No Poems Today I, II, III

No Poems Today I

I have no poem in me today

I’m aware it’s either ironic or lying that I’m writing
But sometimes the soul just needs to say, "I’ve got nothing,"
And learn that it’s okay

The sun will come up again tomorrow
And lean into us with rays, like words, that warm
To help us realize, it’s never much about us, anyway
Just the dance of light jumping between every living being
And, come to it, every rock and dust and slumbered thing
Which still write a few words, in their quiet, and throws them, like paper into flames,
Into the dance of fire
Where what’s burned, crossing through, is refined, reproved, renewed
And stands there, across the river, a fully formed Phoenix
In the world to come

No Poems Today II

I guess the fear is we know someday, it won’t
The sun, I mean—come up and all that

But for now, my friend has left town, and my birthday's gone,
And I spent so much energy running around, my soul has pooped out and said, “enough”
Like a jalopy on route 66
We are like circles which, running into happiness, running into sorrow, grow tired and
have to sit once again before the great silence

But then, "Don’t try to wring from me any words," my soul said,
Your brain will judge them all as trite, if you try
And you know the drill:  
You’ll think what you find is never true, that your young energy just deceives you

I don’t have a poem in me, though they remain all around,
I must simply sit and say, "the waves come in, the waves come out
Let’s hope a new tide rolls about"
(See, that rhymed
...I tried)

No Poems Today III

A good substitute for truth is rhythm and a line in time and two words
That stare at each other, from across a line
But this moment won’t yield to cheap tricks

After all, I had a moment which now I can’t remember
Can’t recall with rhymes, like a magician calling a hidden card forth,
But it was poetry

If I can just find and pull the string of it, like a line of hankies from my sleeve,
I could write a poem
But all I can remember is, it was something about how you laughed and smiled
And shook your head while you read your book, a world being born inside your brain,
And me standing in the doorway, an unseen shadow, shaking my head and smiling in my turn
A world turning, like a kaleidoscope, inside me 

From George on his Deathbed

O, God, I leave this story
And I don’t want to go
And lose this pageantry of sight,
And above all sound
The notes of symphonies
Tightly wound and worn
Like a woman’s wedding gown
And the music of nighttime
And birds at day

The smell of summer, too
And ripened fruit
And honeysuckle root
I weep, but not from fear
Only loss
I want to see the story end
I want to dance its final spin

So help me go
There is another story
I’ve been told, and I know—
beyond those feeble witnesses—
That it is so
And the colors there are brighter
Than a thousand here
And its music will melt me
While I will revel in being wax

Still, I can’t see, if pain is gone,
How joy will stand
Or how a pear will taste as sweet
If fruit won’t rot
Or how a stolen day could be as dear
When theft is made dumb
By endless time

But these mysteries, I leave to you
I’ve learned to trust
I know you will see it through
O, God, into that void I go
Knowing this is not the end

And as I leave her...
This I can’t bear to say
(It rips my heart away)…
Let her know our life was sweeter
Than any autumn scent that drenched me
Any summer spring that quenched me
And though we trust it comes again
This is still the brutal end
And meet for tears and loss

But now, heart and courage
Unknown spring still stands
So let me grieve purely
Not as one who is afraid
But as one who loses
And has the strength to cry
With no pretense nor pretending
Even if this is no end

When I Was Young in the Mountains

Actually, I never lived in the mountains
But the brand’s the thing

I was young, of course, we all were
And startled
By the light of this green world

I lived by meadows, that’s true enough
But you’d hardly call the hill a mount

It was good for sliding down, though
I can still feel the ice freezing my hands

It cut me like a dagger
The winter would rip your skin

And in the cutting
Something was let in:

You knew you were alive then
With blood dripping down

You didn’t know you’d always be chasing
Ever after
Something to make you feel the same way

Something as true as that racing pain
You could stay just one step, one slide, ahead of

If pain’s the tutor of the soul
His truth, at least, is easy to learn:
“This is real,” he says
“This means something and matters”

And if you know that, you can hold all things—
Like water’s held in a bowl—
And then you can let it all go

When I was young in the mountains
I learned all I’d need to know

But it wasn’t long ‘til I moved to the town
And things move on from thing to thing

Worse, people will become things
And if you let that winter happen

Well, there’s no spring behind
Nothing coming to redeem it

And when the singing’s gone,
What’s left?  Just standing in line

Keeping your head down
Running ‘round and ‘round

Trying to get what’s next
Trying to not get ground up

Because that’s life
And what life becomes

But when I was young in the mountains?
I was the king of the land

Hands bleeding, the whole world in front of me
Some pain that said, “Don’t get numb, kid,”
Teaching me

