you come to understand

you come to understand

the bent latch
the rusted nail
the last lingering edge of glass
in the window pane
looking out on what once was

it has drowned in a pond
where rotted trunks now rise
out of gray tessellations of cracks
inhabited by tiny black beetles

awaiting the orgy of winter
a blue racer basks in dwindling sun
it has fed upon the young of a mouse
that scurries about
puzzled with absence

this is just the way things are

scorn of a jealous muse

you never realized did you
writing so many useless words
stringing your ink across the pages
over and over

until the pen was spent
and the sun went down
and all your teeth fell out
and turned to dust

though a tree now grows
through what you used to be
all the world's birds
are gone forever

where were you
beneath summer's rustling leaves
always wanting
someone else's urging

the real and imagined

Some say a poet lives by his words
but really he dies

the poet is only a man
wed to thoughts of another woman

even after many years
she still inhabits his mind

the real and imagined
have always waged war

he finds himself in some other country
overrun in a barren field

frothing with spittle
surrendered to the white of his bones

he writes his last word upon her
as if she is paper lifted by flame

paper lifted into the hollow of night
into that which is holy

his own body
he abandons to silence

this inscrutable absence

i find a winter moon
tangled in the twisted branches
of the timeless oak

it also holds the wind
outside our kitchen window

tessellated moonlight blue
like shattered glass
upon the midnight snow

obsolescence

is it time
that has bricked in all the windows
or just being

nearly all the old edifices of this city
now closed off to light
this grey haze of december

above the grime of some shadowless alley
a fire-escape rusts
soon it will come to ruin