wants to say
throw it into the air
behind you
from these winter blossoms
our city will know
something better has to be
dreamed up
go along now
there is another waiting
behind you
clutching his coat
in all this
cold swirling data
dreaming something too
Suspension
Playground with interlocking tunnels. Willows worry
their reflections in the frog pond. Little gods throw spheres,
miss as often as they catch. Coins flicker in the fountain bed,
worth exactly the feeling of wishing. Leaves in circulation.
Runners in circulation. A young girl in the shade scratches
at a scratch-and-win. Grown men with dream journals in their
back pockets wander among the birch trees. Dolphin on a spring.
Rabbit on a spring. Swings used in inventive ways. Sweethearts.
A tall woman walks an oracular greyhound. A beetle-child
hums his way home from his cello lesson. Some bright flapping
memory is caught in a tree and is also an actual thing: a kite.
What happens in real life is absorbed into dream journals.
Flocks of young soccer players aligning, dispersing. A small
god pops an empty juice box under his sneaker. Another
laughs and shouts, Angel! Angel! as his dog pulls him
by the leash through a flowerbed. Frisbee-sliced air.
Pale moon on a string. A maple drops a leaf into your hair
to get your attention. Okay, sweetheart, you’ve got it.
Then more leaves drift down toward the earth.
Blackout
The storm gathers, stirs a tree, breaks
a branch, takes out a cable, cuts the power,
quiets our fridge, watches us through the window
where we sit to eat ice cream in the dark.
You strike a match, cup the flame,
touch it to the candle’s wick.
The city is already motioning to repair
but we can’t hear it for the trees. We hope
it will take its time. Who will sit
at the piano tonight? The child
given relief from her homework. A relief
for the moment. The storm
raining its applause on the roof.
Thirteen Summers for Timothy Treadwell
after the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man
Out in Grizzly country, Timothy Treadwell films
a bumblebee sitting motionless on a stalk of fireweed,
believes the bee has expired with its head inside a flower,
its legs heavy with pollen. It’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s tragic,
he says in a breathless small-town-movie-theatre-cashier voice.
He steadies the camera on the fireweed, thinks
about that line in a song: Lord let me die
with a hammer in my hand.
I love that bee, he says.
The tapes contain hours of footage. There he is
resting his hand on some warm bear scat.
It came from inside her, he says. It was just inside her.
There he is screaming for rain during a drought,
when the salmon aren’t running and the bears
are eating their own children.
Timothy films himself
holding a bear cub’s skull.
Lord let me die
with my head inside a flower.
He looks into the holes where the cub’s eyes would be.
Looks away much too soon.
When the bee moves Tim realizes
it was just sleeping. Days later, a bear paws honey
from Tim’s chest. He is moaning, his girlfriend
screaming. The camera covers its eyes.
Love disperses like light
across the Alaskan wilderness.
You Were Depressed. There Were More Birds.
You were depressed. There were more birds
in the yard.
Rising from the chair was difficult. The yard
was overgrown.
The lawnmower was in the shed. The weeds
were flowering.
You couldn’t get to the lawnmower. The grass
was as tall as your shoulders.
You were unable to summon the strength. The yard
was audible with insects.
You touched the windowpane’s glass. The outside world
thrummed with hidden creatures.
You
