The Hope
In my hands, I’m holding
this unbearably heavy ball of hope.
Watch me fold under its gravity.
Come, help heft this globe
of hope for me, that I might rest
awhile, and replenish my strength.
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Tug of War
Be real.
Be fake, be sweet as boring cake.
Be real.
How does real feel?
Real feels right,
but right feels wrong.
Real feels like
punching you in the face
for the hurtful things you say.
Real feels horny.
Gotcha! feels real,
and anything said upon stepping in dog shit.
Fake feels wrong,
but wrong feels right.
Fake feels like
putting up with mistreatment
January Solitaire
Lay out a patience
(Winter has come down.)
Watch logs in a fireplace
disarrange into orange dice.
(Next year regulations
will prohibit burning wood.)
“Try again, Sir Tommy.”
(Desperation is one parent
of whimsy. The other is unknown.)
Best not to count the times
you look out on the gray and sigh.
(“Quantitative judgments do not apply.”)
Mr. Brown
The truth is the basketball coach
assigned to teach geometry disliked
both sports and angles. Plays
he drew on chalkboards looked like
problems, problems like plays. He
calculated the area of the rectangular
court to be most pleasant when
empty and only echoes cheered.
He coached his classes best when
a fire-drill called time-out and he
might stand shyly in the courtyard
next to her, the English teacher—close
enough to look, for instance, at her ears,
or smell her sweet breath,
care for her tender shoulders.
His job was an amorphous shape between
Units: An Introduction
Everything is made
of little units, which
are made of even smaller
units. The smallest units,
undetectable by us, are
reality. All units larger
than these are rearrangement,
illusion, phony structure.
They constitute a kind
of molecular cinema
watched by us and
understood by God,
who is exempt from
the unit-arrangement.
Sierra Nevada, November: An Appropriate Weather
Twice, perhaps, I have awakened surprised
by snow in the wide field. November: bare oak branches
like cast iron. A long breath drawn
down a blue canyon in my lungs.
A superb stillness, plenty of room.
My mind sits in a corner of such weather.
It sees a few men in brown clothes
cleaning an auditorium. They slam
metal folding-chairs back into two-dimensional
space. That sound echoes like gunshots across
the bare field between November and March.
Someone incinerates a newspaper
containing today’s weather forecast. My eyes
follow cinders and smoke into a pale sky,
into a dream of weather in which a storm
descends to devour my mind’s desires
At Gate 17
An old woman in an airport,
sunken cheeks,
turns toward a window
where sky comes in and
we can see metal villages
take off, glide down.
Her face suggests she knows
how society got this frenzied,
worried, driven to vacate.
She may know too where each
of us is going, returning from,
and why airports reek of grief—
her face is a rare manuscript
of grief. Her years spiral
slowly in memory like a galaxy.
Her attachments drift aboard
Sierra Nevada: Cold Work Moment
In a sense it’s always winter
in this wooded county of our psyche,
where my father and I build a house,
the rest of the crew off drunk somewhere.
The contractor has taken blueprints
and a cash advance to Reno.
A white sky pays out
kernels of snow. My father saws.
I nail. Partitions take ghostly shape.
In the forest of our days, coyotes
eat bread crumbs we scattered
to find our way back to where we left for work.
We lift walls into iron wind,
and brace. Ropes of snot come out
of our noses. Sierra cold’s meticulous.
It polishes our eyeballs like a monocled jeweler.
Fox and You
If you saw the fox,
know the fox saw you first,
and not out of the corner of her
eye.
If your breath caught
when image of a precise
snout, wise eyes, thick bristling
stone-and-cinnamon fur struck
your optic den,
know that’s the sort of guiltless,
guileless reverence the best of
the best Beliefs have in mind.
If she returns
to you, taking a path through dream,
know by dawn she
went back to milk-drugged pups.
To a Passenger in Mainz
There’s the experience
of being the last one left
on a railway platform.
The desired train wails
away toward a city that
was not expecting you.
You feel a mixture of regret
and satisfaction as you retreat
with your ticket and luggage.
A taxicab takes you
back to the apartment.
You don’t unpack.
You're not going anywhere.
There's the experience of not
going anywhere. There’s a
mental exercise of wondering why
Hands of the Wind
Inside a pyramid, its reason:
A former king parched like a leaf
And now impervious to grief,
Bacilli, and a shift of season.
Dust of a million builders’ bones
Informs the wind with grit, lingers,
Then scrapes with unbelieving fingers
Familiar blocks of hand-hewn stone.
Remodeling
We were after other forms, more light.
The house itself suggested other versions
of itself, faces within a face.
Rooms refused to add up. We
petitioned partitions. Shadows
fell against their will.
Blue meant one kind of life,
yellow quite another. Annuities of fate
sat in paint cans, quiet, unmixed.
In Plato’s formal heaven, two-by-fours
are Two By Four, grainless, ideal.
Here lumber rankles at our plain
geometry, gets nailed to the crosses
of our blueprints. We model, mold,
remold, remodel. And still we sigh.
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