Either these falls are shrinking or this river’s high. Traffic stops for you when you no longer trust. You’re walking across blind spots, a stone embankment and swerve to tease the dead. You have predicted you would join those left-handed ghosts when the right of way becomes cursed, your body, upon impact a weightless parcel [...]
Archive for August, 2009
Would Be Roadkill
Posted: August 31, 2009 by Arambler in Day PoemsTags: civil twilight, ghosts, Poetry, roadkill, skyline, traffic
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Leaving Hoosierland
Posted: August 30, 2009 by Arambler in Day PoemsTags: Connecticut, Hoosier, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, pedal steel, Poetry, Southern Portugal, wood-paneled station wagon
A moving walkway is coming to an end, begin here where passing through is an industry. Will I speak to strangers, you ask no one. I will not use horizontal escalators to get what I want, you state plainly—rural routes delineate a grid unlike any you know now. You remember how you did the leaving, [...]
Gardening at Night Cinquain
Posted: August 29, 2009 by Arambler in Day PoemsTags: cinquain, digging your own grave, gardening, Poetry
A clue you are digging your own grave in the dark— this dirt under your fingernails exposed.
Before Swimming Season
Posted: August 27, 2009 by Arambler in Afternoon PoemsTags: ducklings, Poetry, swimming pool, tarp, three sisters
For MJ A duck nest beside an unpumped pool, debris-laden, a feathered inn. A feline banquet surrounds the swill, the outdoor plumber’s late again. An expansive tarp buckles in the mix, ducklings gone from view, a child slips. Three sisters twist their braids into rope, shaking debris from the little one’s throat, survivors are taking [...]
Realizing with relief she can’t hug a voice, she is safe from self-harm.
Heights (Day 2,304)
Posted: August 24, 2009 by Arambler in Day PoemsTags: acrophobia, fear, heights, Poetry, tightrope walker
And I know I will die. It could be now. How will I lift this foot? And I don’t, and I do. Stairs to an elevated pedestrian bridge over nine lanes of highway. The linking flight between two floors within an office, a red ladder against that brick wall. A green one in a park [...]
Washington Avenue South
Posted: August 23, 2009 by Arambler in Day PoemsTags: beams, boulevard, Poetry, poets, roadhouse, scars, Washington Avenue South Minneapolis
Before the street made sense, became a boulevard with flower beds and urban strength trees, she entered the roadhouse to seep into wood. To be the end. It is gone. She is not. Up the long block—a lengthening stretch of cars, do not honk, go fast, poets cling to their voices under beams compressing breath [...]
Glass poems collect dust in a case that used to hold taxidermy fodder. It could be her head (not the stuffed bird’s) this time that flies off—this night could be the one she witnesses outside first before locking herself back in.
