just pulled itself out of its own hat and I know a better poem
when I hear one: wind and crows, wind and crows, wind and robins
and the silences between them and crows.
For the sad Wallendas
If the sky set out to be beautiful
we’d turn away or throw our shoes at it
or call it pretentious as we went to sleep,
none of which has happened on my watch
except the second and those were flip-flops
and it wasn’t the sky I was trying to hit
but whatever makes a friend stick a needle in his arm
as if sewing the rip in his blood closed. When he died
the logical response was duh, the emotional response
was louder, more smashy/breaky
and I see this in people all the time
when I’m looking in the mirror, out the window,
at a park, a car, to the end of Canned Goods
where a woman cries in the direction of a can of peas
and I almost touch her shoulder as I pass, with my hand
and also a deer, the spirit of leaping, then I’m off
to peaches and barely hanging on
to the trapeze of the day, you say falling
I say when, you say net
I say the great ones
go without, as well as the plain ones, the stones,
the feathers, the torches, and everyone in between
The feast
I’m hungry. Nothing I’ve put in my body
has changed this. I ripped Genesis from a bible
and devoured it, thinking I’d feel filled
and whole and walk up to deer and stars,
rest my forehead against theirs and telepathically
talk to them as equals, but they all ran away,
deer majestically and stars at a speed
I can’t begin to comprehend. Do you worry
we’ve offended stars and they’re abandoning us?
I do. And you. So on behalf of my anxieties,
I say sorry now on principle to you
and any trees or otters or planets
I have harmed, and look forward to the earth
turning me into sustenance. An aria comes to mind:
A poor woman must feed her dead husband
to their starving children. She’s convinced
she’ll go to Hell whether she does or doesn’t.
The question she ponders in the aria:
Is the dilemma itself Hell
and has she been there her whole life?
It’s an Italian opera so the cruelty
of poverty has a natural poetry to it.
They’re almost the same words—poverty and poetry—
as are dagger and danger, mangle and manage,
lover and lever, inspiration and kazoo.
When her dead husband sings back to her,
he praises her skill as a cook and suggests
the loving ways she might prepare him
to give life, as she gave life so long ago.
I don’t cry as much as I used to
and wonder if standing in the rain
would replenish what I seem unable to give,
visible proof that I long to be absorbed
but recognize that I can’t be.
The life of the rough night
I found her in the morning cutting hair from her head
to burn or banish on the river,
a practice run at mourning. Why wait?
She’d risen from bed
to think about the dead getting closer to her parents
by the day, to not sleep
a little differently on the couch from how she’d turned
like a lathe on her side
of dreaming. She’d taken a crowbar to the dark, her eyes red
from trying to break inside
what has no end or center or beginning, while all night
crickets taunted,
Nothing changes. If you want to be reborn, die;
if you want to love,
hurry up: what’s a year, a decade, a life to water: a person’s
a sheaf of rain
in a thirsty world. Rain rain don’t go away: there is
no other day.
Prepare for takeoff
We were poor.
My Mr. Potato Head was a potato.
My pony was half a red crayon that drew all of a red pony.
I rode my red crayon pony with my eyes closed.
Mr. Potato Head died slowly of mold.
The
