WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

grief

March 18, 2004

Goodbye

On New Year’s morning, 1992, it snowed. You shivered, touched me, kissed me, said you loved me. I waved goodbye to you and went into the winter. Wind cut through your bones like knives, your skin, it was so cold on New Year’s morning, 1992 you died and I did not. I dreamed I knew… Continue reading

Poems, villanelle

grief, loss, poem, poetry, villanelle
February 2, 2004

Coming to Grief

I walk with you again, this crowded gravel path. We pass beneath dying elms, fire maples, thick oaks. Soon bats will rise up, above the trees. My hair clings to my skull in the rain. I hear the river moving stones in its bed. The rain stops. Now, spots of sun, the steady dripping from… Continue reading

Poems

grief, poem, poetry
January 16, 2004

Brother Gull

It is an ordinary death for its time, family in a clot around the high, white bed, gull at the window. The man on the bed sticks and twigs, remnants of pain. He opens his hand, lets mine go. The gull lifts from the sill into the solid wall of sky. Continue reading

Poems

brother, death, dick brogan, grief, poem, poetry, richard brogan

Ancestral (Artificial )Intelligence

I do not use AI to write. For me, writing is how I think, and I prefer to do it myself. If/when I post anything here that I suspect or know to be AI generated, I will tell you.

I have changed this from Artificial to Ancestral, after Abi Awomosu @ Substack. This medium was made with human history, human thought. All of it, bright and dark. It is ancestral.

Poems

Please do not assume that I am the speaker/ subject of my poems.

In these times of creative nonfiction and fictionalized memoirs, I think of the poem itself as true fiction: it is most likely not factual, but it must be true.

It is likely to be — it is best if it is — a truth I did not know before I wrote, and may not understand even then.

A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think — but it is not necessarily biographical.

grief

Goodbye

Coming to Grief

Brother Gull