Elan Mudrow
Smidgens
Two Windows
Two Windows
Wildwood Trail, Forest Park, Portland Oregon, January 2019
How Does It Go?
It isn’t a question of whether words will come
It’s a question of how you want words to go
Christmas Presence
Late, Christmas night, wandering past your home.
I see your face in the window, warm, buried in your phone, your lamps glow
There’s a fuzziness about your image
The trees, their winter arms angling for musty sky, starless.
The atmosphere’s full of their limbs, in your yard and everyone else’s,
black against the city’s sky, a silent collage
My hands wear soft gloves, wool, cotton, and oil, stretch to fit
move in the new climate’s coolness, a different kind of clear.
I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve touched bark, I take off one glove to text someone.
My boots can’t walk quietly through all these streets, so much pavement
as if we’re knocking down mountains exchanging them for vast networks of streets.
Your home, just one of many quiet ones, mostly dark.
Car tires sound like sticky tape peeled off a rough surface,
slide like sludge past your home, carrying kids with new Christmas presents.
I see their faces through the window, warm, aglow, buried into phones.
I wave to you as I walk by. You politely wave back.
We resume texting.
Forest Spirit
Forest Spirit, Klickitat River, December 2018
Resonate
Click on image to enlarge.
Taken at Cattus Island County Park, N.J. in November 2018.
Mnemosyne
Her arm, a light porcelain, marbled with a series of veins and arteries. Sometimes she thinks she’s cold, a stone. She takes a sacred bath, a bit too warm for many, candles burning messages into her sweat, to see through the cold, if she wants to. She knows that spheres from the furthest reaches are born from heat, sandwiched inside a cold vacuum. Our sun maybe different. No one knows for sure, it plays pranks on us. Fires look the same but are built of independent flames. Words are there and she wonders if they’re written or spoken, both? Thamus listens to her and will never forget her. Thoth writes her notes down in secret. Neither are good students of love.
I touch her arm, press lightly and gaze at the indents I make.
(Prairie falcon feather. Image taken where it was found. Click to enlarge.)
Dab Of Warmth
There are mild spots between winter’s beating of grayness
Where breaths, in ease, are breathed…gloves are placed in pockets or lost on streets of snow
Mixed in that scattered brown batter of orphaned leaves.
The sun appears as a stranger, speaking a forgotten tongue, yet familiar tone
Trying to place a lull on the ceaseless movement of cars slicing through premature melt
Inviting the city to meditate between weather systems.
Only the north wind, that magician, retains a fierce spell, stinging lips of a spring kisser…
Who…hushed…awaits the requite of warmth.
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