I've never unhinged the door
to invite in the light of reason,
always incurious, cemented in
my own world unless someone
comes, absorbed in the waves
of my own heartbeat with
nothing to trouble me inside
Winters coaxed this sandspit
From shore and outgoing tides,
In radiant disarray, have returned
Land to the harbor by at least a half,
Leaving mud flats adorned with
Alluvial fans, hump-backed inlets
*Sensitivity warning: violence, gun violence, death, descriptions of blood, graphic descriptions of violence I can’t sleep tonightBabies are in cold storage instead of bedsThoughts and prayers […]
First light frosting the tree line, and I close the door
On the rest of the house and leave the need for sleep
To others. At such an hour, with dark still lingering,
The stars blown apart and a waning moon near vanishing,
I’ve become too well acquainted with the dark dialect ...
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You stand at Devil’s Gulch
and say,
“I don’t think Jesse James
took a horse across here,”
and I don’t either,
because it’s much too wide
and there’s no way
a horse could jump that far
without breaking a cannon bone
or falling into the chasm,
even with Jesse James on its back
It was full of old glass bottles,
vases, broken plates and jugs
all remnants from long ago –
an old village landfill full of rubbish,
now part of my garden.