Status Updates From The Indifferent World

I prefer to be selective in my whens and wheres of reading poetry, saving the experience for the rare moments when I'm least likely to be needed or interrupted. Often, I like to pour a glass of wine and leisurely match the pace of my sipping to the pace of my reading, contentedly laying down the book when the glass is emptied.

A good poet gifts the reader greater language with which to describe their world. I've been watching the evening skies all summer for the return of my two favorite visitors: bats and nighthawks. Tonight (while Noah Jones crooned Let It Be on the backyard speaker) the bats finally made their appearance, and I got to recall Ken's expressive lines,
"Above, cheeping brown bats flutter in
insect-dizzy circles..."

What's gone is ghost,
but rhythmic feet beat on,
stubborn life that doesn't know better

"It's morning when lines
break
under the rhythms of crow
call,
their gentle rocking of sky,
black and forth,
black and forth."

"like her hand when it cupped
the curve of my shoulders and
squeezed
warmth into my fear."

"Look again -- an
unwritten poem shifting
in the wind, an open
wound of torn air."

...a piece of driftwood light as
time. The barometer
is bottom-broken; the bubbling
tidal flats give up

their dead; the seagulls tilt over
the rot
of eyeless dogfish. The code of
hospitality stands

outside the beach house you
don't own. Its heels
sink in the wet give, hair slow-
dances the wind.

Poems are world-wary, too. Hear
the whistle of wing lift
as they take flight.

Waking to rain
is a lovely sadness
for ears to sip
under sheets of darkness.

Still water at dawn
has a way of doing that,
putting you on the trail of a separate scent:
the whiff of the past.
There’s the loon, of course,
the drawn-out cry of regret,
and the nuthatch circling the pine tree,
its feet scratching against bark
like a gnawing conscience.