Washington's Sunday Etude

Washington's Sunday Etude

it’s morning and the calendar
is set a page two days ago
I let the water run and lean
against one gleaming shower wall
still wondering where the evening went

I tend to write of things of which
I’m just peripherally part
as seen beyond a pane of glass
I am the eye behind the lens
and sit backstage to pull the strings

it’s morning and I’m wondering if
in twelve-point font, laid end to end
the poems that start with just "it’s morn-
-ing" would the earth’s circumference stretch
and so redeem this waste of words

I always dread the evenings’ ends
that pass somehow so unfulfilled
and so, from pocket’s depth I fish
one half-dead pen to scratch the tip
of feelings insufficiently expressed

A Friday Night

a friday night

1. magnetized

couchback silhouette,
bent and black
inside the glass.
you sat from me
two cushions away
like we’d been polarized.
can’t you feel
(your uncanny sixth sense)
this magnetic divide
of dissonance?


2. walk-throughs not served

left, right, left; our
shapes make rhythms
predictable on the sidewalk;
two long shadows laid
neatly out before us
like corpses never more
than at a friendly distance.


3. a walk home

leafless trees are speechless trees;
bare branches barely shake, while talk
skitters and slides across the sidewalk;
articulately brittle, autumn’s raspy address
falls desiccate from the frozen air
january, weary, tires of the ado.

Without Title

Without Title

the viscous hardness of glass
is cool against my fevered forehead.
I am calm, ever the pillar of strength,
the image of bull-like serenity,
while red incites riots inside
this quasimodoid body.
I feel my blood-flushed skin connect
and meld into the pane
fingers follow; knuckles, hands,
bleeding wrists and arms, and all.
like stepping through a cobweb,
the window becomes my train.
I always tried to be honest, and now,
made of glass, the matter’s made easy
now no shape matters - mine can’t be seen.
I walk, and like an empty goblet,
the silence and the stillness fill me to the brim.
I gently pluck a flower from the earth,
drift absently through a bench, and think of him.
a sudden breeze gathers shards of glass.
I find I’m falling to pieces.
I see him come. I don’t have a reason.
I take a breath, feel my being expand,
and, like a sigh, evaporate.
the flower falls, the danger passed.
the story’s safe.