What It’s About
From every roof screech boat-tailed grackles
So much fuss over a blue sky
Though no flowers grow here
The light snags on windows
Broken among the burnished rock
If it is like painting after all
I want to be able to linger not just look:
Synonymous worlds growing smaller,
Sidewalk chalk stars
On the neighbor’s door like a thumb
And then the sun comes in again somehow
I didn’t know there could be more of it
Winged reminders pushing air around,
Rainbowed fragments going
Toward the past’s diamond future
(There was a horsefly in the lemon sherbet
That was why I left the parlor.)
Now through my eye I am looking
Bright fountain bright aperture
Bright fear—
More the memory than the desire
For burnt citrus tongue
Truthfully, I ought to leave those stories behind
The voice showing me how
To talk to God instructs:
It will be a better painting
If I can’t say what it’s about
Older than light and therefore irrelevant,
A girl-child makes her way out from
Oceanic carpet to join me on this wooden bench
When she opens her mouth
And there it is birdsong
The Lathe of Heaven
Every morning the sea paints itself on from utter blankness
History is a beautiful thing
Many winged and missing bits on all sides
Difficult though it is to imagine that which we have not yet seen
Even the butterflies have shadows
Regardless of whether we notice the bend in the light
Some say the first place which was ours
May be lost to us forever
A grasshopper crosses the street by praying
To go is to return
And the path of least resistance will not involve
Climbing through sky lights
From the plane I saw God’s fingers spark
He’s just swinging on that tire swing, pointing up
At the moon
So that there is a blue dot which is both
A father’s hand and a child’s dress
Someone ought to tell us we’re looking too closely
A Different Dial
But anyway getting back to Transcendentalism
That good stuff from Germany
And self-reliance even for girls
It ought to be said is a big kind of deal or was
Like the dripping of sand in an hour glass
Stepping into a new age with Antigone in a single continuum
Why grow old, old maids?
A double bind
Like a muddy dove
Why yes there is something about the soul, intrinsic
And some churches considered actually fallen babies to be snow
And you because of your own role-models
If you wish to create something new
Then you have to do it in the new way
You the reader right now as I’m talking to you
Save for patience, trust, that lot
No one impossibly holding a wholly useful philosophy
Or put another way
Even Thoreau goes home to live with his folks
It’s not a refutation just a path beginning to open
You don’t like the way they’re handling miracles?
Well suppose that comet was merely a chunk of igneous rock
Thus no longer burning
My vivacious friend
Come out to the porch to look upon such dwindling light
Beneath the Sun
There comes a time when the canyon can no longer bear the ice.
Fast the weight plummets.
Cold air rushing itself taut.
Fragments turn to tin, to bells.
Rather than stature, echoes are better used to measure distance from God.
Any height is one from which to fall.
Small, perhaps, but no confession ought be inconsequential.
As how spring comes; a lesson in increments.
Yes, I whisper my evening prayers, at other times forget altogether.
My mother is only a woman.
My Guardian Angel, more than patient.
From the crying room I watched a life cohere around me.
Blinking once, I saw the glassy sheet calve from resting place.
I blinked again and missed the impact.
Above me, there are children moving wheels across the floor which is my firmament.
Thank you medicine cabinet. Thank you spare key. Thank you water pressure.
