Tanka
Death
clad in black negligee
caresses me
how can I stop her
from stimulating my poems?
snow
taking the features
from the landscape—
I unearth them
on a page of tanka
the poem
I’ve worked on for months
gray and cold
time to shuffle off
this mortal coil
every
time
after I finish writing poems
I see
cyclamens by the window
stand unfailingly erect
my favorite
film clips flare on the walls
of the mind
I trap them
with a net of words
a lone dog
barks at the moon
loud, long, piercing
he does not know
the art of tanka
