A tree
Jammed helpless
Into soft shoreline watches,
All aflail,
Untethered lilies,
Like unmoored souls
Floating into wilderness.
Wisps of anguish
All but unremembered.
In the unscrubbed mirror: A pond in Cesvaine
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Tag Archives: seasons
In the unscrubbed mirror: A Kurzeme meadow
I remember
Your summer dress
Billowing fragrances
Of untold yearning
Long into the night
These flowers, too,
Have long since passed.
In the unscrubbed mirror: Mannequin
This is the first of a series of short poems inspired by photographs I have taken over the years in Latvia.
Zigrida, your arms
Used to embrace me.
Now you watch
From your upstairs window
As I pass below,
As the long parade
Passes below.
In your dream,
Things are surely different.
The poet who sang at the end of time
The bland design falls, outward bound.
The swilling beast groans with cheap ecstasy,
Sometimes interior,
Sometimes superior.
What is exterior obliterates me
Until my fragile image asserts its wee voice,
Lost in a chorus
Of wee voices.
I know, I know, I am the only me,
The only conjunction of these points,
But how could you have failed to guide me
Through this hidden path?
Was I supposed to intuit mere chance?
As it is, I’m left to glide along
Waste-bound avenues,
Street grime the color of storm clouds,
Tipping into a middling redemption
Unawares, using old navigation charts,
Useless azimuths, discarded distances,
Captain of a bottomless vessel,
An occidental sailor upon oriental shores.
See there, where no destination lies.
A simple ending, no beyond, no before.
Not even a reason for despairing.
We’d mistaken the moon for a song.
Thunder snow
The clouds thickened and cracked the planks of heaven
Heaved overboard their burden
And crushed the green and brown spring in pale dunes
Robins puffed to pigeon size
Buds disappeared beneath white-laced wings
Of earth-shackled trees
No one about but Cossack girls
With speckled jeans and high boots
Pulled along on bright orange leashes
Their dogs resolute and patient
Sniffing remnants of bygone colleagues
And sprinkling messages in the snow
Long ago such snow shrouded mysteries
What was it I imagined?
All of life and death I suppose
All of longing all of waiting
All smothered ambivalence
All new and green erupting from stagnation
exiles child 