early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future
***
unfathomably translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied
missing you is like
spring standing still on a hill
amid winter snow.
*
we stumbled into
each other’s lives like two young
children playing house.
*
when i return home
to sleep the shadow of you
covers me with day.
*
you have stamped your hour
on me, tattooed yourself on
me like sheets of silk.
*
For a while now the poets have known
the farmers and now the farmers know
the poets and they say hello and hug them
and Elle says again, You were so wonderful
on Friday night and Frankie is smiling
because it is never too late or early for
a compliment meant genuinely and I give
Frankie free zinnias by Ellie not because
she is a poet but because she is a very good
human who has such strange handwriting
that it makes people want to tattoo it on their
bodies, and she tattooed it on hers but not
in a braggy way, in a columnar/cut-off way,
and I like to watch people ask her about it
and I think to myself that I’d never tattoo
myself because I hate repeating myself
but, to repeat myself, now the farmers know
the poets and they like them for their words
and savvy presentation (I think of Scott
in the front row of the sideyard smiling like
someone gave him the exact correct birthday
present) and the poets love the farmers
for their very good foods like Nardello
peppers which are sweet and the most
divine, they’re Ellie’s favorite and she’s
a painter and a farmer, too. And life, I think,
is not as simply roasted as a pepper is, but
it is sweet to watch a farmer hug a poet
hug a professor hug a trapezist hug
a graphic designer slash table maker
hug a videographer hug me, I’m hugging
all of them one after another or two
at once at the farmstand on a Sunday,
and I think we’re all farmers inside somehow,
all artily growing or having newly grown.
mostly just this
mixed in with this
(thanks kaz)
and misha sold four prints
and there are flowers all over the house, even by the sink and right here on the desk
and there are four dollars in “20,000 words” which means at least 2 people have my chapbooks
and maybe, maybe, some sort of art scene to remember is getting going in san diego, but even if not, even if we’re all just smartpeople in a yard for a party, it feels good to remember how many good people there are in this city, and that with some wood and tacks and trashbins-turned-to-tables and the help of farmily, art can happen right next to where we live, and even though no one on the east has seen this thing we did and made, we will bring it wherever we bring our selves, sideyard or sideporch or sideacre of a plot of land…
the frazzled state of hair in this photograph is no where near to the frazzled state of my hair right now. by tomorrow, i will be groomed. by tomorrow, 29 photographs around the yard. by tomorrow, poems and poets and flowers by ellie and good people in the sideyard hearing art, seeing art. you should come. 7pm.
Like a mini-mart off the highway,
Kyle Martindale gets older. Unlike
most poets, Kyle’s often on his way
from the gym, where he was rowing
on a machine outta water. Kyle got
hitched, hiked paths, chose classic
reggae, and flew on airplanes this year,
and that’s just this year. Not even gonna
count up all the feats he finished
during the other twenty-four. Hey
Kyle, we miss you here, the way
you’d decide on dancing most times
and eat the same beany slop three
meals a day, sometimes in a good bowl
from home, on the go, on campus. Hey
Kyle, there are people that you know
that don’t know how to handstand like
you do. But Kyle, we know you’d teach
us if we asked. You always do.
Between houses appears your unmistakable
hair, the hair of a wild man, wilderness
clothed in cottons. We warm
each other and warn the seasons
of their attributes. The winter steals
the softness from our elbows and you,
browned soldier, are older than
the weatherman predicts, more full
of starch, your heels unpeeling. Hot
beet skins stain a paper bag.
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
panache, perhaps 
