Intro. to Lit. Theory, MWF 9:40-10:40, Fall '05

Your old hooded sweatshirt smells the same
but the machinery feels foreign, out of touch
like these sports cars in the snow.
But we never knew how to handle one another
did we? Picturing future goodbyes over coffee and beer
was always my weak suit. Good thing you preferred denim,
falling through the seasons with the singular style and stony eyes
of a modern greek god. Statuary posturing to prove yourself
vulnerably invincible in your world of words and silence.
But these days I can't tell if it was different
before the early April afternoon when,
bathing in bright sky like daytime stars,
we slipped up,
and the rocks by the river
tore through your tough blue
to bleed black and white
'to Seurat's afternoon.

what happened after the storm?

the living room windows are breathing in sunlight
and you will be coming,
like horses thundering down the valley,
with feathers of summer rain on your skin
you are shivering with life.
the trees on your street were steely and skeletal
their power dormant but doubtless
like you. come with me to river's edge;
see the perfect movement over rocks?
see the endless source?
feel the warm brown mud between your toes.
hear yourself: "this is, indeed, comfort."
it is the lock and the key
it is the threshold and the leap
it is time.

Day In, Day Out

I skim sun off the tops of buildings at 6 a.m.
to stick it in my jeans' fifth pocket on the right hip
where we used to keep soda tabs, when we were kids,
for luck. So while they fashion new and terrible instruments
to help deaden the pain and excise capital from the afflicted
I try not to listen, pretending my filing cabinets are benign,
running a forefinger over the smooth distinction and clarity
that's pressed to my denim hip, a reminder that the tedium
will wash over me in rolling waves of paper and platitudes,
and if the grinding surf finally bowls me over
and I am scattered on the rocks for seagulls
I still have the sun.

Turning

We sure try, but we're running out of metaphors for becoming winter.
Jack says it is watching yourself fall from a great height,
but Susan is so sure that sometime in November
we all start skating along a mobius strip of ice.
Kristin reminds us that it's also a giant spruce tree
holding us in its branches like so many drifts of snow.
But here in the north, the crystal lattice of Decembers
only remind me of my father with snow in his mustache,
the way his breath hung before him,
and how he told us that the importance is in the icicles,
their perfectly singular descents
like the cold fragile distance of our lives.

Last Year

I put on sadness like a shroud;
just like Charlie Brown in late October.
Much more solemnity than that.
'Cause after the party it sticks to my skin
to fade like a scar.
And I've been walking down December sidewalks
since spring, watching imagined futures run away
like leashless dogs into streetlight.
Sometimes I reign the dreams in
to hide in my throat, behind my eyelids
like love. Or set them out on display,
flies on a windowsill who sputter and stop—
final breaths too subtle to see.
And that's why it took me three hours
of back and forth underneath slate skies
to notice the gold-auburn leaves.
Standing outside like a monk before a temple,
in a t-shirt with the autumn breeze of soft pins and needles
I could see myself again.

our things

under the torrent of her twenties
and three fifths of phillips
i'm watching her erode.
moving but not, shouting her silence
in a room of former friends.
the air is like a stone,
out of which she carves a temple
to life without regrets,
white rock sanctum
to hide from something she might remember
or maybe never knew.
but i'm just a sidewalk witness to the crash
too far to shout stop,
too close to ever forget.

Time was

Your sweater was a sprightly light magenta
and we didn't care who heard.
Sun stained south windows
like ichor in the spring
two thousand years too late.

We didn't notice.
We were waiting
happily, for the stream of life
to usher us like feckless salmon
to the rocks.

And two months later
the sky was so blue
it felt like our last forever.
We were lying in the tall grass,
wildflowers too close to focus,
when the wind whispered one,
soft syllable of separation.


You danced away
on autumn air

like a paper doll.

September 28, 2009

Today the world convinced me
that fall will fade to winter
once again, that we'll all close up
and harden with the frost,
all the shoulders in the North
tight in expectant acceptance,
bracing for the impact
that devastates us
in slow motion.

But the cold air on my face
only evokes the furnace inside,
and your body is breathing like spring.

Hot To Tell When The World's Ending

All of a sudden everyone on Earth
will forget how to bake cookies.
The Wal-Mart greeters will always be genuine,
that the chicken came first will be decided by committee,
and the new World Government will build golden idols
to Reason, for which Rousseau will write a posthumous letter
on liberty, pissing off Mill and Burke alike.
Sesame Street will be canceled,
the PTA disbanded,
and garlic will be wiped out worldwide by a rare mite
(riots, led by gourmands and Listerine stockholders alike, will ensue).
Will Shortz's bagel will slip from his grasp
as he stares in horror on a Sunday morning,
realizing that he's unintentionally crossed
falconer with gyre.
English will devolve into a series of guttural
literary references, script in txt msg shorthand,
French will devolve into English,
Spanish into a series of suggestive winks and nods.
Some asshole astronomer with no sense of boundaries
will name a new planet Krypton,
and Jim Lehrer will swear on air about how
"collateral damage" has come to suffice
for the cessation of souls.

maybe we gotta try

like summers'
sudden fade
to fall
you disappeared.

but i didn't treat you
as though you stood among those seldom september days
that crack the hardening sky
to touch the sun.

the handful of waning hours
that we hold to our chest
with bated breath
like a secret.