Lazy Is As Lazy Does

“Lazy” is a much more slippery term than it ought to be. What passes as fruitful activity can just stand in the way of what you really should be doing, and sometimes doing nothing produces positive results. Sometimes, whether you are doing something or nothing is a matter of interpretation.
For the last few days, [...]

Hypnagogia*

As you walk among us,
in the flat sun of an overcast day,
you throw no shadow. You carry it
with you, drawing light
from everything you pass near.
The world pales.
Ink drawn from pages, you paint
absence onto day. Every face
resists sight. When, unseen, the sun
slips in its climb, you feel it
and cry its hidden name. This [...]

Transcription of the Absurd

You’re not doing well. The mirror dims, and more objects are extinct to light. You think what fades here blazes elsewhere, furnishing another world’s illumination.
This avenue of shadows falls from the overhanging brows of teachers you’ve forgotten. Their motion has stilled to the palsy of atoms. Having mislaid the names [...]

Abstracting Abstraction

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper
Last week, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see the Edward Hopper show. I’ve long admired Hopper’s paintings. His city scenes exude narrative mystery, and even his Gloucester homes and Maine [...]

Haiku Sonnet: 99

Imagine a chit
given after each act—red
for compassion, gray
for doubt, ochre for
expected cowardice and
yellow for surprise.
I’ve stuffed a strongbox—
the slot no longer invites
any addition.
The uncounted days
elude what’s known. Paper takes
the updraft—drifting
confetti unsettled long
after marchers pass on.

Haiku Sonnet: The Thing Itself

The whole parts again,
and another unlikely
division makes cells
into a body—
disassembly, assembly
all at once. Can each
have a mind? Can each
live in its role so firmly
the play’s forgotten?
So it is with us
as we pass each other, snow
falling between us,
wondering if we’re part of
this life or its cast.

Whitewater

No one believes me when I say a girlfriend once broke up with me because I used too many metaphors and analogies, but it’s true. She felt I couldn’t take the world head-on—I only wanted to describe it in new ways.
“You aren’t really talking to me,” she said, “you’re [...]

13 Ways of Looking at Snow*

I.
Back to the window
I untangled shadows, guessing
snowy branches were
arthritic fingers
knuckled by age and frozen
mid-reach.
II.
Where he’d shoveled snow
the sidewalk looked like feathers,
his motion still there
in the sweep of wings.
III.
Snow falling two ways:
as a shower of stars or
as all the heavens
falling together.
IV.
Snow—verb and noun, snow
drifting and settling.
V.
A day in the sun
and snow sags—the fanciful
swans of the morning
bent [...]

Finds: Environmental Art

Some years ago, I was visiting a friend and idly pulling books off his shelf. He has an addiction to art books, and the book I picked was one of the more unusual ones in his collection, a book of “environmental art,” sculptures made in nature with whatever materials might be found there—sticks, rocks, [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Memory

I rode gravity
on my bike, down to where life
proliferated
in a drainage ditch.
Waterbugs spotted pylons—
their black ovals like
tar cast to catch hold.
Amidst the algae, they were
obsidian, holes
in light. I couldn’t
count them even if I knew how.
I would have found them
moving, mounting the water
to elude my eyes.