Variant 20

The bow bends. The bough bends.
The arrow is married to both.

Variant 19

 Pines.

The fossilized shadows of trees
that stood here 300 years ago.
Dark with age and the knowledge
of what came to pass
and what will follow.
Snow caught in the branches
like the desire to forget
and the knowing

it can never happen.

Variant 2

 It is a good day
when the water stays within the riverbanks
and the flame stays in the fireplace.

But for how long?

A Hundred One Line Poems

 1.

Frost scribbles on the window.

2.

The trees do their winter dance.

3.

Wooden fence posts with names painted on them, like a cemetery in single file.

4.

In the spider's cookbook, the pages are all stuck together.

5.

Oh moon, tell me that story again.

6.

Recipe for disaster: add one human.

7.

The laws of physics are immutable. You, sadly, are not.

8.

I erased the note I wrote you, one letter at a time.

9.

The river mispronounces the names of the drowned.

10.

The snail sleeps in its car, in the middle of an empty field.

11.

What does summer furniture do in winter? Black skeletons standing in a white room, looking for somewhere to sit.

12.

If you cut water, it bleeds. If you cut glass, it cries.

13.

An afterthought, filled with music.

14.

Death, and its thousands of practical jokes.

15.

The wind holds its breath. The trees count to ten.

16.

The mayor dropped by to ask how he was doing.

17.

The wind doesn't ask.

18.

The past is past is past.

19.

The future is just a dream the past had of us.

20.

There is no present. Only the future rushing past.

21.

The grass knows what it wants.

22.

The chalk outline of a cloud.

23.

The chipmunks and the squirrels argue for hours.

24.

Nightmares are in black and white. Dreams are in color.

25.

The moon closes its one good eye.

26.

Truth is an addiction.

27.

When the movie ends, the audience is empty but the theater is full.

28.

The sky is a door we cannot walk out of.

29.

Paper butterflies and acetylene flowers. 

30.

The leaves regret the tree. The tree regrets the leaves. The rain hides their tears.

31.

The starfish of memory, the nautilus of dreams.

32.

The mirror sees everyone but itself.

33.

Love on paper is only on paper.

34.

Pretend you don't exist. It will be true soon enough.

35.

Let's get one thing straight: the mind cannot be happy and the heart does not make sense.

36.

The magician's final act:

37.

The sound of glass holding its breath.

38.

The snow's alphabet: stone, stick, fallen icicle...

39.

The stars were once gods, then dreams, now just pinholes of light.

40.

Nightmares are the world telling you what you are afraid of.

41.

Actors crave an audience of thousands. Poets hope for a thousand audiences of one.

42.

The snow has forgotten what it came for. Its pockets are empty, turned inside out.

43.

He has heart-shaped cufflinks to prove he wears them on his sleeve.

44.

Poet. Psychic. Wrestler. Bartender of last resort.

45.

Current Resident of the return address for the Beyond.

46.

The wind creeps up on you and steals your thoughts.

47.

We are an equation that cannot be solved.

48.

Susceptible to other worlds.

49.

All my wounds are self-inflicted.

50.

Sometimes it seems my dreams have dreams of their own, dreams of another dreamer.

51.

You need to learn to write yourself out of hell.

52.

The poem never ends, but the poet fails to notice.

53.

The invention of the imagination.

54.

The bric-a-brac of a thousand yesterdays collecting dust.

55.

There are things you don't realize until it is too late. But too late for what?

56.

The skin of a new day.

57.

Memories are fossils. Another time, another person pretending to be you.

58.

The museum of the soul is closed on Mondays.

59.

No, it is not alright.

60.

Poetry is its own worst enemy.

61.

I  press my face into the hair behind her ear and whisper anything but words.

62.

Language is a distant planet.

63.

It takes a thousand light years for a single word to reach her. 

64.

Someone told me I was kind, but what kind he couldn't tell.

65.

The gods were busy throwing bones into the fire.

66.

Rain: a paint-by-number landscape.

67.

The spider sees only flies.

68.

The candle's assistant, fire.

69.

I left the trees out to dry.

70.

At best, the earth puts up with us.

71.

We are the beautiful wreckage of the middle class.

72.

Words are useless when they are most necessary.

73.

Are there no adults among us?

74.

The stupid teenager who said he wouldn't make it past twenty-five is still alive within me. 

75.

The wind has a house of its own, the windows always open.

76.

The dust is doing its slow motion pratfall lit by the early morning sun.

77.

Strangers are lovers who just don't know it yet.

78.

Or enemies with the wrong address.

79.

There are no shadows on the sun.

80.

The assassin inside chooses his victims at random.

81.

Someone has hung a "No Vacancy" sign on my dreams.

82.

The night clerk cheats at solitaire.

83.

All night, every night, the cicada winds his clock.

84.

The river never asks. The stars never explain.

85.

The rain writes on the window in invisible ink.

86.

He was the last non-playable character in a playable world.

87.

Something something the meaning of life blah blah blah... (the voices in my head)

88.

It would be nice if we could occasionally act like adults. But we aren't. We are children trapped inside aging machines we can no longer control.

89.

There is the sense, in modern times, that beauty is an illusion brought to fruition in the eighteenth century to replace the religious concept of purity which failed to survive eight centuries of war and infighting. Or so I am told.

Bufflehead

Alone. In a narrow slip
of open water the brook's hard work
keeps free of ice and snow,
the bufflehead sticks to itself
or its mate.

No friend
of the mallard or other ducks
they must share what scraps
of open space are available.

Separate but equal.
They prefer

the quiet places
where there is no one
to make fun of

its bloated head, the oversized
target he looks out from
at a world
round,

distinct and difficult
as itself.

After Basho

Seventy-five years
and the pine tree hasn't blinked once.

Our Neighbor

On special occasions
he wears his sash and frilly hat
to indicate he is the representative
of a strange and uninhabited country.
He shuffles through the yard
introducing himself
to each and every tree and shrub
with a deep bow and muttered obsequies.
They say he hasn't been the same
since his wife died. There are children
who live in distant cities but never visit.
The rest of the time he can be seen
sitting at the kitchen table in his bathrobe
staring at the calendar, waiting
for the next day circled in red
to arrive.

Variant, 18

 Look in the forest.
Examine the trees.
Question the rabbit
and the skunk.
The answer
is in a thousand places.

Variant, 17

The grass is sheltering in place.
It's secrets all exposed
to the weather. Rabbits, squirrels,
chipmunks pick through it
like seagulls on a trash scow
or relatives at a funeral.
I am happy to die
so I don't have to hear
what people say of me.

Variant, 16

My friends don't want to leave
but I have nothing left to say.
I can hear the moth tapping his wings
against the back door screen
asking to come in.