Intermission
The night sky opens
the desert's blanket
of blossoming stars. Saturn
wheels right, dips
into one of the blooms.
I’ve come here
in the middle of something.
Far off, the wind works
at loosening someone’s step.
I need to go back soon
to what I was doing,
but they are falling around me,
the stars, errant needles
falling, and the sky is weightless
where the streak was.
I think tonight I will know
what it all adds up to
and these points of light
falling into my hands
are a clue, the lost sound,
the path.
Will you come with me?
Contents
Night Song
​
Tonight, we can compare the moon
to my wife’s deerskin drum.
She made it from a selection
of pale white skins and added
feathers wrapped with sinew
to the side, also a beater
with a padded leather head
and painted handle. Sometimes
she plays it for me
and sings, but mostly it sits
on top of our bookcase, leaning
against our adobe brown wall
without rolling off. Across its face
are small dark flecks like tracks
in snow and in the silence
you can hear them making their way
through the winter forest, deer
between the trees, following
the river of moonlight.
Another You
​
It’s time to get inside the boat
of yourself, dip the paddle
in the black water, gently, if
need be, but leave
you must. I know
you don’t know
how to do it or where
you are going
but that’s the essence
of leaving the knowing
of thinking to become
a listening, a hearing,
as in, I hear that second
turning into the meadow
of a moment, that tree
reaching to become
a nest, the stones all talking
about your decision and how
you need to let go and let the owl
bring you shards of moonlight,
small chips captured in the drops
that fall from your paddle
as you learn to recognize
the sound a heart makes,
how you can hear it
calling through a vein
of ore, through the bones
of trees, out on the road
in the chest of a stranger.
Below the Divide, Colorado
​
The rounded river stones
are stacked twenty high,
lifting their cradled silence
to the cabin's peak. The fire
invites our gaze and soothes
our lostness. Nearby,
the mountain moves
imperceptibly to the left,
introducing a new distinction
in patience. At dusk,
the sun disappears behind
the range, changing
the sky a rusty agate before turning
jet black.
Through the night, the river
repeats the pebble's puns,
leaf phonemes, ice weaving
tales through its palm. When
morning comes, the valley
will fill first in the west,
light traveling up river
in rotation around an
imaginary point
above the ridge—a hawk
might be there, or a cloud,
or nothing.
Fire Season Footage
“There is no set beginning or end to the fire season.”
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection
It’s early in the season, but news from the California valley
has the count already high, seventeen homes gone
by sunrise, tonight we watch the footage, the fire
taking the ridge, the last house, a beautiful 5 bedroom 3 bath, once
underwater, now embraced in the flames (I tell my wife,
I think we drove through that area years ago), the fire
creating its own wind, smoke and embers
whisked up into a shadowy sky.
After we’ve been sold our dream car with nothing
down for 60 months, in which time
everything will be worth less and cost more,
and eight other things, one that will let me
control my bladder, another
fix my ED, we come back to the international
segment, sure to stoke orange to red, jihad
faces in the streets, the backs and shoulders
of soldiers, weapons firing, long cannon barrels pointing a hypotenuse
across a blue desert sky, the red blast, then white trail
ascending, corkscrewing the modern
to the ancient. Back on the Hill,
some inadequate regulations are twisting through
the House, while senators ready their mallets and stakes
even before the sirens of talk radio begin their spin.
It’s late April, but here in Chicago there’s still a nip,
so I go to put another log on not seeing the irony,
a piece of oak, which burns hot and slow, the horizontal bars
of our metal grate having long ago knelt
to the hearth stone, the oak making its reassuring clunk
as the remaining burnt logs
give way. A commercial prepares us
for the movie at nine, a rerun of brilliant escapes
I’ll never make, out of buildings, breaking through windows
with a flowering splash of glass, girl
in my arms, about this time I start my story
of how today in our patch of garden I watched an ant in his single-minded
exactness lift a shred of beetle up and over a thick blade of crabgrass,
his tripartite self turning this way and that, leveraging every angle
as the bit of carcass kept catching, the entire time a tiny red mite
has tucked himself in on the green awning’s underside, and then out of nowhere,
a daddy-longlegs stilts through the scene, its body a planet
held in the orbit of its legs, each unaware of the other and none
the shovel blade I am about to plant with my boot, I’m saying to my wife, it’s all just like this,
only we know too much to enjoy it or maybe
not enough or perhaps just the wrong things, and I flash on the underground
exhibit at the Field which miniaturizes you
as you walk down the corridor to meet a five foot
nematode and a two foot larva, its jaws,
yes, it has jaws, mauling a root end, and how my Sufi teacher said
that contradictions are not to be understood as an either or
but rather a both and, otherwise you are led only to violence and loss.
My wife listens to me tenderly, which is one of the reasons that I love her,
and reminds me its her bedtime (she’s sensible too), so before I become
all too clever, she heads for bed (are you coming with me?)—
when I get to bed, we look into each other’s eyes
to see if we still know each other, mostly
we do, and we both laugh when the bed’s pine cross-struts
start to squeak. In the morning, it’s off to work down
the condo’s back steps, paint alligatored, the developer long gone, we take care
to step around the condoms spotting the stairwell.
Thanksgiving in Mesopotamia
​
Beyond my sliding glass door,
a snail carries his spiral house
across the wet lawn toward
my garden. Overhead,
a jet pierces the light-refracted
mist. In Baghdad, dawn
is breaking and chunks
of shattered concrete
cling to bent rebar—
the shadows resemble
dismembered limbs,
someone is crouched
heating drinking water
behind a freestanding
wall. This is as far
as I can go as
commercials tell me
Thanksgiving is just around
the corner and the turkeys
are going fast, up next
college ball, unrated teams
knocking off undefeated
national leaders—never before
have there been so many
upsets. Furthermore,
I’m working hard
trying to imagine
a snail’s soft underbelly
as he trails over what must be
prickly terrain on his way
to my cucumbers,
planning on
wreaking havoc.
Breakfast
outside civilization
eats itself
down to the bone
which is you M - F 9 to
5 your weekend wi-fied
the air become walls of
numbers that describe
your next vacation 2 weeks
out of the year for which
you will need to get
permission
a simulacrum
of a life and you load it
into your Dodge
Durango you’re driving
because what else
can you do the sun
keeps coming up you’re
out the door blue
tooth fixed
to your
ear burnt
toast in your
hand
Glass
I almost stepped on it, grey and still,
the anonymous pigeon blending
into the concrete sidewalk that weaves
past my shrubs having apparently blasted itself
against a too-clean window.
I’m to blame—fingerprints, dirt-edged
rain splats, webs and captured carcasses,
the small clouds of cocoons
that were tucked in the corners,
all cleared out, all wiped clean,
both sides impeccable. Proud of my job,
I looked out the brilliantly invisible
glass to a shimmering day, trees
bursting with afternoon sun, sharp shadows
etched across my neighbor’s white siding.
And now, the window spotless still except for a smudge
made of what is carried on wings and chest
of a bird, a melange of dust, preen oils, vestiges
of parasites. Here, an actual moist drop—
fluid from its mouth?—no doubt microscopic organisms
somersaulting about in it.
I had come with my sudsy orange
bucket. It had been months and even
I had to admit they needed it.
And I enjoyed it, the simplicity of the act,
the way you could work systematically, see
your progress, satisfaction
in taking care of something you own,
getting every inch of it crystal clear.
Which had me marveling again
at glass, how it is utterly transparent
yet solid, bits of silica so self-effacing
as to become nothing, all while spanning
a six foot opening, making me a window
through which to see indescribable
beauty, something I live with every day
but still don’t understand.