no words

the lover in winter

The Lover in Winter

Leaves fall.
Green dies.
All heat drains away
and dies,
as the sun enters
the last sign.

Cold tortures soft things.
Winter plagues the birds,
and Philomel keens
with the rest:
the fire dims
from their sky.

Hollows are wet,
and meadows are seer.
The golden sun flees
our horizon.
After a day of snow, the night
freezes.

Everything shivers.
I alone am warm,
for deep in my loins
an ember burns.
This flame is a woman,
my longing for her.

A kiss feeds the fire,
a woman's soft touch.
The light of lights
is in her eyes,
nor has anything been -- ever --
more holy.


Anonymous, circa 1200
(my translation)

imagine a woman behind razor wire

photo by Cheryl Dodds

Sam Rasnake, editor of Blue Fifth Review's Blue Five Notebook series, very kindly invited me to write a poem
in collaboration with the above photograph by Cheryl Dodds.
You can also scroll down the page for a short commentary on the process of writing the poem.

the translated story / of life

The Sandhills
by Linda Hogan

The language of cranes
we once were told
is the wind. The wind
is their method,
their current, the translated story
of life they write across the sky.
Millions of years
they have blown here
on ancestral longing,
their wings of wide arrival,
necks long, legs stretched out
above strands of earth
where they arrive
with the shine of water,
stories, interminable
language of exchanges
descended from the sky
and then they stand,
earth made only of crane
from bank to bank of the river
as far as you can see
the ancient story made new.

late october, yellow leaves and wind

a (very) rare political post

Though H. P. Lovecraft was personally very conservative, racist, even a eugenist --- he would, believablly, have joined the Tea Party, if he were alive today --- still, the words will say what they say. In 1920, he wrote the best description I've yet seen of the 2014 election (and of the general mood and direction of America in the 21st Century).

From "Nyarlathotep":

". . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

"I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown."

the music of what happens: blackbirds and a mouse