Measurement Conversion
With only tides to tell time
The standardization of minute increments
Is a near impossible task
The irrefutable changes day to day
Once measured the hours
In between become distance
The distance a scaled map
Printed on newsprint
That tears as it is refolded
The tide stalls before it turns
The length of that stall is a single unit
Day to day the changes irrefutable
Late Thoughts
Such a small matter
A grit that chafes
A kernel that rubs
At the core
At the crux
This late thought
As immaterial light
Leaves the room
As viscous dark
Backfills
The ambiguous space
Sleep is elusive
You wait for its
Moment of scission
To set you adrift
A sub-lunar figure
A weightless aura
A water-edged contour
An emptied hull
Bodiless
As it begins to sink
The Open Shutter
for Uta Kogelsberger
In the night of a long exposure
The moving figure disappears
Not even a blur of ghost flesh
Or wisp of fog unfurled remains
Looked at long enough the body
In motion transmutes to plasma
To ether then at last to the invisible
Exposed and thus exposed is erased
A figure no longer figured
Transitional Object
Nevermind
The incongruities
Of scale
Or the point
At which all
Things vanish
Although no one
Has yet deciphered
The oracle bone script
A word still recalls
A referent
In the world
Like you I occupy
A mutable
And indeterminate space
I am never absent
Thus embody
My absence wholly
A Light Remains on in a Sleeping House
A confluence of air masses inhabits the hallway, fills the narrow space. At one end, the room he shares. He can hear the sleeper’s breathing ease, hear her eyes as they close. At the hallway’s other end, a mirror hangs, heavy with all it holds: a palimpsest of desires, grids and facades, conflated perspectives, multiple vanishing points scattered like birdshot. . . The hall light is on but barely casts his shadow.
Header photo by Tim Hill, courtesy Pixabay.