Process
Left here to revive amid footprints and empty bottles of the older derelicts, I uncushion my head, pain rushing to a clot, and contemplate motion—at such times walking’s a fair ballet— I get up anyway and trudge through carbon dawn to sweat my heart clean. Down the rivertown way, vistas run out, heady with muscadine vines and sardines for sale; a mirror seen through cafe window catches steam and the cook’s cigarette; nets are stretched to dew and spent mayflies; the rattle of outlandish canepoles echoes my heels as I follow fishers for awhile. Behind a pile of cinders I pick one flower, which I shall give to some woman and sing penance the rest of this day.
The Going Gets Better Than Being There
Last winter the days were bare as trees. You were far from me. Now a fertile breeze connects our thoughts, pulling out a softness like lint blown from cottonwoods. Our tendrils clutch across big-bellied river. We are here sharing a train whistle, the arc of sun and clouds. Above the high whine of diesels my head rings against wind and distance.
Mt. Island Lake
With the last of the sun, we washed eyesight in waves patting the shoreline beneath a terraced horizon. Thoughts lie on air like smoke or fog, words roll down red-fanged cliffs to turtle-back water, heavy with secrets and fish big as men. Between ridges fox bark cracks a silence over choruses of frogs; across the lake, sounds of campers die out with their coals. Locked in we drift ghost-like along the snake fence under marshmallow moon impaled by saplings; we give up on soft moss. Above our sleep dogs ring the valley.
