Robinson, Folk Singer

My father is a therapist. Of course not.   It

must be his voice. Not therapeutic.

There were

times, as always.

As you must have heard. I grew

without perspective, depth. Immanence. No sense.



Words removed, time’s tune.

Though these come back.

Ants amassing under the concrete floor.

The sliding door off-track.

Stepped through.

Eventual shatter.

Evermore.



Terror is a turning away.

This Semele did not.

Reduced to ash at the presence. The wind

picks up. Everything taken.



Fain, I would have. But for so

many things.

The walls the wind blows through.

The house

of collected debris. The day the train

pulled away. Later derailed.

The skeletal umbrella.

Water pouring

over the drains.

Golden State: Spectral

The last of the light

winds its way down

in the night-cleft

and the dark distills

a still-tremble in the trees

along the boulevard,

the evening wind

softly troubling the leaves.



And, as ever, someone ends up missing,

stepping of the curb

into the lamplight, a wisp

of fog, dissolving into the weather—

a return to the water

of which we were made.



And what remains resides

in the mind,

a dream of endless falling

emptiness filling

the heart’s black pond.

Perhaps now there’s jasmine

in bloom, an iris

in decay, the yellow tulips

severed in a crystal vase.


The windows square by square

alight, a shadow

passes through a curtained frame,

a ghost in a portal of air.