Tag: minimalism

The Earth Has Not Settled

There is a little cemetery
at the village edge.

Most of the names
have been weathered away.

But the newest grave—
soft, raw, and dark—
has not yet learned
the expected stillness.

The earth has not settled.

And in the heavy quiet
of twilight,
it sometimes seems to breathe—

not deeply,
not urgently,

but as if remembering how.

A slow, patient
rise and fall,

keeping time
for a name
already carved
into its heart.

Phototaxis

The buildings remind me of splayed fingers.

Evening seeps between them,
staining the asphalt, though much of it
still tries to rise — coral blushing peach,
cooling to lavender, then smoke,

a haloed dome above,
then nothing,

or the illusion of nothing:
our minds supplying
the celestial forms
we remember seeing at night.

And with night,
low-pressure sodium vapor
arrests the compound eye.

Wing scales blur
the distance between street and lamp,
straining toward what
will never turn back:

Apollo toward Daphne,
Sköll toward the sun,
Hati toward the moon —

hungry.

Glitching Theremin

I imagine love to be
like a glitching theremin,
jittering capacitors,
undulant frequencies—
juking, jiving, birring.

Flitting through clover blossoms,
stealing nectar, offering honey
to the hives of the sun;
rosebuds gathered, borrowed,
never owned.

Something like the shape of caws
in velvet throats—
held briefly aloft
like a rusted locket,
a gold ring, a grub;
promises swallowed
then given back.

Their phlegm strewn askew,
picked clean like carrion
by vultures descending through spindrift
and trembling wind—
vows stripped to bone.

What rots dries out.
What dries out feeds the field.
Beneath the seeds,
time sharpens its claws
until finches and psalms
of lovers
begin singing again.

Segovia in the Ice Storm

the first time i heard
segovia
was on the radio
driving through maryland late at night in a january storm switching from snow to ice with each hill
and curve in the road
a treacherous journey
but that soft guitar in deft hands seemed to offer guidance
i felt as if the car were holding still
in order to listen to him
and the world around us was the thing in motion

Star Under Cloth

And sometimes—
when ritual hush fell like snow
and the air thickened with older names,
when gestures turned like keys
in locks I could not see—
I felt each soul as a star kept under cloth,
each life a fire sworn to its orbit;
and I knew the terrible tenderness of it:
not all stars are kind,
yet all must burn true.

So you made a temple of me, O light—
not of marble,
but of measured hours and reined desire,
of mercy laid as mortar,
of truth squared to the tongue,
of love obedient to will.
And because you built, you exposed—
for temples gather dust as surely as cottages.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.
So I sweep, and let the lamp judge.