I just didn’t know how numb a pain can be
Couldn’t know such realities

When I was spinning in joy
The winter cracking my lungs open

The pain teaching me that to feel
Is what’s real, even if it’s hell

And then, after that winter
The spring coming with so much sap
The smell of green would take your hand

Make all good and bright inside you
Renewing the land, and you with it

For years now, words have slipped from me
Beneath this longing that can’t be laid in words

To slip from this place
To slip from this, the unreal
Where all is numbed and tame and plain

Back to that hill
That I can slide down
Where I can find again that letting in

That letting go that holds you
And lets you hold it

Your hands frozen
Your soul, unzipped, alive,
Shaken and unshaken

Your heart quaking
For how real it all is
And how much it means
The pain of everything meaning everything
Its sting speaking, being, revealing
Everything

On the Grabbing of the Check

I was startled and started at the slamming palm of the gentleman—
Well given the context, perhaps I should just say man—
As he grabbed the check, and his friend said, “Damn,” and smiled
The friend’s cup still settling, disheveled by the tremor of the man's masculinity
His chest pushed out just an inch further now, beneath his grin
His virility in hand, not a carcass brought back to camp,
But a piece of paper, which still signifies some strength 

The Maori, to show their virility, dance the kapa haka
Pounding the ground with such fierce testosterone
The frenzy of energy is a behemoth charging through all the channels of heart,
So desperate, like all of us, to put this power and prowess somewhere
To stand beneath the bright stars and defy our dusty lot
And the awful incongruity of so much longing and so much strength
Destined for a long, slow fade
Which, in our youth, it always seems, we can outrun, or outplay 

I thought, too, sitting across from my friend, above my Eggs Benedict,
Of the Masai drinking milk and cow’s blood and alcohol, before dancing and being circumcised
And later, on my computer, I discovered Vanuatu land diving
And all the ways to prove that we are men

But first, I sat across from another,
At about the distance of Doc and Wyatt at the O.K. Corral
As the nice waitress with the plastered smile said, “Anything else?”
And we said no, wondering who was more the warrior, and who was fastest on the draw 

Now A Car Hurtles Through Space

What about this car in space thing? 
My wife said to me as I read poetry and we both procrastinated on putting our minds to sleep
And it’s true, I guess: a billionaire put a car into space, heading to Mars with a mannequin clutching at the wheel, hell-bent upon the deep
No shotgun rider needed, either, the great vacuum enough protection for the race 

Oh yes, I heard about that, I said, intent on figuring out what on earth this poem is about
Though, somewhere above me, an electric car is hurtling through the atoms, 
And in Tokyo, a man is slamming down his empty whiskey glass, trying to drown out how very insensible all this desire is, burning under cold, unseeing stars which, it really seems, should see and do something about it 

His palm slamming down is like the ignition of a rocket, which sends a payload into space
Then an unmanned car becomes a jester’s grin, sailing above the world
And two fingers, metaphorically lifting from the wheel, flip two birds into the void 

I sense all this, inchoately, with words that will only come later, as I am sitting trying to figure out what on earth this poem is about
But for the moment, I lay next to a beautiful woman, with no energy even to do what comes naturally
Energy only to take all this in stride, and marvel that there is no strength to be amazed
After all, after a while you realize, there are miracles everywhere
And we are kids at a zoo who, by sunset, have seen enough, for there will be more miracles tomorrow
Like the perfect comfort of this cold pillow, and cold hands on a warm back, 
As we all hurtle through empty space 

A Spider in the Shower

I did not see the spider in the shower until I turned and faced the wall
I saw him, then, scrambling up the tile, like waiting for a shoe to fall

He was a doomed bystander,
A pedestrian running from the wave, in some midnight B-movie disaster, screaming without a sound
A step ahead of the steam and heat, on gangly feet

He was a thin thing, too, and awkward
Running on such spindly legs, he betrayed physics, like a cartoon whose scampering feet never touch the ground

Not a Daddy Long Legs, but hopefully carrying some such silly name,
(Or a scientist somewhere should be hanged)
Not, to the point, one of those inky, hairy, thickened things, with mandibles to maim
Which, I confess, have made me scream
(A man-like scream, but nonetheless a scream)

And so I had pity, thinking what a miracle he is
And all these creatures beneath our feet
And this one, finding a corner of the shower to hole up and hide in
Praying Godzilla will pass him by

