Show and Tell
“In the actual, from which another life/Is straining to burst, to set out in navigation,/Or be swallowed by demons in the leaves.”
Harold Jones
For Love Nor Money
“Every object, rests on its certain devaluation/In the implacable fact of an ending—decay,/Dissolution, death—from which another/New thing and its solicitation emerges.”
Bird Life: A Triptych
“No thought, as that of mine, to complete the bare/Purpose of their being, which is to feed and breed,/Become another edible, leave another seed.”
The Lie of the Land
“And because you are beautiful do not think/The Nereids will hear you, or Neptune wake/And the sea calm, and you will not sink”
Traffic
“And where, but in constant circularity/Is all this moving headed?/The answer Cannot be death…”
The Tide
“‘Where now security, what to trust?’/The cycle of an invisible moon has/Our harbor in its force, another period/Has begun: the existing limits to be tested.”
Love Makings
“Yet there is no one thing, no attribute/Of yours that I can fix on, nothing/I can abstract, describe, isolate…”
Five Poems of Neighborhood
“‘What have you got there?’ ‘It’s snapper.’/“Did you catch it?’ ‘No, my dad caught it—/He says to watch out for any tiny bones.’”
4 x 9
“Anyone who keeps/A compost heap knows the whole of life”
Fly Fishing
“What does it bring to light?/What meaning is there to land?/Have you killed a bit of me? I doubt it.”
Oncology
“More truths than cancer creep beneath our speech.”
The River Walk
“They bring us here, to a place/Elsewhere, where there is no motion”
Epilogue
“The citruses will still bear fruit, and if not these,/There will be others to form the soft flesh/Of oranges, new limes: all creating in their rot.”
Equinox
“Yet the cold does not rest there.”