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

poem a sometimes, i guess

I HAVE CONFLICTING FEELINGS ON THE SUBJ.

Sleep, after all, is a kleptomaniac

who steals moments and hours,

hoarding them until the time is right--

when it can appear from behind the couch

shouting SURPRISE, and saying that after all

this time, it has learned the lesson:

a life is for all cycles of the sun and moon. But

every time the room is empty, the last light

turned on with a timer to make-believe

someone is home to ward off the burglars, the

ne'er-do-wells, and you

who will never return

have gone. Or else, less often,

you and sleep sit across from each other,

the bags under your eyes darkening

as you look at the opened present on your lap

realizing that you had asked too rashly,

that you never really wanted this. Wondering

how long it has been since you both ran out

of things to say and

when you get

to open that other, really big present.

poem a man i should be sleeping

THERE IS NO WORD IN ENGLISH

And at the end I have only one

word that my life has com-

pressed between its slight layers so

it shines now pearlescent now

muffled like the last word

in a phrase bit back (i

t would have shed some fresh light

in the dark corners, where the

lamplighter of our conversation never tread) but

I have never been to Portugal and

time tips ever onward so I can say only

saudade, softly, saudade--

feeling nothing so sharp but longing and

let it be my last word, that I love you,

that you are lost.

poem a harglefagofh

PACKING A BOOK BOUND FOR POCATELLO

Packing a book bound for Pocatello;
it's been years since I was there. When,
after eighteen hours on the road, I
found the cheapest motel in its winding
avenues, passing a group of kids playing
baseball in the park at 10 pm, all their parents
watching from the stands while a block over
the pink neon outline of a woman flashes
flashes. And I slept on top of the covers,
waiting to fall alseep, half-watching a show
where a cougar dances among a throng of
younger men, her legs flash like headlights
coming through the narrow crack of the blinds,
and their faces animal-hungry for the chance
to return, to be back next week.
I was on my back,
wondering if my car was safe.

poem a day or so

THE WORLD'S SMALLEST MAN

The world’s smallest man has a face like Don Knotts--

all big teeth and bulging eyes, a weak chin and

the kind of cheeks children draw on animals –

his neck looks impossibly long beneath such a face,

his arms too seem long, but they must be to do what his height cannot.

His skin everywhere looks tight, knuckles showing their joints

like each one is a ring he wears and cannot remove; yes, I am

small now, it says, but I remember what it was to be smaller,

smaller than I am now,

smaller than I may ever be again.

poem an almost twice today

GOD! GOOD!

Each of us carrying off the other

like a thief in the belly of the night

and in the morning we find the thing

we stole and had stolen was the same

so like mirrors reflecting themselves

we grow darker as each reflection compounds

and by stealing we have made the thing

more solid still.

Perhaps alone we may have called it

into being but only together could

such a thing survive.

poem a today

MOOREEFFOC

Dickens called it mooreeffoc,
when the mask of the world slips
and its true face is glimpsed between
those frantic, fluttering fingers, and
we have all struggled in reflections;
so what is the word for calling true
that which cannot be? for seeing mooreeffoc
and saying coffee room?

poem a whenever #something

TWO POEMS

I have two poems
And neither is wholly mine
Because I carried away lines
And phrases whole from you.
God, god, they were good—
Which is why I had to have them.
The annals of things
Which I have forgotten are already
Too full to add these few more; so
I have two poems

poem?

Does each choice branch away
from the bough of the one I made
so that by squinting into the distance
can I see, just over there and
faintly, the shadowy, bright, brilliance
of the life my life could be?

poem a sometimes

ON WATCHING A VIDEO OF A RUSSIAN WOMAN SMASHING BOTTLES IN A STORE

Oh, ceaseless fury,
slipping along your lake of spirits
and wine, your feet are pocked
by broken glass your hands rain down.
What systems created you?
Whose high pressure pressed up
your low? And upon which shore
will you land, vapor-drunk,
buffeting against
the mountains until
you disperse, are dispersed,
and wail no more?

poem an occasionally

and, god, how
she dances. once she
said it was the spirit,
and now, in the wind,
you can almost see hands
saying dance in the way she moves her wrists,
how her knee knows to bend.

and you hate the world for conspiring against her;
that, once at rest,
the spirit leaves.

poem an occasionally

THE ISLE OF THE DEAD

In China, Shanghai, they call it the isle of the dead.
Not that it ever was surrounded by the gentle rubbing of water, but
it is an island now, an isle, and the lights
from the city around work
hard all day and the not-quite-dark
at eroding it until
finally

there is only one building
on a graveyard of thousands: easier
to topple just one.

And no one here ever speaks of ghosts--
They have all left to the city's bright heaven.

sadaspojf

EACH PASSING MOMENT

now now you locks shining
in the sun framing each shining
star and the pearls of your laugh shining
in the cold new day all the air shining
each time before along the necklace shining
in almost the same way but now shining
darker or lighter but still
and now now you
in
and
always

poem a blahdyblah

_____________
the word tumbling syllables down
to bounce across your ear drum
you turning and there has only ever been
one word between us
how quoting you spoke phrases
which were like but not
what you were looking for like
oh but they were close and
into a more violent sea and
in remembering your face is so beautiful
and if i could have a word for it
i would speak that word forever

poem a sometimes #something something

ON SEEING A PICTURE OF A MUSHROOM CLOUD, AFTER THE INITIAL BLAST

How the head of it just
floats away, only tendrils
of radiation, smoke, connect
it to the base unfurling like my
neighbor's flag on Memorial Day
snapping in the wind.

These are the things we cannot escape.
The blast, just another
choice made in an unspooling,
knotted sting. The space between
before and after is so thin

the men in the bunker just outside the blast
barely have time
to hold their breath
but already their chests are tight--

already they have forgotten how to breathe.

poem a day #something something

and from the way she
holds her foot when
her legs are crossed (how
the line from her leg to her toe is one
long, straight stroke) you
wonder if she is a
dancer,
if she has danced.

poem a day #...14? 13?

COAL

Oh. My black-bodied, boastful bundle
you have returned again, bringing once again
a body, a barely-bloodied bunch
and declaring in the tongue I
will never understand that you have killed it,
that you have brought it, and
that because you caught it and carried it
it is mine. It is mine.

poem a day #12

HAND, fig. 1

Detached, it is a seamonster's skeleton,
a mess of bones pushed together
by some well-meaning Victorian
who kept piling them in there just
because they seemed to fit. Ah,
but how it would move.
One, arthritic, is called
a different species, a herbivore,
its bulbous joints made it slow.