A decent rendering of ourselves, in scale, come to it
Ourselves in point, just one step ahead—
Always scrambling from some wave, some heat, some steam
Wondering about the great giant of pain, crashing dumbly about us, singing a stupid song
As we scramble for some safe place
To rest our weary feet

Beneath the Anger, Always Sorrow

In The Perfect Storm, there is a moment when the actors are transfixed metaphors
Staring at a patch of sunset beyond the fray until
Seeing the wave that would push them away from sun, back into the darkest day
George Clooney, bearded, brawny, bruised by life, curses the storm that will not let them go

In your sorrow, my friend, you were such a sailor
Not on film or page but in flesh and blood, looking at the pink horizon of hope beyond the waves
For a moment, your anger abated and there, beyond the black and gray of it, you saw the pain
Touched it, felt the throat-tightening grimace in the underwater vault of it, 
Always kept at bay by the energy you expend wrestling that Leviathan away
Beneath such thick skin

The pink sky ahead was the way out of it
But it will not let you go—the rage—unless you find a way into the pain 

Sad to say, Clooney and those sailors went down with the ship
It’s not much of a metaphor, then, unless you can flip the script
And claw your way to that horizon
Where the sunlight warms and burns you to death
Like the boy covered in dragon scales who became himself again, but
With searing pain—the sloughing off of second skin—
The agony of being lost and found
The strain of being saved
As the ocean always brings its truth to bear:

The path of life is more painful than death
Resurrection far harder than a watery grave 

Good Fruit

There is something gained, of course, in the glad reality that
I can peel and pierce an orange whenever I like (or twice, or thrice)
Can walk or bike to the grocery and engorge on citrus
With fine happy fingers or the expectant knife

But one hundred fifty years ago, a woman walked six miles to town
And waited two hours for a train, late at the gate from a broken beam,
Which finally lumbered and gave out, with a great sigh of steam, 
After a trail too long, a master mean

And from a car she watched, as they hauled though the yard
Mail and bundles and boxes large, and a sack of fruit
Which, ten minutes later, in the general store, she made sure
Was first unpacked and, laying her hands on two—the limit—
She paid bright coins for that good booty, then walked back the six miles
A smile in each step

All to bring her girl a gift, a Magi, a wise woman  
And the girl gaped
As if the skies peeled back and angels sang, at the sight of that orange orb
All on Christmas day

There’s something gained in that story, too,
The beauty of effort, the perfection of simple things
When you still have eyes to see miracles all around you
And the soul’s longing is longer, made more sure by how it finds you
And what it will require of you

There's something lost, too, in how easily I weigh and peel the things
Or throw away the ones which fail to please
Because, after all, life is hard, and it’s often hard because it’s easy
And easy doesn’t please me, or you, or us
With these souls meant for good, hard work
To fill the earth, subdue it,
And bring of our lives sweet, good fruit 

Hard Candy

I bought six boxes of my favorite candies—
Hard coffee toffee that tastes like Christmas and childhood
Figuring that their presence,
There in the basket by the pantry,
Would fancy my delight after each hard daylight

Men used to come home and curse Kennedy or Nixon and pour a Scotch
It’s something close to that
To take the edge off|
But they just sat there, untouched
As calendar pages dropped one by one in a long film noir montage, through the seasons

When I came back to them, they had soured, gone soft
And I ended up trying to freeze them back to life before throwing them out
All rubbish

Then, at Christmas,
My sweet wife got me a small package of the same, nestled into the toe-nook of my stocking
And like a Phoenix rising,
They tasted, one by one, like bliss incarnate, bedeviling senses
A bite-sized shell of soul-song

I don’t know what it all means, but I’m quite sure there’s a parable or a poem somewhere inside this story, like a soft caramel center

Storehouses don’t always please the soul
It’s not the having, it’s the letting go
Delight is a dish best served slow

The Strange Truth of Last Hours

The whir and beep of the machines will go on
Transferred to some other room, newly washed and dressed,
They will walk on, mindlessly,
Insentient of their duty,
While the sun, too, keeps shining
And the grass outside the window is postcard perfect

Everything about the noise and the bright light of this day is paradox
Comforting torment
Laborious rest
Natural life prolonged artificially, 
As death stands windswept by the windows

I stood to the side as he squeezed his son’s hand and told him,
“Don’t be angry with God”
I kept a poker face, like the machines beeping, pretending
They aren’t the slow countdown, after which,
They will stretch, wash, take a smoke, and start again

