Here and Now
The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees. When I tell you the day is a poem I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening. The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds of the wind that whips up the seawall. If you want the poem to take on everything, walk into a hackberry tree, then walk out beyond the seawall. I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing the mistral careen off the seawall, hearing the fauvist leaves pelt the sarcophagi. Here and now the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me for a second, before the wind broke branches and guttered into the river. What questions can I ask you? How will the sky answer the wind? The dawn isn’t heartbreaking. The world isn’t full of love.
First Published in Ozone Journal (The University of Chicago Press, 2015). Reprinted with permission.
The poem feels like someone quietly moving through a morning and noticing how the world turns poetic when you slow down enough to see it.
I love how the day starts with “strips of yellow glass,” a small detail that already feels full of warmth.
There’s something intimate in the idea of speaking to one person while the sky listens in, almost like sharing a secret.
The wind, the seawall, even the pomegranate seeds feel alive, as if the world is gently nudging the speaker forward.
The reference to Van Gogh adds a soft layer of sadness, like the past is brushing up against the present.
I really like the moment with the pigeons brief, tender, gone in an instant.
The poem keeps shifting between calm beauty and sudden harshness, the way real days often do.
The questions near the end feel honest, the kind you ask when you’re trying to make sense of things.
The final lines hit with a quiet truth not dramatic, just clear-eyed about how the world is.
By the end, it leaves you standing in the present moment, not romanticized, just real and strangely grounding.
Transcendent. I love the steady, calm pacing, the brutal landing at the end.