Where is the audience / The glowing coverlet / The cup of water / The sleep / Where can you turn around

Ars Poetica It is hard won, it is fragile, it does not bring joy. It holds water, it holds air, it is its own reward. It is light as cobweb, it is tough as cobweb, it is barely visible. It is hollow as a victory in the battlefield. It is heavy as a baby’s coffin, great as a dolphin’s eye. It beckons, it whispers, it flickers in the wind. It is impractical, it is laughable, it wrestles. It is free, it is precious, it speaks the sound of water. It is mad, it is alchemy, it is fleeting and enduring. It can be studied but it can’t be learned by heart. It can be followed in the forest but only by its track. It can be followed in the city but only by its blood. It jumps fences, it embroiders, it ferries the dead. It can’t be captured and it has no price. It’s in the screaming alley, the ink-blot pines, the village well. On the threshold of your pain you may find it holding …

I’ve never gone on a “father-son fishing trip.” Nor have I ever called anyone “Pa.” Still, this is my go at a fishing poem. I’m drawn to the idiomatic force of the “fishing trip” as a trope for intimacy, serenity, and spiritual fulfillment in nature, just as I’m drawn to the possibility of “ordinary” speech as a vehicle of familiarity and ease. Neither one is mine, though. The poem’s suggestion that one might join one’s father for an end-of-life fishing trip, speaking in cadences of folksy directness, provokes awkwardness in me. The poem, I think, wants to embrace that awkwardness, and to take the journey that it knows is unavailable to it. In literal terms, it follows a much denatured creek that rambles through the town I now live in, and it dumps out into the Lake Ontario of my childhood. Even as a full grown person, far into one’s own life, one might persist in imagining how “everything” would be different had you and Pa only taken that trip together.    Creek I suppose …

The French doors / are half open and the red curtains / writhe in the night like the last time / the director was near someone who matters, / some flood, some satellite.

I have seen a great deal of death and loss. For my own sanity and preservation I had to explore death, to understand it and craft for it a personal mythos. This poem seeks to do that, to make death more tangible not by simplifying it, but by complicating it, adding to its ethereal nature, to understand it not like something we might hold, but like something which holds (the difference between how we conceptualize a stone in our palm versus how we conceptualize wind). I don’t know why concrete fact is often seen as more comforting. The realization that we don’t know what we don’t know is a most exciting and encouraging one to me. Death could be anything we have thought of or that we have not. I want to sit with death and ask its name, but since it won’t answer I call out to the dark and let the echoes respond. I let the questions be their own answers. I inhabit wonder, and my lack of understanding becomes what I know. …