Ingress #1

Don’t recite the unwritten histories of sediments
or instruct me in decoding the script of the moraines

until we’re deadlocked in rush hour and you can sing
the anthems of third shift to the syncopation of a train track.

We can lie out in smog and fog, drift through fluids wherever,
if we’ve heard the same one song that rocks the San Andreas

and determines the curvature of magnetic fields at the outskirts
of the visible sky, sailed across event horizons into the vortices

of gopher holes and storm drains and all creatures’ resonating tracheae.

UPDATE: The Hard Way

A poem I posted a few weeks ago is now available in Catapult, along with a companion (prose) piece, "Heavy Artillery." The rest of the issue is also read-worthy (as usual).

Let me know what you think.

Earth Song

O circulating cell,
wrapped with dust,

all rests upon a root,
life rushing beneath.

I press two feet to you,
soles in osmosis,

and my mouth shapes a seed.

If I rest against the trunk,
a gradual spine,

the bend of shade reaches
down, your hands over my eyes.

Then I see our horizon, swaddled
in skin and bloodstreams,

turning into turning.

*

[This is an old one that has, for some reason, stuck with me for some years. How do you weigh your own attachment to a poem against the more objective sense of its "worth" or "quality"? Writing for myself for so many years gets complicated when I imagine a public audience, even if only an unread blog.]

What Can You Do With It?

A poem can pop
like a turned-on vacuum.

It can wag a finger
like any old adult.

But most often it sits,
a slim shadow on its page.

Its fox-eyes follow fingers
to stalk, turn, scavenge, bite—

or just play along.

Nocturne in Computer Glow

Monitor, speak
of the world

in its breadth
and largess.

Repeat the codes,
the jpegs of old,

those pathways departing
from tongue

into broadcast
beyond broadcast.

The pixel mind
turns corners

in the dark
soirée of the soul,

and I who abide
in flesh, to hear

the risen tones
of blowing wind,

would unturn the keys
in their locks.

The Hard Way

I've never seen violence,
never had to raise my fists for anything but soccer,
though I can imagine—

more sweat than blood,
but the wound so opaque
with nothing to see in it.

What you don't know can devastate you,
translucent swords abroad
sharpened in your name.

I've never considered myself a violent person,
though I can imagine,
rising from my armchair in the cinema of war

to sample it, train in it,
conjure a dream to take this world
and become it, love it with pain.

Whose moment of comprehension precedes death,
besides the historians? Who knows the light
beyond blindness, except the blind?

Take, for example, any person you might know,
confidante or otherwise, and what can happen
provisionless on a long road.

What good then is a tincture of love
as gunfire flickers in the woods
like a campfire?

*

[My thanks to friends at the Litribune workshop for their thoughtful feedback]

Trash Haiku

Bottle caps scattered
down the cracked, salted sidewalk.
Rains wash these sharp, dark seeds.