Spoiler Alert
This poem opens with clouds
sliding off the edge of the sky.
It is dusk. The camera has
been sped up to make everything
appear to be in a hurry. And now
night. What looks like ghosts trail
along overhead as though on
a conveyor into nothingness.
In this stanza, the poem will
draw comparisons between
an axe and a decree from a
far off country, a document
or declaration, perhaps of war
or genocide but the poem
will have strong misgivings
about the presence of
genocide in the poem, especially
as the first word of a stanza.
Soon, but not yet, the poem
shall shift to a different scene
where two boys practice shooting
at two other boys they believe
to be their rivals. Are they playing a
video game? Are they on a
paintball course? Are they
in a suburb in America? We don’t
know but the camera has now
moved to a bed where a man
and a woman do what exactly?
What the reader wants and what
the poem needs might be in this
scene radically different. The
point is that something is
happening in the bedroom on
that bed. It is dusk again.
He lifts a hand, and now we know
June Notebook
________for Cassie Duggan
Because the fan could not turn the summer air to ochre, the feathers
found their way to the window.
The old grammar was always just a placeholder for new resentments.
You planted rows of gardenias in the billiard room (noticed) (at last),
even though the house was clearly in flames.
Our lives are a diorama of what is yet to be,
a slingshot over the commute.
This revelation is a caterpillar on a tree.
If paradox is your home, look out the window to see simplicity
from the scope of the sniper.
We spend so much of our lives in the visible.
Returned letters are on the prowl;
the gold of the mind buried next to the pickaxe.
Open your mailbox to find the shinbone your disquiet dug up from the yard.
Let’s admit it: we have all been vacillating between hindrance and drawback,
but that doesn’t mean our languor is our own.
Perhaps this is why we have become addicted to a drug called recovery.
This poem is slowly transforming into a wounded zebra
about to be set upon by a pack of lions.
The moon shining on your bright face and you shining back.
The road is closed, but at the end one of two things waits:
1) an aging clown; 2) cancer.
Self, you are a lot like a combination lock on a small island.
The moths come in seasons of drowsiness;
the flood arrives with a whirring of wings.
Nature, you are a suitcase too heavy to carry;
you may get left behind.
Sometimes I am a person who says yes to everything, even a toothache.
History has lectured to us about both plot and structure;
O to be frenulumed to our words.
Political Poem
____after W. S. Merwin
One day
when the war
is over
something will
rise to bear
the new weight
we have been
asked to carry
up the path
to that place
we have come
to think of as
this life. In a
small field
a young
girl raises
a shovel and
sets it down.
She imagines
a small bird
lifting into the air
like some sort
of prayer
that knows
its way.
