Poem 5

This is a poem about sand and my relationship to it. I mostly wrote it when I realized later than most that glass is, at a basic level, melted sand. I think most people realize this within the first decade or two of their lives, but I never really grasped the concept until my early twenties.

Giving inanimate objects human qualities is called "pathetic fallacy" by scholars. I like doing it anyway.

Silicon

Giving away the sand,
a beach clings to human feet,
sneaking between toes,
inside swimsuits,
stuck to the bottom of a cooler.
She makes leaving into taking.
A mineral parasite,
she scatters on kitchen floors.
I have swept her out of tents
and found her still in old shoes.
Beach blows across windy noons
forcing us to cover eyes
and mouths or else spit
tastes of her on to the towel.
But occasionally she
finds a clarity in herself-
flowing amidst heat to
stillness in a frame-
and shows a boy the rain,
even as it runs down her in pearls,
or the red of an autumn
that stings his eyes.

Poem 4

In honor of Derek, the man behind the awesome photos at
the munky house, this poem is better than half-done: we're looking at a 5/8ths-complete poem. I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving. This is another driving poem.

After a Movie in November

Warmth crawls over the hills.
The 20’s of November, closing to 30,
and the chill can almost fade before
it’s night again and the stars
mock us, bundled huddles,
buzzing through the parking lot
of the cinema,
our footsteps rapid-fire.
The car sits and waits
deciding to reverse,
when once it had leapt from
driveway and parking spot.
Leaf shadows and moon slipping
over dry paint and chrome,
tires on dry gray and black:
We ride past teeth of frosty grass
whiter in moonlight by far
than teeth in your smile,
but not the skin on your cheek.
Your head on window
leans against your reflection,
and I find only engine-churn
and clicking turn signal to say
what this all means.

Poem 3

I tried to make this as unsentimental as possible, but seeing as how I am a sentimental bastard at heart, it gets a little bit that way toward the end in the "coda". I hope it's clear enough why I tacked that part on.
There are a lot of conjunctions in this poem.

When someone is here
she lays out her own proof,
evidence. For example-
everyone a set of examples-
hands, white hair on knuckles,
and a back turned up on a bed,
and eyelashes in sun
and used Kleenex
and a pot in the sink soaking
and the crease behind an ear.

But, when she leaves
things step through curtains of symbol-
guesses and hopes.
Warm moisture becomes
buzzing signal on copper
and consonants on paper
and a picture under the shirts
of a bottom drawer,
a ghost of a phone number
remembered in a bar
when a song plays.

In the big war
ladies sent letters
-epistolary caresses-
dashed with their perfume.
Molecules slipped through
supply lines, cheating distance
in tiny floral ways.

Poem 2

I'm not sure when I wrote this one, but I think it is about coming back to Bellingham when I realized that it was my home town, and Spokane, the city in which I grew up, seemed unfamiliar.

Herds of cars tumble over the pass
as the snow builds on trees and rocks
and smoothes the change from
forest to grassland.
Tires fumble against cold road
and hum with a song
you whisper into the car under the stereo.
This drive evacuates Spokane again
with Christmas packed in the trunk,
and you flee back to candles:
light on a young woman’s shelf
that bounces off book spines,
and evenings smiling behind a mug
and loitering, a pile of heat,
in the bay’s wind.
Each street there, you could pry it up
and find names you almost know
and bars with cheap pool and cans of Rainier.
That cold there, after the river, the mountains,
the plateau.