A Moment in Winter

The white snow is spotted with paw tracks. A bicycle tire fades into wet black asphalt. In the foreground, the trees stand like toy soldiers. Behind them over the silent brick homes, the sky flames out in brilliance, just for a moment, a silent second or two. The yellow and pink lights burn the bleak winter canvas, and the moment's glory bows its journey to the blank white night below.

Fiddlers

At high tide, they begin the procession. Arms raised, slow waving claws, tipping fingers in the wind. The sea is calm. The crabs freeze with my footfall. They escape into the dark shore holes in an instant. In and out of the holes, they go. They peek out for safe passage. An endless wave of fiddlers, silently dancing along the dusty shore, under the cordgrass and over the discarded clamshells in dried mud. The birds circle overhead. The sun soaks up the puddles. And the fiddlers wave to one another as they dance and dig. They retreat to the holes in unison at a sound and return to the pebbled sand, one by one, with a shuffle and wave. Endless silent songs along the shore, told with the rise and fall of a sea of calm claws in the salt marsh sun.

My Underworld

I once lived in a house of poems. My love was shared in a world of songs. She sung to me, I echoed her call. We composed fires to keep us safe and warm. But then, my mind crept into her past. It dove and drown there, shadows broke down our walls. She was drawn down into my moving images. Scenes of many sorrows that I could not withdraw. Ego ghosts and goblins pulled her away from me. I descended into a grave of memory, yet she followed me. She held my hand and waited for our ascension. Her eyes ahead and up, she looked up into the sun. But I, I kept looking back into my darkest dreams, and it was my words which would not let her be. And so, she disappeared, into my damned underworld. I walked back into a cold, prosaic light. Now in the day, my stories tear at me. They tear my limbs, freeze my soul, burn my brain, and leave me with a shattered, scattered, solitary heart.

How to Forget

Someone please tell me how to forget, when I smell you drifting in hallways and feel you in my waking dreams. I see you in my unmade bed, I hear you ringing in my head. Someone please tell me, how to forget.

Snowball Cakes

A carpet of white light fell last night like frosting. It is in the yard, under the cherry blossom tree. The bushes are caked with icing like powdered sugar. We dip our figures into the batter to form round cakes. We play food fight with sparkling, slushy ingredients. My snow angel helpers have red, ruddy cheeks. They eat the fresh snow like dessert. Their eyes tear as snowball cakes explode in their outstretched mittens. They laugh in their snow boots, as they watch their chef father form a figure on top of a make-believe party cake. They topple this ice man with giggles and globs of iced cupcakes. The snowball cakes seep into the wet hard ground, and then they melt into the soft fluid forms of memories. And the ice man feels like he is baking and rising, even as he feels the fun dissolve into darkness, and as the icy water runs down his skin, the chef and his angels go back inside to warm and remember.

Kite Strung Like a Butterfly

There is a kite strung like a butterfly on a clipped tree branch. A single string holds it to the trunk and limbs. It dips and bobs like a ship, tied to a dock in a storm. It has a metal nose like a mosquito's stinger. Its wings show numbers and advertisements. Its colors are red, green, black, and white. The wind pulls the frail line, coaxing it to break away. I want the synthetic, tethered butterfly in the air, alone, spread out against a pale blue sky. I want to see its patterns, dancing with some paper clouds and a spectral moon at midday. My eye imagines it floating away from wooden fingers, no more grasping for the sky from tree branches. The butterfly pulls the string and wood away, into fresh imagined air. Its wing rise into currents, to circle the earth with beating wings, until it descends back to the ground, after the fall, and lands atop green grass, in the shadows of tall deadened trees.

Spider

She waits. The web is beautiful, sheer, wet with hot dew. Its threads are anchored in cold corners. She doesn't wish to see the corpses. A grasshopper, once, she sucked his blood dry, and licked his body into liquid. Until he ate his arms and legs off, for his shell to fall. She likes bloated bugs, puffed out moths and loud, buzzing flies. She eats them as they emerge from garbage dumps and sinkholes. She spins them with threads as they squirm. She likes when they begin to smell and squeak. And she knows when they twist the tales of web entrapment into epic tales of amore enchantment. She eats them anyway and smiles from shadowed corners. Her limbs look so nice, on naked walls or in nylon webs. They dazzle the head, engorge the body, envelop the soul, until the drained bugs slowly turn dusty and dry, and the spider heads back up to her high perch, her home, to hunt.