Where it is either still
Or hardly moving the water —black beside the light,
Appears to wait. Visitors keep it to
Themselves, knowing if there’s a story nearby,
And it’s told right, they won’t
Have to sacrifice the dearest part:
Simply, I came here to get away from my job.
And because it didn’t rain or charge a late fee
The gold at rainbow’s end.
Some people live their lives to stockpile:
They amass grain silos of ramen
And basements full of bullets—
They’re going to be ready for the invisible tide.
But they’re not: the grain rots in a column and the gun
Powder dampens beneath the hail of magazines
And sandwich crusts—lives are lived
Upon the dampened plans for surviving.
I thought about it recently when I couldn’t sleep:
Feathers in the pillow struck out from the inside, the
Harder I twisted it—the harder I tried to find
Comfort
The better they poked me in the eye.
It’s as if they were telling me something in death the goose couldn’t say while she
Was alive.
I’m adjusting to minimum wage,
Green, but cold, gloves, scarf.
And bare feet—there is
No big mystery, Four-Eyes.
The cardinals flip as they
Climb an invasive vine,
Grazing on the stuff in the high neck
Of a tree.
It is as if, this evening, the dead are rising
From their graves, blood first.
The C is a moon.
And of course the O is always a moon.
But the S is one, too—
See the smoke of laughter
Climb that starry staircase, and
Fill in all those cosmic rooms with bent
Walls and blue windows...
This is where a dreamer’s letters all get answered.
And the canceled stamp has a rocket
Lodged in its lemony eye.
You get two chances every day, and
A lot of time to think about it.
The sun encourages work
The moon does nothing.
But, I dreamed about you: You were piling
Greens and olives in my arms. I was stubborn
But I didn’t say no, exactly.
People endure awful things just to learn the color of
Their own shameless moon.
As a person without faith
It bothers me to think
Of the Wonders of the World, and realize
There was a time when earthly wonder wasn’t enough.
People must have needed something more mystical
Less mentally accessible—
Like a memory following brain surgery
Or the funeral of someone important but not
Close.
They needed a blur to augment the incomprehensibility
Of enjoyment, an anti-science to assist in
Disbelief.
It is spring and a banal gang of four winds
Crashes the morning
And takes over the windows.
They have the logistics of a cluttered play
Whose stage hands fell in love with the sets and couldn’t
Bring themselves to strike them.
They looked at the scene and put up with
What it said about them:
However much of this spring moon—
However much—
Yes—
It begins hot in center, hotter still along the warped edge.
But that part that runs over, toppling the cool toppled
Horizon
Is unimaginable.
The fate and the fate near fate
Collide.
An ambulance parts the way and people
Heave their helpful bits.
The sun glistens in all the blue particles between the shell
That protects us, and our ungrateful senses.
The fate and the fate bear fate approach one another
As though time might mellow their differences;
These dummies are gluing their own skulls back together
Just trying to think.
