The anniversary of some future sadness passes every day unnoticed.The calendars bear no trace of it; the candles stay in their box. Inevery house, there’s a dead mouse in the wall that the living micebuild their nest beside. Meanwhile, it’s the usual programs aimed atthe sagging couch.
The time will come—meanwhile you’ll add more ashes,that dirt in your hand. Goodbye, goodbye,you’ll learn to say it. What you want isdirt on the coffin, ashes in the grave.Not a glimpse, year after year, of someone on the street,turning a corner before I can seethat red plaid shirt, torn sleeve. Tender 26,bad number, risky year…
Did I know him? Yes his speed(did I tell on him, turn him in?)fell out of his pocket climbing upmy two-story steps—hmmm,what is this? crystal-like, kitcheny,condiment no wonder he talkedso fast, eyes switching back & forth,if I sat at his feet with some slownarrative. He was a chef—an excuse. Did I go to the porn…
Could you love God in a world without death? Teacher asked. And we children shouted, a bristling forest of raised yearning arms.Yes! No! Depends! We didn’t know the answer, or even the question, just wanted to beadmired for alacrity, vehemence prompted by authority. Some of ustook the opportunity to punch our neighbors, or, in our…
There’s a radio station at the left end of the dialwhere you can listen to 24 hours of genocide and war crimes;how in the south the election was bought cheap by men in unmarked uniforms;how the contaminated medicine was shipped abroaduntil babies started being born with deformed spines. —And then the big conspiracies: how the…
“There is a high risk of losses of lambs and sheep exposed to these conditions.”—Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia “Cold pastoral!”—Keats I have done two drawings: one of sheepwith lambs on a hillside near the old colonialmansion between here and town, and anotherof sheep dying with their dying lambson the same hillside in bad weather….
Summer is entered through screen doors,and therefore seems unclearat first sight, when it is in facta mesh of fine wiressuspended panewisewhose haze has confused the eyes… What if we never entered then—what if the days remained like this,a hesitation at the threshold of itself,expectant, tense, tensileas lines that crisscross each otherin a space forever latentwhere…
I was as true as the numbers it takesto make a fever, and even if Julywas a slow-burning ship, I could stillfind comfort in the scattered spectrumof wind chimes and sun catchers. But now the skyline lies in hangdogsilence. Winter is a heavy opal claspedaround my neck, and the city skulkssilver-haired and ornery, and oh—…
Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into themorning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, Mother Teresa. Burnt bagel,Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’sfailures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makeshim run a stop sign bang in front of a cop….
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