The rain came back, so long since we’d seen it I went outside waiting, listening for it, trying not to draw parallels to my dry January: Dawn and I got a table at the steakhouse, a split of bubbly, and… Read More ›
poem
This time on earth
Where does it go, when the hair recedes—and why does it leave? And will I go like that too, without any notice but more a long, slow fade like snow thawing in a field— And are we just that then,… Read More ›
“Believe”
I grind my teeth at night, I clench my jaws what’s troubling me, beneath the surface? big, prehistoric fish swimming low? my fears, my desires, combined to one? you clench your jaws for all you want to say but cannot,… Read More ›
“Little time”
In the late, gray January morn you have already moved on. Though the evergreens stand like Japanese watercolors in the fog, you’re making breakfast in your mind, making plans for the day. Though springtime stirs, but has hit the snooze—… Read More ›
4:59, Friday
In my time of darkness I go back to the old haunts, to Raymond Carver: I closed the book and he looked back, and in the morning spoke to me on the toilet, in my bathrobe with my phone: He… Read More ›
Poem | ‘The remains’
How dim the light in the morning through the last brown leaves And the look of the limbs curled inwards, slumped low How soft the heater blows those long, solemn notes Like the sound of a car scraping down an… Read More ›
Song for late summer’s sorrow
When the sun came out it hardly mattered with the wildfire smoke and clouds and cloying mood that comes from late summer days you’ve seen enough of: No, the sun was going under, swallowed and swollen, buried by messy, careless… Read More ›
Dream of forgetfulness in the wake of night
In the papery pre-light of dawn my wings like a honey bee’s begin to break down my body a weight I can’t let go, these words are the weights when they hang here, unsaid.
One commitment (for August)
In the morning before the sun is up, when the cloud deck makes the light go soft and pale, the grass is the color of straw dried-out and sharp, golden red. The lawn sprinklers wake spitting and cussing, and the… Read More ›
A jarful of days
In the corner of my yard in the mid-afternoon heat in my hammock with Pablo Neruda between my legs, my glasses off, bare-chested and unbathed, I think about death: my body a lump in a sack swinging here: all this,… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 