Monte Merrick

after the memorial – in which memories were returned again to life and salty tears and poems and muffled sobs from books and hearts made these pixels shimmer and made them stand and groove – we said good bye and didn’t walk from the church to the hall where strange quarter sandwiches and potato salad […]

when you find yourself under a fleet of gulls your wonder is as far as your wonder can justly take you. you just can’t reach out and take this gull, winter plumed and tilted. you cannot know this gull by force. gedanken says the old teacher who suffered no god-shaped hole. if you can you […]

   run to see beyond the trees five hundred or so snow geese in their vees – telling travelers’ tales to the island below. and here, down here, a thousand robins sing their nest-building song – so soon? and the long-tailed ducks? will they leave tonight? on the fifth of march we saw eight, maybe […]

we once threw our spirits across whole divides. we could land in and look from another point of view. we could sail our souls across the seen and and the hidden. we could walk our own bones to the source of the river. now we fling our bodies into places they could’ve never gone. we […]

i could tell you what this or that wave means, but it wouldn’t matter – and that’s best. watch Orion into the dark of night. we slingshot together just like we did on the cup and saucers, flung and spun. no tickets needed. each of us knows this and yet it eludes us. Monte Merrick

You find out what’s a poem the Hard way some times A scrap of line you threw away two days Ago and now look at you bent over the dumpster at the waist Sneaking a bite of pizza while you Think no one can see you It’s not everyday that the end of the world […]

Stars through bare trees And Aleutian geese. The climb to the higher dune drowns The motor sounds Lets in the surf. Across the bay 101 strung with colored lights Burning holes in the weave That keeps us watertight. Monte Merrick

We mark graves for ourselves Not for distant arrivals But for our own returns When we place a stone We don’t believe its weight will ever lift But it does What still hurts now seems to bear some load Each grief is a member That vaults the sky This old skull Is going somewhere I’ll […]

1 the actual world is not an imaginary friend. the moon in the sky is farther out than we can conceive but we can imagine what we imagine without end. we can walk to the foamy line where the surf runs up the sand and see the curve of our mother’s side – the old […]

Forty black brant in league with the moon dropped from the evening to the bay. We did not dive in to the gold night sea, the dog and I. Monte Merrick

Whenever someone says that history is a lie, I think about the scar that runs the length of my scalp; I think about the crow who died in my hand. I think about the time that I let the screen door slam and pinched my sister’s index finger flat. History, they say, is written by […]

o townsend’s solitaire you are likely unaware how much you stir the air – when we see you there robins perched upon the height of douglas firs in sweet delight compose verse at day’s last light that begins and ends o townsend’s solitaire