The birds knew. They heard Earth
thinking about a shift, a shrug. They
repaired to the stability of air, where
they might rest assured on fine
individual engineering. On alleged
ground, in our immense, inappropriate
structures, we were by comparison large
in our self-regard though miniature in
our soon-to-be shaking skin. Solid ground
is a compelling myth. Our material
condition is liquid when it isn't vaporous
or vacuous. Our feet knew. They felt
Earth pass under us in squirts and waves.
The planet is pieces and paste. It is going
somewhere, we’re on it, and that is that.
If you’re his wife, you’ve quit
asking why it all piles up out there
in the yard for everyone to see
from the highway. Hubcaps from ghostly coupes.
Beer signs in neon cursive. Coke machines,
cars, cars, cars. You keep the house
and the backyard according to your principles.
You hate the mechanism in men
that drives them to love machinery.
If you're his dog, you
urinate on tires encircling weeds.
You sniff varieties of rust,
chase squirrels until they disappear,
until you ram your hot wet nose
into angle iron; it all
makes the yard difficult.
Maja used to say,
“Thank you for today.”
From her I learned
everyone’s old and
young at once.
At night in snow
near Maja’s bus-stop
on Maja’s basic street—
Murargatan means
street of bricks—wild
rabbits sometimes paused
like caesuras in Swedish
conversation. I waited.
I felt wiser after leaving
Maja’s house. Life itself
was a tutorial. I’d gathered
In Oklahoma and everywhere, despair
only makes life seem more unyielding.
A better tactic is to signify that life
is what it is: If you practice law, fly
a pirate-flag atop your office-building.
If you run a tattoo parlor, arrange for
your phone number to be 435-OUCH.
If you’ve owned a used-book store for
twenty years and are going out of
business, hire a temporary laborer,
and when he announces he’s fixin’
to get sick, tell him, “Use the bathroom.”
When sounds of his retching drive
browsers out, say, “Thanks for coming
in,” and resume the final inventory.
Wait for the man to return from his
Outside a cabin in snow,
we are, and hear our, breathing here.
And wind in pines shucks
itself through sound like snakes
slipping through their summer skins.
And it is easy out here. And out
here it is easy to admire
an image-aided concept
of cabins in snow. And
it is easy inside a cabin
now to believe in an Idea
of Winter, for notions of snow
furnish our true cabin,
consciousness—which, fragile amidst
oblivion’s drifts, stays sturdy against howling.
Life imposes on us.
Memory superimposes,
layering life’s imprints.
Into an aperture
between life and memory
moves the photographer,
who listens to light,
convenes shadows,
constructs position.
In the dark room,
life and memory wait
while hallucination bathes,
inscribes itself on a
pane of white-space,
coalescing like epiphany
and now rising from the
On the Gold Coast Theatre building, a concrete mask
pretended to moan. Or sing? We weren't sure which.
We deduced it despised a violin and bells
hanging below it, an architect’s tacky gifts.
There was concrete. There were bricks, glass, wood.
To these we donated our need of symbol,
our weakness for decoration. Our bodies
represented us in front of the old Gold Coast,
which had left behind its design in order
to become. We are there no more, have scattered
to a heresy of heres. Our memories are
synaptic masks that pretend to moan—
or sing? We’re not sure which. Our memories
design an architecture of absence.
Some valleys you passed through replaced
themselves in memory.
Their mystique deepens like loam.
A glacier of forgetting moved into others.
You never know: should mind’s climate
change, these might be recalled.
You cannot remember entering even
one valley without having felt changed:
Maybe you sensed descent into routine,
or escape into meadowed ease—
or knew involvement with anonymous
mass humanity lay ahead, urban sea.
You entered that one valley—remember?—
by train. A pleading wish to be from that valley
seized you, a wish not be you.
As you gazed on and out, your forehead
You ask advice as
if I were a parent not a lover.
With calculating
eyes, you talk of career goals not love.
Like an autumn wind
bending trees, a chaos of leaves, you rush
to change the world
questioning how experience is gained
and ask, is youth a
barrier to life. I answer, is age
a fence to living.
And think of all the things we have in common
and all the things we don't.
Question: what is a silhouette, but an illusion
taken at a slow tempo. How palpable it feels
when time—an empty vessel—no longer fills itself.
You question that silhouette. You speak
at a slow tempo. You ask how urgently and gently are
synonyms. Their music is as familiar as
your own shadow. Ask: is there a word for this
slow tempo.
You whistle a basic six note phrase. It
becomes your anthem. Is this what
prayer looks like. