Up and down
church thronged
with strangers
one face looking up
haircut in winter
I talk about the history
of mining
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Ceremonial
After dark, when the woods
turn back into a forest,
go stand under an umbrella
& let your prim column
of not-rain become
as anonymous as the others.
Count the drips until you lose
track of everything else.
Inhale the fertile aroma
of log-rot & truffle
as if it were the freshest tea.
Ignore the lightning flash,
what it does to the ground:
a stark here-&-now
of sticks & leaves into which
it no longer seems possible
Spaceship Earth
The chair in the forest accommodates
a cushion of moss — better than
the bedspring, which collects dead leaves
& the rare blackberry sprout.
The canes never get too far
in their explorations of the dappled light
before a deer discovers them & has them
for breakfast, spines & all, threading
her hooves through the rusty coils
& the jumble of squarish stones
where walls once rested.
High overhead, a scarlet tanager
grooms under his wingpits
during each pause in his recital.
If only the lice that live humdrum lives
in the forest of his feathers
Hypothesis
What if it’s true: that as you walk,
another is walking within you, perfectly
coterminous with your own walking?
What if it’s true that as you sit,
another sits within, weathering you,
like the coal inside the ember?
I don’t like to think that our bodies
are mere vessels — or vassals —
but what if they were? It could explain
these odd, apparently random urges
to hold & be held, or to lose oneself
through concentration: the not-me within
wants to reach the not-me without.
Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Maybe
that’s how a finger continues to itch
after the amputation of the arm, & why,
Seven facts about the ancestors
They were short. They could squat
on their haunches for hours.
They knew the right times for things.
They remembered what they heard
in a way that we who have been trained
by the measured tread of text cannot.
They had bad teeth, but better than
the farmers who followed them.
They squinted a lot.
They knew every conceivable grief
except for the small, dull kind
that accompanies the purchase
of some interchangeable part.
Supposition
Suppose it’s true: that as you walk,
another is walking within you, perfectly
coterminous with your own walking.
Suppose it’s true that as you sit,
another sits within, weathering you,
like the coal inside the ember.
I don’t like to think that our bodies
are mere vessels — or vassals —
but suppose it’s true. It might explain
these odd, apparently random urges
to hold & be held, or to lose ourselves
through concentration: the not-us within
wants to reach the not-us without.
It might explain why, as we slowly
tighten around our cores,
strands of white begin to appear
Horsebalm
Three days from the solstice,
& the shriveled leaf still smells
faintly of lemon.
F-stop
Splendour of snow blown sideways
through the penitentiary yard,
plastering the brown scissor-blade legs
of cattails in the ditch, filling keyholes
& every available crack,
razor-wire softening into white ropes
when the bang of an unfastened corncrib door
brings everyone — the guards
& the guarded — to a full stop.
This was once an ordinary farm
with ordinary livestock.
Ghostly pigeons arrive
from a blurred-out depth of field.
Hi, cue
To what shall I liken
this New Year’s, warm and brown?
It happens, that’s all.
Another Good Question
A good question never satisfies the way one might expect. It’s not like a conviction. There’s no warm glow of satisfaction. Everyone tells you, That’s a good question! But they don’t know how it torments you in secret with its indifference and its perplexing transformations. Living with the questions is like living with a house full of cats. Wouldn’t you rather have an uninterrupted sleep? Wouldn’t you rather be numb? Sure you would. But getting there involves a brief and jarring realignment of molecules, a hot iron fry pan going into the water, that squeal no real voice can begin to answer.
What makes a good question “good”?
Why doesn’t it ever satisfy, the way a conviction does?
Not a haiku
snow fog at dawn
the wingbeats of a maybe crow
fade into the would-be distance
Lepidoptera: haiku
The butterfly weed’s
deep orange—
a monarch stops to fill up
Halogen flashlight:
he picks out the luna moth
from 100 yards
The stripped catalpa
still quivers in the breeze:
starving caterpillars
Candlelight vigil
outside the state prison—
the smell of burning moths
Hummingbird battle:
only the hummingbird moth
remains on the flowers
Red-spotted purples
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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