A Snag in Things

This poem  was published in Third Wednesday Fall 2010

The snag in things

This Autumn yielded just enough.

I have cast my line into the gritty spasm.

I listen closely

to the tone of the ripple that is made.

Together we are the ivy that goes

burning up the wall outside my window.

Between the crests my hook gets caught. 

I think about the snag in things.

Nothing is accomplished.

A shimmer bends just out of sight.

The slightest of new thoughts heave

like dying embers from the push of a breath.

Watching winter rooftops

Watching winter rooftops(written 2001)

I have watched

The winter rooftops

Slanting, fading—

As from inside a dream

Where everyone knows me but no one sees me.

I have watched the shingles,

                        Each sickly with solitude;

                                    A singularity formed by the cold-minded many—

                             Layered in the orange streetlight glow

                                                And a December evening’s snow—

                                   

I go on guessing as I suppose everyone does—

                         this flesh, this mass fused together by molecules and seconds,

                                                            Globular—moving, blood to dirt.

I go on guessing,

To see              the holes                     where one

Is not               to step

                                    Into                              disaster…

I too have pleaded with snowflakes,
                                                   that I could be a dot on their frozen wafers

            Falling through            the spaces       in between      the silence.

I want to scream louder than the dying voices of distant stars,

            To be stronger than the wills combined of all

The surrendering Doges and the diadems of fallen glory.

I have watched the winter rooftops

                                    And the drifting of the discs

                        as they go ultimately melting into the cycles and the cycles and the cycles…

--dedicated to American poet, Emily Dickinson

Like A Diamond: Published in Refined Savage Poetry Review, 1st Edition 2006

Like a Diamond

So maybe
like a diamond,

more than fifty
percent of me,

the original shape,
has been lost in the cutting,

polished into a simple sparkling,
smoothed and rounded by spinning disks,

coated by a paste of bejeweled dust and oil.

Its hard to tell
where I formed

-- a hundred miles
below the surface amidst
a river of molten lava

--it could be that
I just jumped into being,
spear and shield in hand,

from the thunderous head of a volcano,
taut and crisp and concealing wisdom

from the bursting out of my Mother's tierra.