distant, keeps odd hours. A foreigner, regarded with a mixture of bemused tolerance and mistrust.
Category: epigrams and conundrums
The tree caught in a tree cannot be untreed except by rot.
Say what you will about the lizard brain;
At the encampment of the damned,
Mountains so long and low
we forget after a while that they aren’t the horizon, that their trees don’t go on forever, that the sky is wider than we can know.
I dreamed the angel of death was a bland functionary
who kept giving me forms to fill out.
In a dream, I extricate myself from your embrace
to rescue children drowning in a river. One of them has already grown fins and a tail.
I dream I’m possessed by a demon who gives me seizures.
No pain, no gain, he makes me hiss through a throat stretched thin as a telephone line.
As the green drains from the leaves,
why doesn’t it pool underground
like a reservoir of eternal summer?
Why don’t the green, leaf-shaped katydids
turn brilliant colors before they die?
When lovers intertwine, why don’t they fuse
like roots from adjacent trees?
If a human falls in a city and there are
no trees around, does it leave a hole?
I dreamed I was at a picnic table across from Donald Trump.
But he wasn’t president, just a racist old relative with appalling fashion sense, and everyone else was pretending he didn’t exist.