I'm back to writing a poem every day, whether they stink or not.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Meditating at My House Near the University

Some mornings I sit on my porch and do nothing
but drink coffee and listen to squirrels chirp,
car brakes squeak, and bulldozers shatter a house.

But I can meditate back into that morning-porch body
in the middle of the day if I listen to my breath
until the greasy machines rattle to a halt.

You know the machines: one practices cleaning the house,
one makes invisible money, one makes love.
One machine splinters a warping wooden porch.

Now the bare ground of my body has a tremor
of caffeine underneath and the engines send up
the last blossoms of smoke over the rubble.

The University is one big Buddha. It’s fattening
into the neighborhood. It’s meditating everything
down into parking lots under quiet lamps.

This Buddha awakens in my direction. It wants
its fields empty. It wants to wake up with the engines
cold and still, the wreckage gone, the squirrels chirping.
.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Poem

Sometimes a bird builds a nest
in the jaw of the letter “e.”

One could wield a cross like a dagger
and stab a man through the heart.

I caught my wedding ring on a box.
It planed the skin back and left a scar.

Every garbage truck is packed with symbols.
Metal, paper—--uninterpreted

I’m falling in love again.
All the small, solid objects are growing nervous.
.