But my breath caught and I almost laughed
Not because it was funny, of course
It’s just that, when everything’s absurd—our longing for life betrayed—
Truth is a cold glass of water poured over hot souls
And the steam is so strange
Through it, there’s some indictment of what we’re holding dear

It indicted me, anyway
And I laughed because it’s so odd and pure and good
That the one dying should so easily let go
While I stand by with fists clenched, beside so many bedsides

On Clichés Becoming True

On my math teacher’s desk in junior high there was a postcard standing sentry to remind us that “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” the first in a long kick-line of clichés we learned to dismiss along with all the veracity of romance novels
Either so clearly false (unenchanted wands waved to produce one last bit of sleep for us, the awakening ones)
Or truths so true they became trees to the proverbial forest of our heart’s unseeing wilderness

“Aim for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”
(maybe)
“Sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you”
(until you start therapy, twenty years from now, and find they are all still inside you)
“God will never give you more than you can handle”
(no wonder so many people hate God)

Even with the true ones, you don’t know the truth until it’s true for you
And familiarity breeds contempt, so we overlook the closest truths to hand
Until we stumble into them and remember we read them on a poster back in high school

As when I cleaned my yard this afternoon and saw all the unscrupulous pieces of dirt,
Returned after last week’s good brooming
And the leaves fallen once again, the vines re-claiming aimless space,  
And I knew, as of a sudden seeing,
There will be no place in my life, no space in my yard, where it’s done
My backyard has become the metaphor I’ve denied, the cliché I’ve hid away, the fact revealed:
There is only journey

Yes, I feel it now in my bones, moving up my stomach with sobering sight, this revelation,
That I will not arrive
There is no destination except deeper down and real, where God is—
The arrival of letting go

And somehow, without wondering what else I could be doing or where else I could be besides here,
I put my hands on the rough-catching handle of the rake
The bristled top-hat of the broom (with its flakes of paint falling in a great irony, to be swept away)
And move the dirt that’s always returning, holding the rake with steady breaths, at peace, while another sort of irony snakes back upon itself
Finding me mindful for a moment, that  

The journey is an always-becoming-destination
A train station merging always with the tracks
A process so very close to place 

Omar, on the Border

My body can no longer hold my spirit  
It shakes at the smallest lifting
It quakes through the watches of the day

And in the night, when I lie quiet,
Awake
I can’t sit straight, stand, get up

You move your hands, feeding me, shaving me
My chin presses in as my body abandons me
Once again, this morning
This now eternal re-occurring
The never-ending boarding of the flight of myself
Leaving me, as I stand at the window, waving

But my mind still sees so clear and bright and clean
I peer through the curtains, and in-between here and the hills, the highway
With its flashes of sun, reflecting off all the cars and trucks
That run and ride blind to the dumb luck of youth

Quick rivers of light flash into being
Blinding apparitions through these partitions of glass
Promising some world enflamed with the light of the sun
Some world burning on the other side

Escape from LA

I made a home where the sun always shines
With freeways and palm trees and traffic signs
A home where you rest your wearied feet
Though you’ve walked not a mile, and stepped not a beat
But pedaled through madness, through crowds, and through heat
In gray lanes, in metros, and urban retreats
And neon, and smiles, and meet-cutes-and-greets

Through refrains of headaches, the seasons are concrete
And tulips and roses are burned out by heat
So asphalt’s the flavor that floats on the breeze
And car horns the sonnets that play through the trees
The song of the autumn is trucks in their straining
In merging lane-changings with no thank you waving
As they swagger and stomp with their impolite feet
And bleat down the freeway like overstuffed sheep

But now I’m bound for somewhere far
I feel the burning, I’ll answer the call
Of land where sea is rolling in green
Where summer is gentle and winter is mean
And we’ll forget interchanges and pages and frets
From smog alerts and the hundreds of texts
Beeping like peace-seeking missiles directed
At a man’s sense of quiet and silence and feeling
Without which a man can’t make rest with his being

We’re bound and we’re leaving, we’re going afar
We’ll search through the bogs, barbaric and wild,
That thaw when the springtime’s passion’s enthralled
We’ll find them, we’ll walk them, we’ll sit on their logs
We'll battle the brooding of mist and of fog
As the geese and the mallard honk on the breeze
As windstorm and headwinds sing through the trees
And the bog echoes back with the croak of its frogs  

We’ll ride to the north woods,
We’ll hunt for the birch
We’ll hike through the forest
We’ll wipe off the dirt
Where magpies and skylarks and puffins are perched
Where the November storms promise battle has come
And we’ll grip and we’ll feel the roll in the stern
When the aft tips downward and sails are a-fly
And the spray of the sea puts salt in your eye

