Sunday on a Whim–Douglas Cole
Squirrels are eating the insulation.
The back door is wide open—
but the black cloud has passed over.
Why so sullen, face on the wall?
You need a strategy to get from here
to the car. It’s quiet now, but any moment
the bullets will be flying.
I slice a sliver of self and say,
you go live the mid-century modern
with pool and sound view
and more rooms than you’ll ever need,
while I eat roots and walk under palms
head exploding like a dandelion seed.
Look it up, you’ll find nothing
on the filmmaker, one movie out,
a solitary prayer that won’t burn down,
but watery images drift into your dream
even when you’re driving home
under an animated fishbone sky.
At least I call it home: beach shack lean-to,
all I need is a little fire, night music,
and the hieroglyphics of the waves—
sun door I slide through to bring you
these glimpses, these bits of other world
eyes like a gallery vision in a gum wall
you can put your concentration to and see.
Sunset Cliffs to Golden Gardens—
ragged fractal edge, a thing you feel
and hear—no wonder this looks familiar:
shaggy trees, birds, hillside sloughing
water to the slough, deck top rolling
mist assuming another day,
parting like a game show curtain
revealing what we’ve won.
***
Douglas Cole published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has been anthologized in Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications), Bully Anthology (Kentucky Stories Press) and Coming Off The Line (Main Street Rag Publishing). He is a regular contributor to Mythaxis, providing essays and interviews with notable writers, artists and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blond, Flash Count Diary) and Tim Reynolds (T3 and The Dave Matthews Band). He also writes a monthly piece called “Trading Fours” for Jerry Jazz Musician and was recently named the editor for “American Poetry” in Read Carpet, an international, multi-lingual journal from Columbia. In addition to the American Fiction Award, he was awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Editors’ Choice Award for fiction by RiverSedge, and has been nominated three time for a Pushcart and seven times for Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com/.