frolic and grief. The Ancients
mourn, loving the lost off to their
out-of-body nowhere or somewhere,
eating with them one last time.
The original church-basement lunch
after the funeral, I suppose.
And those ladies who
toil among the fruit salad, ham spread,
the muted voices—
O long-robed muses of oldest days,
(for Poetry lyric and epic and sacred,
for Music, History, Dance, et al) come hither!
Even you, wordless stricken one
called Tragedy, the start over,
dark forever thus
in such places, that bright
moth bitten-blind ring of leaves you wear.
May Day
The child, the miniature
old person waiting in her was worry,
all that sitting alone in a tree thinking the tree
knew her thoughts.
Walking home, just walking like that…
A kind of radar. It does ache,
scanning the waters Is
turning to Was turned to who can recall
the inch-by-inch days of school.
What got learned piled up or it morphed
to the next thing and left behind
a little smoke.
There are children with
no child inside. But here’s a bird for you, says Spring,
brought back from the dead of
snow and ice. Plus flowers, the first blue (sweet
low-to-the-ground vinca), first yellow
(forsythia’s wild reach every which way).
And those hearts in the garden again, their red
and their white bleed so meticulously
minting sorrow—classic, ridiculous, too many—
one might think them fake, stamped out in some factory
an ocean away, two continents. A good third of
the workers underage, trying so hard.
That Thing
I have a lot of rue in me.
A bicycle tire to fix.
World peace to attend to.
Bones in the x-ray not lighting up right.
I have an ear
for that scratching in the wall that
keeps one awake in the short run,
like: whether to tell you
that thing or not.
That thing. So many names for it but certain
categories in the subset of
small and dark include
all the better to see you with, my dear, said the wolf
in that bonnet swiped from
the grandmother he ate. Try to figure a logic there
if you come into the story midway. Which
is every human’s condition.
Case in point: my family’s ridiculous habit,
showing up to movies halfway through. Then sitting
the same mileage into the next run—
theaters couldn’t care less, all day if you wanted—
until scenes got familiar, a runaway train, a kitchen knife
redropped. Until my mother, reduced
to a whisper: this is where we came in meant
finish your popcorn, we’re going.
If I told you
the screw-up, the backstory
of that thing I should
tell you… Ugh. Such earnestness in the world
is exhausting. Consider the local Y, full up
with the breathless on machines,
persistent perfect shapes-to-be while
the youngest among us sit poolside, stunned
to a rivet by a crushing coach.
Look at my nose! shouts the bellowed monster of the shallows.
Their little heads turn.
To sleep is to dream all the way. But too much
of that thing went on today.
I lower my head to the pillow for my brain
to be washed all night—
Because you said
that happens, that’s the drill. Whatever fluids
I had no part in making
run ragtag and rivered over my
bleak-in-there, for hours.
A Rescue
The whale might, she might vaguely recognize
human cries of those drowning
as some distant tribe of fin
and blowhole. And the damaged
submarine, her cousin once twice
three times removed, huge and gray
in the blood-let Atlantic’s notorious
cold beyond cold lined at bottom with
outrageous fish whose photos in a glossy
seasick book could wide-eye you
to some moon creature,
their razors on stalks bright-blinking
right off their heads to terrify or protect.
So the great species of the planet
unite underwater where we earth-stuck
oxygen eaters rarely look or think to look.
And on hearing those cries—
Wait, doesn’t the whale have a massive
mammal heart, a child could
run through it. That sound, such a flood
to the brain. (Brain curious as a calf in spring
folded up, tangled, still wet
from the going.) Do something! billows
and bells through the hopeless
slate-blue. The whale’s identical first
cell of us too in that watery void before
we turned sea creature here,
land breather there, damned the same to
archangel