Empty Calendar

Snail-scrawl in tidal mud. 
The drift of clouds as a compass.

A network of repetitions,
The chance encounter prepared for.
Pale, luminous: a vast distance.





The moment comes around
At last: a votive offering,
A spill of house lights on the flooded marsh.

As I align the past with the present,
The foreground presses close.





The usual intervention of weather.
Shadows skew against the hour.

Faint fragments, as if web silk, aloft:
Ghostly, without weight. I
Renegotiate the diaphanous tangle.





With only a wooden match
As a unit of measure, I build a scale model.
Night, like an underpainting, bleeds through.

I proceed as if a title might 
Allow at last the amalgam to set.





The always of a remembered detail.
The uneven terrain not yet worn even.

Not the stones, driftwood, or shell heap,
But the air, the breathable salt air, through which
I observe each as it levitates.





X equals the unknown, which is to say
The cussed, the otherwise irretrievable,
A negative space of clouds and mist.

What is memory but remote access?
Out of fog a depth of fog coalesces.





The event occurs, occurred, will occur
In a tense form available only in dream.

An island endures in the distance,
A beach of disheveled cobbles, as blue
As an anomaly of fire, as glacial melt.





The poem is not a representation,
But an analogous experience.
Is it a hoax if no one is deceived?

This is yet another iteration,
A patina of marks and smears.





I had hoped for a fragile transience,
For the ordinary’s semblance of mystery.

What is a genre if not an interrogation
Of genre? How do I discern presence
When I reside in past light and lost time?





The sky is without depth or surface.
No need to graph a range of nuances
As the tide pulls back and the past flattens.

One season lapses into the next,
Into some uncharted calm or calamity.	





The longing is not for a paradise, but
For its eventual, inevitable loss.

On a current’s bewildered grammar
Fractured ice sheets refreeze. Cloudlike,
Distant lands recede as I draw near.





For more than a second, a ghost adheres
To sight, like a breath’s aftereffect on glass:
No more bereft of meaning when it’s gone.

I shelter in place. Day by day by day
I invent a place in which to shelter.