05.03.05 - 11:00 a.m.

Life feels strange, lately. It doesn't sit well on my skin. Some things open, other things close: everything feels unsettled, half-finished. Last night - in May - frost, and perhaps tonight, too. Last weekend, the last weekend in April, snow and wind and wet and rain. I tried to enjoy the storminess of it all, the strange sense of community that comes from battening down the hatches. All the chain stores and all the greenhouses were covering their stock with plastic or bringing the mobile racks of particularly sensitive (and pricy) hanging baskets inside and I felt a certain strange pleasure in that: the weather making fools of us all, and the ghost moon shining through the scudding clouds in the sky above.

Now, I'm just weary. Well, and leery about my gas bill, since I've had the heat on for weeks. I hoped to have a month or two off from high utility bills. I think I really need to replace the furnace this year. Le sigh.

Anyway, another poem. I like some bits of it and don't like other bits, but can't figure out how to extricate the good bits from the pretentious, extraneous bits. I'm implementing (now) the one-year principle.

The Edge of Reason
by me

You can ask me, again, to tell you where
I've been, but I won't answer. You don't
like the woods; You never liked the woods,
the filtered light, the weight of the canopy, the green
froth of spring; and you, stuck below, the living
branches an extravagant sprawl above your narrow
head and so much between you and the sky.
I remember now, all the forks and bark and branches,
those birds and all those bees and all that fucking
sap, my God, you said, it never stops.

You wouldn't approve of the path I've taken,
which kept going when the track ran out and
there were no more alternatives, just a wild horizon
of empty space already filled by someone else.
Look: the other side of the ridge and down, below the
treeline, which might as well be the other side of the
world. (You always hated that side of things, the way
the summit crumpled down into the valley below
like a wet plastic bag, no respect for the structure
of mountains, sinking into itself, as if high
were the same as low and middle, as if there's no
distinction between anything, anymore.)

I'm tired of your questions.
I'm tired of my answers, too, the backwards
and the forwards of it all. Once we met in between
spaces, where the trees grew stunted and lichens crawled
through hairline fractures in the rock and the sun still
had somewhere to shine. You wrote your
name on one side and mine on the other and our
hands met over the crisp edge between here and
over there. You smiled.

And you didn't ask again.

I'm in the writing mood again.

;with you.!.
by me

i think i'm a dependent clause
attached to you at the semicolon
with only a preposition between us
to keep us safely knit.

look, i'm trying to figure it out
on my own, without the extra verbage
but prepositions are almost as important
as conjunctions, and i don't believe that
i can make it on my own.

so i've ordered two periods, one question mark
and an exclamation from supply. when
they get here, i will try them on for size,
and i'll offer my preposition a semi-colon and
the leftover punctuation and all the
commas it can eat.