Yes, we’ll sail to the lands where the flags are a-buckled
And windstorms and raindrops send curtains a-ruffle
And the wind in your hair sends your backbone a-tingle
With the promise behind it of storm and of winter
And we’ll laugh and we’ll relish the flight and the fear
And will earn every draught of the sun and the clear

We’ll know that out here a man will be drowned
And we’ll revel that mystery still can be found
Far from the mouse ears and freeways and sounds
And the asphalt that blankets and covers the ground

We’ll start a new baseline, with shadows and fears
We’ll learn to tremble at the roar of the tears
Of the vast-speckled autumn, melting the year
Till winter, so naked and barren and sparse,
Reminds us that life is a poem not a farce
Of sun and of surgery, highways and cars
But a battle for living that must leave its scars

We’ll respect the black ebony of December’s floorings
When winter at last has slipped from her moorings
And then as the snow casts its pall on the land
We’ll laugh and we’ll revel and grab at its hand
And go skipping down hillsides and dales and down glens
We’ll run through the meadow and skate oe’r the fens

And when winter has locked the land up in its grasp
And no man can stir, not a moose nor a mouse
We’ll curl by the fire and look through the glass
Where snowflakes are falling and coming down fast
We’ll look and we’ll know that preparing is past
That now is the time to batten the hatch
And that fire is friend and our strength and our life
We’ll laugh and we’ll rest in the joy and the strife

And all will be quiet and silent and holy
We’ll wake with the morn and go to sleep slowly
To hear every noise of the wood off its feet
Slumbering through cold, the snow and the sleet

And when springtime so dappled revives all the trees
And the birdsong returns on the meadows and lees
When summer comes golden, with wheat in its hands
No one will find us nor know where we stand
We’ve gone out a-roaming and roving the land

Pages

It is clear by now there will be no great work, no magnum opus
No statue looking down serenely on crowds grateful for what I gave
No volume held with awe-struck hands by someone who,
Having poured over the pages, felt saved

But my God, my world is just so bright around me
The sun burning on my daughter’s face, as she faces, with no hint of guilt nor guile, the coming day
As my son smiles and embraces, with quiet pleasure, the first orange light

I want to tell them
Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, flourish it
Pass down unwritten pages of life and love
And that tree will stand in the coming city with its many gardens
Where there are no statues, just oaks so full of sap they almost droop,
And seeds, flowering
As bees surround and crown
Their many leaves  

A Girl I Once Knew

There was a girl, lived just up this road
Pumphouse, named to hearken back a century,
Before so much iron made things spin,
And they used instead the wood and water of this forest
Which hides, now, the long path to her house
Or, more likely, where she used to live—  

For surely a new family lives there, and she’s moved on
And that is part of the mystery of changing rooms like we change days
The residue, though…that’s always the same
The filmy wash of love and longing, and so much pain
On hearts and windows

We never dated, never touched, but
Dear my, the lust of those brown eyes
“Chestnut," “mahogany," “coffee" and such
If they were written in rhyme
On some love-note inscribed
"Dark eyes piercing their own mysteries
and piercing mine" 
The tall longing to be known, a sunflower breaching sky
And strawberries, her skin
Grown warm in our Alabama sun

Her mother died and there was tragedy
She might as well be a maiden or her lady’s waiting maid
From some sod-trodden century now romanticized
The hardship of rock and mud forgotten

It’s all the same, after all—the same longing, whatever the time
And whoever owns the skin that contains within it
The taste of strawberry
Its scent wafting on the wind, still
Wading through so many years

Tide's Come High

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s come high
And the moon’s riding orange in the bright October sky
But the geese by the river sense that autumn is a-quiver
By the blue band of winter, sailing up the river

Sailing up the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your true love should be,
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
Cause the boy couldn’t buy a golden ring, girl
The boy couldn’t buy a golden ring

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s by your side
And the moon’s riding low in the blue October sky
Out across the bay, the waters rush and play
But they pile on the rocks without shame, girl
And they’ll pile down on you just the same

Sailing down the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your love let you be,
Past the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
Sailing for to buy a golden ring, girl
Sailing for to buy a golden ring

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s at your breast
And the moon’s gone to rest by the blackened raven’s nest
Cold as the morning is the ocean in his mooring
And it’s time for you to up and go

Sailing down the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your love you will see
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
He’s gone and he’s bought a golden ring, girl
He’s gone and he’s bought a golden ring

