The Drifts

It snowed here after seventeen years
of not snowing.

The lower hills and the upper mountains
appeared out of nowhere.

Strangely dressed
as if suddenly they went mad
or reached enlightenment.

We didn’t know what to think of it.

The different world that brought a strangeness to the seaside.
An inexplicable mood to our approach.

We might as well have seen
a three headed grizzly bear.

Or a giant trotting over the mountain peaks.

Or a serpent swallowing up a fleet of white sails.

For a moment we forgot ourselves
and were lost in the drifts.

For a moment.

Not a Hair More

We no longer try to capture
anything with our pens.

There is no description
that bring life to life.

We know this now.

Sure, it’s ok to write about the tides or the mud monsters
that people eat for hors d’oeuvres.

It’s ok to go on and on about seagulls in flight
or the curvatures of cliffs.

To scribble relentlessly over the angles of city streets
or the anonymity of cars
passing all day and all night.

As long as these things are what they are
in our words.

Lying on the page just as the flower blooms or the cat yawns.

Just as a field ignites in a storm
or the rain falls and keeps on falling.

Let our letters lie nakedly as they are,
and not a hair more.

The Weather Brings Us

It wasn’t long ago
when we were screaming in the night
about who said what
as the rain streaked.

It wasn’t long ago
when we were figments of ourselves,
no longer sure about the subject of our screams
—ghosts in the driveway,
a hillside crumbling…

Sometimes we have to yell and gesture largely
when the storms come.

Sometimes we have to let the clouds fall on us
and sink into the mud
—our hairdos dunked,
our mascara flowing with the dirt.

Let this be our primal therapy
to become the rain,
the hillside,
the mud.

A scream into the huddled trees.

Extending as the rooftops, the thumping leaves,
a thousand dark ravines gathering water…

We don’t know who orchestrated this great simultaneous sobbing into the trenches,
when the dim yards reach saturation and everything spills forth.

We don’t know why when the weather rolls up with a bruise
and splits open
so do we.