Two Poems

Stranger in a Strange House

I have not made a home of myself,
stranger in a strange house.

If the body is a temple, I’ve spent my life profaning,
damning the brain’s flawed wiring
with word and bottle;

I find it hard to forgive myself for this, which
is itself a kind of violence.

But who can abide the mind’s vise,
dread clamped in its jaws, offered up to me
the way my dog once paused at my feet and released
from his mouth the soft, still body of a rabbit—

not with any malice, simply as if to say,
here is a thing that exists in the world.

Because terrible things exist in the world
my mind has become a strange house—
in every room, a dead rabbit.

I try to bury them and they multiply.
I turn the lights off and years slip
senselessly into the void.

I know I should “look at this in the light”—
the title of a poem my mother wrote to persuade me
of my goodness, and with it she gave me a rough stone
shot through with a crystalline seam of glass.

Some days I’m not swayed by that kind of beauty.

Still I dredge myself up each morning
and let the sun’s arrows strike me
like the hand of god reaching down to Adam,

hoping to ignite some bright vein of wonder,
convince myself any of this is divine.

***

All There Is

At the creek this morning, where the tireless
blade of water has cleaved gneiss from schist,

spiders have sutured the rifts with silk.
I stoop low, step slowly; it takes patience,

but how could I begrudge them their fragile bodies,
their fugitive and glistening empires.

Still, I rage at my own body grown tenuous,
thrash like a fly caught in the mind’s web—

won’t yield, though the path looms mountainous
and my legs, with their frayed sinews, quake,

bile rising molten in the core of me; weary as I am,
I could shake this life apart every time I’m forced

to bow to the teetering spine, the vengeful gods
of impotence. But I’m learning patience—

paused before a web slung too broad for passage,
I see summer’s first frog belly out from

beneath a stone and cast his domed eyes up
through the lattice of richweed to watch

pines rake languorous fingers through the breeze
as if that’s all there is or could ever need to be.