poem a today

OF THE FARM

Clouds ambling in the sky above my father,
whose back, dark with sweat, hovers over
the field like a period, far from the road where
my mother and I, kicking up slow, lazy dust
clouds of our own, drive back from church.

The sun on my face is a baptism, the mint melting
to nothing in my mouth, a communion.
The mechanical cacophony of the riding mower,
only a hum in the distance: some hymn
whose words have been long forgotten.

poem a sometimes

WALKING IN WINTER

The clouds all swollen with snow
and leaf-smoke in the air,

Firelight through the trees
like candles in a vigil,

The darkness covering us gone
heavy with things unsaid,

But each breath hovers, drifts,
like some minor cloud, and

There is no sound so rich
as your voice saying my name.

A MEETING

I have, of course, gone over it all before:

not the time of day or the place, even, but

the movement toward each other, and

the general shape of my hair, the positioning

of my arms, out (I suppose) or on their way out.

I do not dare pose you. So, in the going-overs, you

are the unmapped continent, the endpoint, my

destination. And your voice says my only my name,

endlessly.

And if I could take back my lie, I would say

that the time of day is during the cool sigh of morning,

the last week of summer, and the place is unfamiliar

to both of us, but chosen. Or, perhaps, in twilight,

by half-chance, at autumn's easy peak.

You saying my name and me saying yours,

tumbling together, tired (always, we are tired),

concerned then less about the where and the when;

the who, in every instance, is answered:

you, you, you.

Oh, the sudden hollow silence--
no electricity. The white-noise of the fans
gone. The lights gone dark and gone. I
awoke in a playhouse, where all things,
upon inspection fail: taking up space, they
do not perform. Useless,

I moved between the walls of this place,
half-drunk with sleep; flipping fuses with
dumb faith, I was shocked
each time that the lights, the fridge, the stove,
did not obey my tiny, clicking command.

Two hours later and with a beep the walls
are shorn up again, my net of electricity
gratefully restored.

poem an occasionally

poem under revision

oops, nevermind. it didn't work.

morbid poem a day

SUNBURNS

Seven years, they say it takes,
for every cell in the body to be replaced.
I've often thought about the path it takes--
does it start on my feet, my fingers, my face?

Or is it more like tossing one hundred rocks
in one hundred lakes: the ripples working the locks,
laying another layer of sediment in all those rocks,
my face just the current face of my body's many clocks?

And when, sun-burned, dried and dead,
my arms, my neck, my face are shed,
could the ring of window-white around the red
tell me anything but one day you'll be dead?

poem sometimes?

THE DEATH OF AN AIRTRAFFIC CONTROLLER

Mulhouse, between Switzerland and

Germany, France; narrowing the focus,

say airport, then control tower, its tight-

knit network of offices, cubicles, paths

of least resistance erupting like a flower

whose stack of blooms is each another floor.

A corner office, maybe, or the one

across the hall from the one

he really wanted: its windows only

catch the light between noon and one

and the secretary attached to it always

reminded him

of the girl he loved in high school, in

the way she looked up with her lips

parted slightly and her hair all dark

and nearly brown but red, really, red.

Small consolation it may have been—

to see how effortlessly his blood

matched the color, to be reminded of her

as he bled out at eight in the morning,

the sunlight creeping in already,

lapping at his face.

no title poem, too tired for titles

poem under revision

poem poemy poem

THE THING ABOUT HOME

The thing about home is
that it has never
existed. The four walls you
hung your posters or post
cards or letters or whatever
on were only ever walls. In-
stead, it is a place cobbled from
the minor and the mundane:
the scuffmark beneath the window
from your shoe as you exited, the
one you scrubbed until it was light
but not gone, and the pockmarks
from pins and nails, and there
was the corner you faced every
night as you fell asleep, all
built on the floor from a different
house, with a door from a house
you can't remember--

only the light from beneath
as you lay in the dark. Home,
then, is the feeling. It's the gas
expanding to fill the space.

poem pome pmoe mpoe

Waking up in a rainstorm on
the Utah freeway is like waking up
a glass coffin: the water rushing
thick like dirt on the windshield, each
thwmp of the wipers another shovel-
ful heaped up until

there is no land deep enough
for such a grave unless I
am some mountain's seed
and in the sun I will bloom.

poem a this time

poem under revision