sure

there are things that will need burning.

In response to Via Negativa: Oysters.

there was no break
to tell where it began,
and where it began again.
Everything was always
beginning: even the rain
thinning out was a beginning,
the sun tugging on the curtain-
pull to signal the start
of our nightly theatre. The river
clears its throat over and over
again: the world, unfinished,
alive with rehearsal.

In response to Via Negativa: Eavesdropper.

Beneath the topsoil, tangled synapses of roots. Who says what to each other across these lines, to make such intense blue-violet in the beds of verbena? Even unmoving, unruffled by wind, they are electric. The smell of soil clings to my fingers. A few dark grains lodge under a fingernail. In bed at night, I curl up and bring my hands to my nose. From under my tent of white sheets, the hallway light flickers like a train stop somewhere ahead, before it comes into view.

In response to Via Negativa: Cocooning.