Eclipse

Once, in high school, I saw an annular eclipse.
I saw it a thousand times on the ground
like raindrops, a thousand rings of fire
cast by lenses of arboreal light. Each
like a gold coin spilled out by a long-
vanquished god who hid his blessings
in a scrambled clockwork of sun, moon,
earth, and sky to unwind long into ages
where all of his stories have unraveled
and taken other names, other nations.

I showed my friends the rings and each of us
took just what would fit in two open hands.

Watercolors

The row of watercolor cells reminds me
of the portholes in the side of an iron ship.
A couple must be making love in the first one,
and someone's playing a cello in the second.
Even from this far away, I can see the fight
happening in the orange window. The black
cell is almost empty. There's an oval of white
in its middle where the soul is escaping.
Maybe it was the first room to fill
with water on this sinking ship, the brush
having finally worn the hull through.

You and Solomon

Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twin fawns of a gazelle
grazing among the lilies.
-Song of Songs 4:5

Your breasts are like wine glasses,
two glasses of red you've poured
for me to taste with my fingertips.

Your eyes are like dimes,
the glint in the pupil like the torch
on the reverse.

Your hair is like an ounce of tea leaves
unfolding in the kettle of my lap
giving up their liquor to me.

Your shoulders are like two beaches,
one where I found a bone in the sand,
one where I found the terrier.

Your belly is like my porch,
the corner of my porch where
I sit and drink my tea.

You skin is like Kansas City,
both sides of the city
with all of their nighborhoods.

Your mouth is a lake,
a lake I swim on looking
for a fish to catch.

Your feet are metaphores,
twin metaphore with twenty
implications for my mouth.

Wreck Anniversary

The first day that felt like autumn was the second
anniversary of the wreck. The one that took my dad
and dumped him in a ditch, as boken as the bike.
I spent a lot of time on my porch not remembering,
with Isabel urging me into games with plastic rules.
I drove home from work that night in the cool
window air and felt the wheel of seasons click over
another time. This was another fall coming
when I wansn't looking; another summer I lived
and sweated through until the days waned
enough to bleed the grass pale and sallow.

But I haven't told you that my dad survived.
He's in his Eden now with Mom
building a mansion with one room and as many
windows as they could find. He sent me a picture
that day with a note that said he'd forgotten
the wreck until they started driving home.
It's a place just north of here where I doubt
anyone could think much of the past. It's a place
made of eons of future and ages of present time.

Ted Kooser Eating Cake

He sat down at a table with a small
piece of cake and started signing books.
Whenever he was left alone for a moment
he ate slowly at his cake with slow,
even clumsy, stabs. I wanted
to talk to him, about his poems,
his paintings, and art. I was armed
with relevent stories about all of these.
But something about the way he ate,
with certainty of purpose, caused me
to pause the way you would to interrupt
a person reading or a dentist drilling.
His cake was an hour-glass, when it ran out
he would stand up and ask for his ride home.
And he did. I let him take three of those
bites and went home with my book
unsigned, leaving him with nothing
to remember me by.