A garden rake leans against brown water- proofed deck slats: splotchy, showing how it was a start and stop job, days in between, weeks even. The leaves remain ungathered in piles under the tree, spotted and crackling—isn't it better anyway for the soil, darkening soon into familiar winter? I am always still writing about time— hunting a line that walked through the door, circled the park, stared at the treeline before coming back to the same poem pinned under a lamp. Opening and closing like a hand testing its ability to hold and sometimes to hide, tracing the orbits we make around each other— how we walk along the water's edge, trying to slow the measure of our going. The moon rises; night's noises sift out of the sky—owl and thrush, black- crowned night heron whose feathers beat its sides like a clapper trembles a bell.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.