August came a bit early, merging with lingering Spring.
Birds
The scheming magpies’ plan must’ve worked;
summer failed to arrive in this grey and spiraling urbanity.
Anchorage feels naked, empty
without the carpet of ice and snow crunching below.
I was aware of it when lupines and wild roses
heralded the arrival of what should have been June.
I was keenly aware of the missing white when
flowers conceded, accepting the cruelty of warmthlessness.
This city is wet now, as the great lion arrives.
Saddened by this dreary failure, the cat weeps,
drizzles pulling themselves from a sky
that has married itself with concrete.
The world darkens, turning grey and distant.
All hope escapes of summer, of warmth.
It’ll return to Alaska now, familiar cold eventually driving
away those smaller birds and welcoming the giant cousins,
the benevolent and ominous ravens, keepers of my soul.
In the merriment of an metropolitan buffet,
they’ll shoo the clouds, revealing the sun,
still hanging where they’d first placed it.
7.27.2008
What do I think of this poem? I almost feel like I was trying too hard. I’m still blocked and the words are not coming in waves. They take effort, like these, to release. I nearly like it, but may need to scrap an animal reference.Continue Reading
I’ve always felt solitary. Not alone, not always lonely, but content to just be with myself. But I need the company of loved ones more often than I remember and the lack of such company makes keeping my head up an arduous endeavor. I certainly don’t take joy in sounding miserable when all indications are that I am rather happy, but I am not as satisfied with my life as I could be.
I think the previously posted poem Hiking At Kennicott will either will be edited to be shorter or fleshed out to be an essay. I like it, but it is almost begging to be prose. I find myself rather blocked this week. Perhaps it has been the turmoil this past week seems to be in. Things are in disarray. It causes me to not want to face myself and I slink into my corner and pretend I don’t want to write. In reality, nothing would bring me greater joy in difficult times. Facing myself always seems to convince me that I like me more than I thought and still troubles me because I don’t understand how I can still be alone. I’m feeling rather desperate to have what those around me have and desperation causes foolishness. I hope I can keep the antics at bay. In the meantime, I’ll risk a poem on here that could potentially offend those mentioned in it. It is about three people I love a great deal — a family of sorts. Like all families, it is the quirks of individuals that sometimes receive the focus. It rarely means that those quirky people are thought of any less.
I got out of Anchorage for nearly three days. David, Daniel, Denis, & I took a trip to McCarthy & Kennecott in the Copper River Basin. Kennecott is an old mining town that was abandoned in 1938. The trip was beautiful, therapeutic, and well-deserved by all of us.