in december

the days, they’re shortest,
skinless, surrounding the house,
drift wood barricade.

it’s spring, and now green

is on everything that stands
or spreads. starkness unraveling
under advancing elliptic and the hungry
thumbs of suburbia. microscopic
industries expanding the imperialism
of death and life.

home at the end

of winter. there’s a drafty passion in my ear. on the hairs of my neck. the weekdays and workends of reckless ownership wedging like moss in the joints of the twentieth century. built of chair web and laundry. hefty bags. bottled water. sink full of dishes with egg dried on. comfortable in this obscurity     i pound fists to table   say it’s always the last piece that completes the puzzle      always      cold as a megalith      aligned north       coincidentally marking equinox     half buried in antique stumbling    i make every day make sense   and i make my pencils sharp   make phone calls     make the calendar a battleplan        make up my mind a hundred times    and a hundred times not admitting it’s the puzzle   that completes the last piece         at the end of winter        in the sun’s ungraciousness       my mouthful of acts condensed on glass            counting consequences like beads

after work, freezing

under january’s chisel,
my tracks and walnuts
planted for the squirrel
that haunts the bird feeder

weekend leviathan

churning in the downy foam of saturdays’ seas, he consolidates his will and draws the last warmth into himself. a body no other can raise, but once breached and clothed and coffeed, there is no hope of him subsiding. as if a state of nature, he marshals hammers, wrenches, strange saws, and torches to face the tight struggles of plumbing or pruning, wiring lights where there were none, assembling swedish economy. he will not flee. a singularity, he is solid and will fix it. contorting fingers and heat and hardware into something common. then settling. behind him a wake of sweat and profanities. a wake of things done and undone, first principles simmering.

poem at the beginning

a hundred geese lift
off and slice the morning
southward. leaves fall.
a grey flurry in the half-sun.