You come to the lake for blue water, but it's the reeds standing hip deep, yellow dragonflies holding along their spines, a maze for birdlets, bedevilled fish hooks, snakes to wind through. Rooted down beyond the prism of water, it's how they only move in wind or waves but sift oil from the surface, and gather up and hold the evening fog.

How the cold lingers
holding back
the thaw, holding up
a fine lace of crystal
a powder white scaffold

built to the tree side
sharing the bark with
moss, lichen, pitch,
pollen, insect
shards. How an eye
stumbling in pointless
boots tries to freeze
this picture.

Theodore

At a moment, what seemed only leaves will erupt like this: color, nectar, ants. No reason is given, only this gesture, saying what, I open? Still, if you look long enough, their purpose will arise in you, a wordless shiver, an unfolding.

She sees a bloom, out come the clippers. At home she'll jam their ends in a glass, watch the rot creep up the stems until they nod, spilling pollen on the sterile table top.

Theodore

I hear the snow before it comes, the flakes hit one another as they form high above, sharp against sharp, powder on powder, they send down a collective, audible creak long before one falls, a sound my veins stop the blood to hear. Then the smell that says flakes are in the air that can’t yet be seen. Sometimes it stops there, the dusting known only to me and those with minuscule perceptions, dogs, birds, certain insects. I walk through the trees, breathing it in, watching out, yearning for their chalk white geometry. Snow is an example of the system, how it works, why. Nobody invented snow – it unfolded before us as part of the great unfolding I witnessed, a mathematical unfolding, a reasoned unfolding: checks were in it, balances, the stunning revelation of it, the perfection, the symmetry flavored with the random. So beautiful, heartrending in its noise, its grace, the ugliness giving it savor, the surprise built in, the spontaneous.

Bones

What became of Kaja? I can tell you how her teeth hang looser in their bone, how a molar will fall on a day in August, slide to the dirt, move three inches in a hard rain and then sink in before the bed of decaying leaves hardens to hold it in place. How it will stay there in the drying ground, ready for a bite. How it will stay there and then, in the freeze of autumn, crack audibly, startling a vole, a jerk of the head, just one of a thousand twitches in an afternoon of foraging, watchful for sound, vibration, movement, startling often for none of these, out of anticipation – this perceived by no one but the weak essence that lingers over the bones, eight inches from the vole, the essence that is our Kaja, and she will sigh with impatience to see it wasted.

House in a river town.

Yellow paste licks the walls.

Iron rusts the sink upstairs.

near a bathtub bearing down,

to shatter the plaster below.

Spiders paint corners soft–

nobody will live here again.

Greenish curtains crawl down

window frames, stale with meat

long since cooked, eaten.

Nobody will bring salt,

peel oranges, fire up this stove.

These pipes will only sing with

beams falling, clang their splintered

crash into a truck bed,

hum on the ride. People sang here,

spoke, whispered. Ironed dresses,

combed hair, broomed away cobwebs.

They came home.

Caucus Studios

Ivy and bricks, dust in the hall,
paint peeling down the walls.
We found these when we came
to say so long. We brought flowers,
stories, poems. We snuck in of course.
Blue winter light washed the kitchen,
silence held the huge space in the hall
full of the presence that always said
to anyone lucky enough
to wind up that stair, Stay a while,
what are you dreaming?
Stay long enough and it's yours.