The Hard Problem

A grim 

cut on my soft 

right thumb,

smartly dressed.

The husky 

aftertaste of 

coffee, 

sustaining bitter pleasure.

Another sidewalk,

beige and shoveled 

(not by me),

freely inviting my easy, thoughtless traipse.

Things

like patience 

and generosity

are difficult to explain

but easy to understand.

I Poured a Bard

I poured a bard into his boots this morning

and he caffeined out the door,

but Wednesday didn't look at all to him

like Wednesdays have before.

I assumed his song would quickly solve the snow,

but it didn't fall in chords.

It was too ubiquitous, or thick, or deaf 

to plow with metaphors.

The clouds that hung above his head wouldn't sigh

and weren't so musically

condensed into the milky ones that bloom 

inside a cup of tea.

Instead he said he'd recommend I skip

the poem and stand the drink,

so I sipped and sketched the only lines I thought

spit pith enough for me:

Sometimes days are written

By words a page can hold

But most them are given

By ones we'll never know

Separation Anxiety

Leaving 

behind thesauruses,

I drove mute

through a fortune 

of snow

and thought:

how poor I am

at owning this moment,

how rich I am 

to be alone,

and how 

indescribably wrong I am

about both.

the truth is

above

a few specks of wild birds

winging loosely through clean light

crying wild truth

below

the indiscriminate bulk of luminous snow

concealing an asphalt path

hearing none of it

Poem to Stop Looking

Walking out 

under the thick and 

endless canopy of clouds,

I strained to see new colors;

And finding none

but enduring grey,

I decided to close

my eyes instead

to see what sound it all made.

At first,

a dull whir of traffic,

the drone of jets,

that scrape of desiccated leaves 

did little to improve my sense

of somber muted silver;

but then I realized

that I was still looking-

obliging and inviting

and demanding dusky slate.

Finally, I just gave up, 

and I heard birds.

Not the sound of birds,

but birds;

bright blue and green ones,

there and here ones,

singing cheap and feckless,

bald and fearless songs

of what came before red

or goes after purple,

off east or west somewhere

cold, then quickly warmer

in gold

in circles

in warbles that dove and 

ones that didn't-

And I felt I heard

or heard I felt,

there in dark bare winter,

nature blaze in brightest emblems;

only, now I saw

no longer straining

(and hardly breathing),

That I didn't even want to look at it that way.

No Apprehension

Today, the sky

was so much like itself

that it didn't really 

remind me of anything.

Starved words leapt

in apostolic succession,

wheeled through mock horizons,

and dissolved in irrevocable blue.

The pleasure 

of sun on skin

is no such thing 

when apprehended-

a quality to behold,

not to be held.

After I dropped my coffee outside this morning, everything seemed to change, or maybe

Obtuse, pointless,

Tuesday howled in-

or seemed to.

Without care or criticism,

the steady, edgeless air blew-

or was blown-

toppling all containers and 

moving shadows,

dumbfounded.

Picking up and walking on,

I nosed for form in the cold sprawl,

for some meaningful monochrome insight

that i could coax later

when i was warmer,

for savvy in the bluster,

for willing feeling in numbness.

But I found no rhetoric in my frozen fingertips,

or acumen in a puddle of spilled coffee

and my greenest of thoughts 

just bleached white

in the wind

There is no shelter

that isn't made of words,

and I can't use them anymore

than I could use the weather.

After all,

who in his right mind

would dare call that distant, rippling flag 

unflappable?