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Once in a lifetime you get the Big Prize but it comes wrapped in rainy days and cotton batting, incognito if you will. You stupid fuck, wake up will you, all you have to do is throw out a hand and there it is, shiny as the 4th of July, fantastic as a first kiss, spinning like a new planet. You'll look back like Girl Genius some day and say, yes yes THAT was the day, the thing that lit you, burned…
It's the harsh angle of the sun in August, I think, that tricks my bad eye. In the stillborn space where the walnut tree smothered its lessers with shade, a cape of weedy green masquerades as grass, as lawn, a trickster for my blind spot. In the magnified bright reflecting off the house's siding in afternoon, the mulberry stump sends up a fresh forest of suckers, higher by the day. This is fool's…
My big black walnut tree is gone--the storm took it. The stump is something like the white skin where a ring recently was. I'd like to have a funeral procession but I lack coffin, instruments, mourners. I would like to dance for my lost companion, but am denied. Being old is like being a kid again, in the worst way. I nag: Watch your step don't fall careful with that don't drop it. I goggle at the…
After the last movie theater closed, cluttering the world with popcorn debris and unnumbered Curies NASA reverted to using steam locomotives. The astronauts in their unexpectedly heavy white mummy suits sweated and itched in the smoky, manic compartments all the way to the youth hostel one town over where the older crew got the bends from dust in their blood. An old woman with the moon in her eyes…
Hrimfaxi shakes and cold stars fill the sky-- His breath falls and frosts the fields. Like the currents of tide or wind, his movement is his purpose and your life is simply a road for his hooves, a place where he will go and has been. Nótt whispers and he slows; she raises her hand and time stutters, every star goes still. The firmament is the field through which he goes, and his hoofbeats are the…
Death--the capitalized one-- in his cosplay hoodie holding his skateboard is as dull as junk mail. It's lying there dying that's terrifying. That's when the real demons throw down their smokes and get to work, their feet up to the ankles in mud. It's being left behind that's gutting. It's the empty mug on the other side of the table white as any skull, that sends an earthquake along the bones.…
When you love a doomed thing you know from the start that the wind will win. Friends say, can't you feel the tremble, can't you see the lean? but love is a bird that can only do as birds do until the day it dies. There is a fire and split inside me now with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would. When you love a doomed thing you know from the start that the wind will win.
When I was just an olive sparrow living rootless in Texas, I met Kris Kristofferson and some hay-blond woman with a kind face. I asked Kris, "Are you going to Willie's picnic?' and in that train engine rumble of his he laughed and said, "Hell, I see Willie at his house!" I never saw Kris Kristofferson again after that, except once, last night, around 3 a.m., in a cemetery just off Woodward Avenue.…
Verse I loved you like window glass loves morning light. Cats envied me my easy silence and singularity of heart. Perverse If I found you dying by the roadside, my eyes would be as blank as china plates and my silence entire. Verse I wrote a bloom of poems for you an origami of your face, your voice, your scent. My love reshaped into rows of you, riots of you, and every shape of you. Perverse…
There's a thing, some sort of eruption on my skin and it vibrates every time the autobus bounces and the chickens flutter as if, dreaming, they are back in their shells desiring rebirth as eagles or raptors or some undreamt-of symbol rising through the roof of the autobus. There is a blemish, some sort of eruption on my skin and boiling beneath Mount Pinatubo. The day is hot, and I am dizzy, as we…
