Last notes on the cull

What is it like to tell a defensive crow that he has no natural enemies? Sort of embarrassing. 

A poem-per-day challenge based on my earliest forays into what-was-not-even-really-poetry seemed like a festive way to participate in National Poetry Month. However the project was far tougher than I’d expected, when half-realized during a late-March jog. I knew my source material had limitations and I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to interrogate it. But I didn’t consider just how insufferable working with one’s own past is, let alone abiding the habit of facing its artefacts every morning before work. And I certainly didn’t think about the anxiety of self-publishing poetry each day, whether it was, in my eyes, finished or not. (Being a “basher”, as defined by Kurt Vonnegut, didn’t appease this process.) There are more pertinent writing tasks I could've been working on.

But now that April’s through, I’m satisfied with The sulk crow cull. Not proud, but satisfied. For better or worse, I owe a lot to the discipline of my teenaged self. And even though I’m not very patient with him over the course of this erasure series, I’m happy to mangle and immortalize his compulsion to ape whatever it is we call poetry.

(source: “From Sundown to Silence”, 2000.)

That night we danced

in ways beyond us,

walked a starless mile

into night, talked beneath

the fountain breeze of

Queen Victoria and 

absorbed and belonged 

in friendship, as one,

we remember.

But if at all you wonder:

that sunrise, at 6 a.m.,

I slept on a city bench

complete and in love 

with everything.

(source: “London Rain”, 2001.)

Where rain drowns unfinished

sentences in a phone booth, I frame 

your voice in glass    your breathing 

a summer storm that’s just expired —

transparent and lifeless

as a staining    a disguise

of missing.

(source: “Powder”, 2001.)

Our cheap thrills,

striking out high 

in the black light

of the seventeenth 

hole, were employed

to be priceless, 

reckless on record;

adored, eyes glazed, 

when entranced by 

the proper code

of future days.

But our tradition 

as outcasts was 

powder, costumes. 

The gravity

shallow, grovelling,

where I’d trip but

not fall, at a cost.

(source: “When I Was In The Field With You”, 2003.)

The summer I 

felt in dream;

a wind swaying 

farmland miles,

the goldenrod

side by side

with our ark.

To leave you in

a crease of sky 

is waking and 

in first glance 

whirling back that 

you’ve been dead 

my whole life.

Our straw nest,

field dust —

ignored as if 

a sunburn.

Primary #3

(source: “Running Like a Saint in Exile”, 2002.)

Could the gods of old folklore

better my summer, scheming

white water clouds 

to my front door? 

I haven’t the shadow to pray

bitter through evening, waiting 

on heaven’s storm 

to bow me down. 

Through bombs of light and 

cracked shells, I’m running

reborn in cracks

of swept thunder —

a saint, not rival,

for the gutter.