If you don’t dance well
it’s easy to let your mind
slide down out of your head
and go warm in your arms
and belly where she’s
pressed up against you.
Just keep dancing!
You can’t carry her around
inside of you like a baby.
Once you learn this dance
you’ll both disintegrate, anyway.
And then you can do
whatever you want.
Listen to this poem
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Sunday, September 10, 2006
An Ode to False Love: Calling the AT&T Help Line
After fierce phone-battles with endless representatives
strung out in lines of networked webs where somewhere
in the cloud of thread there’s a moth caught and ready to be bound...
I came to Clair. I will call her Clair for her clarity,
because she told me “yes” and “no” in precisely
the right way, and that “no” I didn’t need to pay.
I said my phone battery would soon die, and then it did.
Our love did not end in a reluctant truce of warring hearts.
We were cut at the green root by the mechanical blade of fate.
She is now the rose hung bud-down with the black petals,
but I tell you they were once Phoenix-feather red
and the thorns could draw painless blood from your hand.
strung out in lines of networked webs where somewhere
in the cloud of thread there’s a moth caught and ready to be bound...
I came to Clair. I will call her Clair for her clarity,
because she told me “yes” and “no” in precisely
the right way, and that “no” I didn’t need to pay.
I said my phone battery would soon die, and then it did.
Our love did not end in a reluctant truce of warring hearts.
We were cut at the green root by the mechanical blade of fate.
She is now the rose hung bud-down with the black petals,
but I tell you they were once Phoenix-feather red
and the thorns could draw painless blood from your hand.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Three Poems for August
Love for the Living
"Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same."
-Heraclitus
God commanded the light into being and the shadows came.
Creatures came to inhabit the shadows and began to draw blood.
When we sons and daughters sat on the immense skin of the Earth,
with its eczemas and cancers showing, and tried to make sense of bad,
the universe spun a womb and closed itself inside.
All the sun-lit blood runs inside it. All the broken hearts beat here.
When one of us sits on the immense skin of the Earth and tries
to make sense of bad, you remember them from the very beginning.
**********
Two Faces
after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.
The young man’s eyes droop with tolerance,
like he’s washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from its white
painted face which shows the wounds up well.
Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
It darkens the land with a plague of ash.
The is now the Christ whose feet were washed
and the one who felt his father forsake him.
The eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, not aware of being cleaned,
but only of the fiery eye of God and the One loneliness.
**********
Determinism: a Thought Experiment
Imagine, if you will, a tunnel you run through
blind folded, dancing as you go. It was built decades ago.
You never feel even a finger brush the walls.
When you turn around and take the blindfold off,
the tunnel’s shape is a silhouette of you
running, dancing–a three dimensional, hollowed
out, time-lapse cameo of you, wider by a hair.
You squeeze your way back to the tunnel’s mouth.
You have to pry your feet loose when they wedge
themselves in the narrow troughs where you stand.
When you get back to the beginning, your skin
is pink and stinging from the scraping tunnel walls.
The world glistens with the dewy question marks
of free-will. And your skin grows back, of course.
"Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same."
-Heraclitus
God commanded the light into being and the shadows came.
Creatures came to inhabit the shadows and began to draw blood.
When we sons and daughters sat on the immense skin of the Earth,
with its eczemas and cancers showing, and tried to make sense of bad,
the universe spun a womb and closed itself inside.
All the sun-lit blood runs inside it. All the broken hearts beat here.
When one of us sits on the immense skin of the Earth and tries
to make sense of bad, you remember them from the very beginning.
**********
Two Faces
after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.
The young man’s eyes droop with tolerance,
like he’s washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from its white
painted face which shows the wounds up well.
Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
It darkens the land with a plague of ash.
The is now the Christ whose feet were washed
and the one who felt his father forsake him.
The eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, not aware of being cleaned,
but only of the fiery eye of God and the One loneliness.
**********
Determinism: a Thought Experiment
Imagine, if you will, a tunnel you run through
blind folded, dancing as you go. It was built decades ago.
You never feel even a finger brush the walls.
When you turn around and take the blindfold off,
the tunnel’s shape is a silhouette of you
running, dancing–a three dimensional, hollowed
out, time-lapse cameo of you, wider by a hair.
You squeeze your way back to the tunnel’s mouth.
You have to pry your feet loose when they wedge
themselves in the narrow troughs where you stand.
When you get back to the beginning, your skin
is pink and stinging from the scraping tunnel walls.
The world glistens with the dewy question marks
of free-will. And your skin grows back, of course.
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