Poetry

You don’t know the forest
of two minds bound by weeds
grown from one to the other,

Life’s on the wire;
The rest is waiting. I know
I’m alive when I

Dawn boils up like milk, cloudy with disrespect.
Like Tin Pan Alley hacks, paid for each line,
neighborhood wrens bang out their high-pitched notes.

Winter at the end of the trail,
where the Columbia washes the ocean,
what one book calls The Kingdom of Conifers,

This pain is so familiar
(we were all children once)
I let it ride my back. I offer it in,

It’s coming to you live: the high-rise ledge
That doubles as a desolate precipice
In a pinch. It’s all raw footage,

Once he looked deep in her muddy brown eyes
and saw nothing there but the whirling flies.

We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.

Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique, 
A method of measure, 
                                a scaffold for structuring. 
I stole its silences, I stepped to its hue and cry. 

Being born at all amounts to peering out from a cliff
Over the sea. The great jellyfish who spread their arms
Out on the sea tell us how deep our ignorance is.