Poem: New moon rite

With slow steps I take the spark and the song through the house, sweet smoke in each dark room. The cold touch of saltwater, the flame’s burn and light, the prayers we make with our lips and the elements in the moon’s dark pool. Sometimes we need the Mother’s wry advice, the Daughter’s leaping and […]

Poem: Frog spells

The frogs throw themselves into epics when it rains, the perilous sojourn from one ditch to another black as pitch under the mist. There was some sort of mass mutual agreement for this rite of leaping, a jumping hunger to be elsewhere, something siren in the rain and no masts to tie themselves to, no […]

Poem: Punchdrunk

The edges gray and fade and the floor tilts on a wave, only you and me in a bucking sea. You think you’re better — and you are — but I will break myself against that shore. I will not let you win, not the mist slowly stealing the lights buzzing in their ballasts, not […]

Trance Poem: Two dragons

Weakened, the blood at my neck, I stagger to my knees. The midnight wind glitters with icy diamonds, my cold-deadened hands white on the yew staff. The red dragon and the white of the land fill me with new blood and I stagger up into the darkness and hail, with painful deliberation completing the circuit. […]

Poem: The beetles

Under the lash of the light, the will’s goad drives the unwilling feet on. Weariness impales me on the hard fact of myself, footsore and edged, a beetle in my hair. It drives the fire from the blood for a time, turns its engine to something practical and primal: the body’s bellows pushing the air […]

Dream poem: The letter

You sent me a letter on lined paper scrawled in blue ink from a typical ballpoint. Even the envelope was as common as moths, the white ones that cling to the screen when I flame the lamp at my bed-head. I don’t remember what I was doing precisely, just the round of tasks and busyness, […]

Poem: Utopia

Maybe it’s time to stop stacking the bricks for utopia and straighten my back into a painful ladder and regard this place, my neighbor’s chickens threading a line through the dead leaves and winter crowding close. You can’t remake your choices or your past, and perfection is only a figment of the mind. You can […]

Poem: Dodona

I look for answers in the curl of smoke, the breath of wind blowing across the pond and rippling these reflections of the sky as if some bookish spirit would only crack the binding and boredly recite the inscription, as if the future were some actuary’s logbook, with an index and clear reference points. When […]

Poem: Sound and silence

In absence, strings sound, thinly ringing in the stillness. Music is a pattern carved in rests, much as sleep delineates our waking hours, much as the skin of our solitude resonates the heart’s drum. Do you feel that ghost touch, silences crowding, pressing thin hands against your mouth? Somehow we move past this, and sound […]

Poem: The memory of the moon

These moments are all we shall ever share: the moon’s yellow face, sickling and growing in that reflected fire, an ornament hanging in the sunset across from its match and some nights disappearing entirely as ghost and shadow. Still, only one face ever etches its details onto our eye. The other turned always toward midnight, […]