Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
When a three-legged dog chases its tail, the stakes are higher, somehow. These poems are like that: trios of unrhymed tercets that strain toward the phantom limb of a resolution but never quite reach it. I call this form 3verse. It takes its cue from the web comic 3eanuts, which consists of old Peanuts strips from which the fourth panel has been amputated. The result is something perhaps sadder but also freer, more open-ended, succeeding in ways the original strips could not.
Ideas for the poems usually come to me on mid-day walks, whence the working title of the series.
First an opossum crawls into our bed.
He’s tame, you cry.
Those are just love-bites.
Then it’s a long-haired white cat,
purring and snuggling.
Get her out of here, you groan.
I wake to a heavy snowfall,
the old dog statue in the yard
just a bump under the blanket.
Right after drafting this poem, I found out that Rachel’s (short-haired) white cat in London was killed last night. RIP Mario.
A rabbit has squeezed
into a ring of fencing
to browse on dogwood sprouts
and can’t get out.
The snow crunches under
my boots as I loom up,
the small animal
beating against its cage
like a panicked heart.
In all this blankness,
a squirrel finds the precise spot
it buried a nut.
Breaking trail with snowshoes,
I choose to believe
I’m half-floating, not half-sinking.
Clumps of snow sail off the trees,
making a random scatter
of oblong prints.
The house is pinned
under heavy snow.
My head fills with mucus.
Icy limbs strain
to reach the ground,
alternately melting and freezing.
I drip in the noon-time glare.
Let me be replenished
in nightly increments.
Snow doesn’t stop falling
when it hits the ground;
it just slows down for a while.
It’s like that talk-show host
who ridiculed the idea
of a day-time moon—
how I relished his show’s
slow collapse, despite
its glut of glitterati.
Having melted the snow above it,
a black stone glistens
in its pit.
All thaws seem abrupt.
Lichens slicked with meltwater
glow a lurid green.
I’m feverish—might I, too,
burn a hole
clear through to spring?
A few degrees above freezing,
and already the first gnats
have come back to life.
Insects have mastered
the most immaculate lifelessness,
deader than any corpse:
even ice
with its many knives
never gets a chance to grow.
Melting snow reveals old secrets.
Two spots of blood
have reemerged in the yard.
Wrinkles appear—
long, dark faultlines
from differential settling.
I know you,
I mutter to myself.
We’ve been here before.
Trees sway like drunks
in a sudden gust of wind—
the clacking of their branches.
The whole hillside
is in motion around me,
standing here with my head cold
almost gone.
How marvelous it is
just to breathe.
In a snow-bound ring of stones,
I am burning all the tissues
from my recent cold.
The sun beats down. Fallen twigs
and leaves are melting themselves
into form-fitting graves.
A flat wing of ash floats up
and hangs in the air
like a famous last word.