Five Poems
Excerpt from The Loch Ness Monster is a Widowed Time Traveler
Give us something hopeful among the bluesy
newsflashes & flash floods & earthquakes
& flashlights during power outages & wildfires
ravaging cities to ashes to ashes to ashes.
Give us your serenity, your folkloric whipcrack,
your threnody, your swampy dazzle, your stupor,
your slipstream. Give us something besides skim
milk & Wheaties & failed intimacy. Nessie, we
crave your impossibility.
Everything is Ideological, and There is Also the Ocean
with its spume and sea glass and sand-crusted shells,
its urchins, its tidepools harboring invisible cells.
Every conversation centers us somehow, but then
there are elephants, fleas, millennium-old ginkgo trees,
polar bears stranded on ice floes in documentaries.
Sharks have been around longer than monster movies.
There are trilobite fossils that predate Saturn’s rings.
Evolution did not intend anything—yet look: wings!
Lull & Frenzy
Summers ago, the family dog
succumbed to cancer. Tumors
preached their pinkish bloom.
In the vet parking lot, a man
played accordion. It was June.
Found a firefly that night, dead
but still lit, bellied on the cusp
of livingness; it’s hard to resist
metaphor—the body pained by
her own bright fang, barely held
together. Outside the window,
brassy trumpet daffodils awaken.
Somewhere underwater, sharks
skirmish; a male pufferfish
lugs his paunch through sand,
sculpting flowery mandalas.
A whale sinks into the seabed
while a widower climbs into
bed, while worldwide, spiders
knit their brief billionfold webs.
gentling
the universe is full
of sharp bits
that you must dance over
barefooted
fretfully effortful
you were childless
before you were born
a figment
glued to song
so what changed?
for one you became
now your ears gulp music
your eyes gobble light
you keep a jar populated
with tiny snails & chicory
you feel seething anger & glee
you are fantastical & doomed
just like every firefly
every whippoorwill
every cuttlefish
every calla lily
Belief System
If there is an afterlife, then it must
be filled with sabretooth tigers
& trilobites, also a songbird,
my grandmother, three mice.
They are huddled by a campfire
roasting marshmallows, telling
ghost stories. When I die, it will
feel like losing my house keys
or as if a hand were stretching down
to yank open the lid of a grand piano;
disembodied, I will forget what
separates a tool from an instrument;
I will confuse a cathedral for a zoo
for a delicatessen; everything will
turn into rabid music. In transit
between life and deadness
a hazardous memory: my father
reaches for the wheel while
teaching me to drive home during
a hailstorm on I-70. I am real.
go deeper
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go deeper 〰️
Read the interview here.
