Asking
Half-hitched to nothing in particular,
the loose loop of light catches dust.
A twinkling of cat fur hangs
from each hook of the air
and the air somehow handled
carries less weight than before.
I’ve tried asking for less;
I only get more.
You read stories like that sometimes:
how in India the invading Brits
paid a bounty for each cobra head
so the local folks started breeding
cobras. Same thing with rats, somewhere,
can’t remember where I read it.
Thoughts well up like that sometimes.
Brief pleasure in watching them blossom,
cutting them off. Today is slow.
I expect tomorrow will be also.
I’ve tried asking for more.
I only get less.
This much and no more and the time
the rain went on so long and heavy
I had to give up and go out in it,
wristwatch swaddled in a plastic bag.
This much and no more, but drenched in it.
Water alive in the eyelash, the ear’s soft cup.
I’ve tried not asking—
I’m trying it now.
Riding Lessons
My ear is full of little organs
of war, I guess—hammer, drum, stirrup—
which explains why I’m always looking
for a horse. The first time I fell off
we were all galloping uphill in a line,
as if momentum, as if twelve-year-old
dreams realized, could hold out somehow
against gravity. The second time was indoors
and I had to choose: stay on
or steer away from the wall.
Or I thought I had to.
In hindsight, it’s obvious the horse
wouldn’t have run into the wall.
Also obvious I could have held on with my legs
while still holding the reins.
I guess the world can only stand
to look at itself from a single
angle for so long—eighty years, ninety.
A hundred tops. I gave up panning for gold
ages ago, but every time the sun rises
I take credit. Every time the sun touches me
I get a rash. I refuse as a rule to take note
of anything other than god
stuffed like cotton in my ears.
I don’t mean God god, that’s silly—
I mean the narrowing of bird to song
or the flattening of water to surface.
The insisting on water, the insisting
on not drowning in glut of air.
I mean the inside of the outside
of what bones I borrow,
and I do not mean at all.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Katherine Tunning
