Poem for Friday, March 28, 2014

Till the autumn tempests come to scatter the
flowers
    --So brief your thoughts of her.

                                  --from The Tale of Genji


So Brief Your Thoughts of Her

It is the time of the year
for our rituals: hanging up our coats, giving up smoking,

remarking on the fickleness of the sky. How strangely
we behaved. How often

we took for granted the
intricate signals sent from brain to mouth, the thoughts

forever tangled in our synaptic thickets. Sometimes, I
manage to think of you

perpetually dressed for
that first winter, telling me your name under the snow-

pregnant clouds. How wonderful your name, you lying
on the frost, lighting up

your menthol, pausing
between puffs to tell me this is your last one, you swear.

Poem for Thursday, March 20, 2014

Life Observation

The contents of my trashcan: rotten
lettuce, shredded pieces of paper and--
    wait for it--
two strips of scissor-cut
    denim.

Poem for Saturday, March 1, 2014 (2)

Improvising

When she said she longed for Venice,
I quietly stepped out and returned
minutes later, hands burdened with two
paper bags: one containing discount pasta
and tomato sauce, one containing boxed
wine and a single taper candle.

I brought her to the table, set a plate
in front of her and lit the candle off the
oven burner. Anyway, I said, it's
probably raining hard over there. And
who can walk around Piazza San Marco
without stepping on the pigeons?

Poem for Saturday, March 1, 2014

Harbinger

The latest form fate has assumed:

the branches of the trembling
aspen, helplessly
tangled in the wind, scraping
the claws of the low-flying
crow.

Still,
he is undeterred: a harbinger, lonely
in his blackness,
wings kissed with rain as he soars
through clueless vapors that we call
sky.