Have been working, fitfully, to stay in the poetry. A few weeks ago, started writing unrhymed quatrains (this is moving out of the box, for me). I have the abstract, the general idea, for the poem, I think. (Am reading the official publication of the Golden Gate construction managers, also Henry Petroski's book Builders of Dreams.) It's just that these days the focus is elusive. More from Golden Gate :

The muggy afternoon yawns,
slumps toward evening.
Sweltering, limp.  Gravity
or accidia draw me downward too;

 
but when I look for you
behind my eyelids
on a flat empty plain
a thin high sound (like silence

 
or a whistle through a line
of leaning telephone poles)
seems to assemble me again –
stirs, troubles, draws me

 
to draw you to me.  A sketch
from forgetfulness, a blind-
fold view (provisional,
fragile) – only the surface

 
of the edge of memory.
The spider, methodical, plies
his thread across a vacant porch;
I inch along around a sphere

 
of years – scribbling a map
like parasol (under changing
sun, over shadowy earth)
or palm leaf (a gray wing

 
flickering and gone).  The river
glints in the corner of that eye
as it shifts out of sight; the
bridge overhead, a form of solid

 
vertigo.

                                                  
                                6.13.05


 
A piano sounding chords, a trumpet
floating around and over them,
and the heart wheels toward
those times, when time

 
drifted into the meadow, gone.
Myriad chains of grassblades
draw me back there, into their 
silence (my speechlessness).

 
And the bridge leans on my heart –
an unknown gravity (I can’t explain).
           *  *  *
           *  *  *

                            
                                6.14.05