NEW POEMS

I assume no one really checks this anymore, and I have e-mailed some of these out to various people just because the urge to share is too strong to resist. Still... I figured... just in case.

Three new poems written this October/early November while in Cairo.

All the forward thinking is mired in the past these days.

I sleep with the balcony door open. The chill clenches my feet, their dirty bottoms, the extra thick layers of skin. Tendrils of wind brush the corners of my elbow, work their way up to tease my face. Cold is so primordial.
Hunter-gatherers laid out on the forest floor, bedding in pine needles and mulch, or animal skins, or tents—I don’t know. Or maybe it was the times I went camping, and at night there was nothing between me and the dead of space save for paper thin layers of sky: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere.
I am recalled to the lolling tongue of the laughing wolf in his winter coat. The dull heatless throb of a granite cliff’s heart. The snap of ice crystals and frozen autumn morning dew, tread underfoot. Wild things that scorn us in their insentience.
And I am curled up on my white linen mattress cover, while an open balcony door whispers to me of forgotten heritage.

Wonderment, we say, because awe is filled with a question; no certainties will come of it, and therein is despair.

At times there comes a deluge
as a quarrel, an epiphany, a small failure, a piercing dream,
a sweeping off of things, really.
And a fierce loneliness
that quiet days peaks out from the loose sod
in little catches of startling truth
overtakes me those rare days of tempest trials.
And I am face to face with my bare self
quivering on the threshold.

Oh I envy the naivety of my bedroom curtains
that flap in the immaculate cold of the morning
sighing in and out, languid flashes of light and color
from within the folds of humble coarse fabric.
What cause for such carefree abandon
such unaffected freedom
when it hangs by its feet, crucified to the wall
by a vulgar line of thin metal tracking
that proclaims the upper and lower limits
of its trite oscillations
breathing in and out
two meters’ distance
of an immaculate winter’s morning.