The Apostrophe Blog
Over the years, a number of my poems were featured at riverbabble, a literary journal that unfortunately is no longer online. riverbabble was founded in Berkeley, California in 2002 by Pandemonium Press and published twice a year—once in June, the Bloom’s Day Issue, and once in January, the Winter Solstice Issue. Every month, the Press also curated a reading series at the Spice Monkey Restaurant in Oakland, California. Even though riverbabble is no more, I am assuming that it means these poems are still considered to be published and thus I can feature them on this site.
Below is my poem, “Present Tense Love Poem.” It appeared in riverbabble #27, the June 2015 issue.
Present Tense Love Poem
Fall going
and we part,
clamshells on the beach.
—Bashō
Now that I have you here
not there but here where it’s all
too easy to lose ourselves in the disappearing
light, the chores that fill the shortened
days as we limp past solstice, the throw
Molly brought us from Dublin, virgin wool
around our legs, an attempt
at snug on this couch where we stare
the double-paned
glass, its annotation of drip,
its incremental
inching
forward,
toward—
now that I have you here, can’t we
but stay, breathing this beatified
in then out?
Measured and (for this
moment) pretending
we are bivalve,
buried in sand, protected
and everlastingly
exempt.
The public domain photograph above is by Jon Sullivan.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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