Lie down, Jenny, for the tide has touched your lips
And you’ll soon taste the darkness, beyond the ocean’s kiss
Unforgiving in its blackness is the ocean in its passion
But there’s morning far beyond these broken dreams, girl

He’s sailing down the bay straight to you, girl
That’s where your love your face will see
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
And he’ll cry and he’ll throw away the ring, girl
And he’ll moan and he’ll throw away the ring

A Circus Memory

I remembered, when my son came to my bed
Still stumbling up from his nap, just awake
That you took me to a circus

I don’t know why
I haven’t thought of it in years and was, in fact, surprised to find any memory of it,
Let alone something so pristine and clear, like a photograph dusted off, but
There it was, a file suddenly found

I was focused on the subtlety and smallness of his breaths, minutely filling the minutes,
When suddenly I saw the great green hall of the civic center,
The concrete once swept clean now filling with popcorn and peanuts and sunflower seeds
And in my hand a yellow fan they’d handed out, advertising a dealership, cross town,
As children bounded in and sat down in the delicious dark, waiting for the start

It had been raining—a good storm, too
So we were wet, which was part of the fun:
To step from storm into a place where the soul heaves away from sad shores,
For just a moment even, to remove itself,
To be restored in those tents
And in the centuries of trains traveling cross country, long before the show was contained in the big rigs which rumble now, with such melancholy, into town

I don’t know why I remember it, except perhaps that you loved me in it
In-between the crazy of our family and the broken glass of pain,
The ruthless love was there, rooting me
And I stand amazed—or sit or lie, as the case may be—at how deep and strong the love goes, covering (as they say) a multitude of misses,
Like ink which colors the whole pot of water

And my son, my son
His face without lines,
His life the very meaning of miracle
With such a heart to hold so much love:
Wordlessly he crawled up the sheets and lay down, smiling sleepily to find me here
And I tried not to move, still as a lion
As he slid beneath the big tent of my arms

Arms poised to hold, and also aware, already
Of letting go
Because that’s how love goes—
The tender breath of it so subtle
Though it builds worlds and holds us, through the storm

Subtext

It’s hard, she said, in that way that you say "it’s hard" and almost look away or retreat inside
So that the seam of the bag doesn’t rip and spill its grain all over this nice table
The heart is like a sack, after all, the bottom of which we stuff with the stuff that would keep us from getting up and getting on, one step after another

“It’s hard,” she said, and as she looked away I thought of textbooks or the Bible,
in which we read “and they went to war”
Which means blood and death and rape and the mad frenzy of hate
But,
The black words look so clean and straight on the white page
Sanitized, stripped down to just the glories—Alexander on his podium, say—and the orgies after
The dysentery in the camp forgotten
The boils, the sores, the blisters swept away by the smell of warm ink on pressed paper

Such is the subtext of pain
"It was hard” means, I guess, she almost spun out into the abyss, like a cartoon riding a bike over a cliff
But somehow, just before looking down and falling
She somehow threw the sack of her own heart off the bike and landed here, at this table
Where the water tastes so much like lemon, and the windows keep the rain at bay

The Chinese Women Talking on the Benches

When my family and I pass the Chinese women
They who sit eternally on the benches by the gate of the nature center
I can’t understand a word, but I get the gist:
There’s laughter, there’s mirth, there’s merriment

And there’s the just hushed rush of gossip
Which tone must be universal, across cultures
Coupled as it is with raised eyebrows
As if we are truly scandalized and not satisfied

Age is relative, but they are old enough…sixty, sixty-five?
And what strikes me as we walk by—
My four-year-old throwing rocks and running like a squirrel when she sees the ducks—
Is how passionate, how enthralled they are
As their laughter rolls down to the valley of sighs

There are still things to talk about, then
We do not exhaust each languorous hall
We are visitors to a museum, who never see it all

Young Cashier at the Hardware Store

The cashier put down my bag of keys
With a false “yea,” and a flourish of her hand
That was sarcasm’s twin, but not unkind,
Before she told me, "four twenty-nine"

It was just a small trumpeting—an irony, a rhyme
An encomium to how mundane all this is
Both this transaction and, so it seems, her life

Which is strange, because she is so young
And it’s a shame to feel stuck when, as the cliché goes,
The whole world is at your feet

But I found it, also, almost brave, like spitting into wind
And I thanked her sincerely for her help
Grateful to be let in to an honest sigh,
Which is far better than a, “Thank you, sir, please come again"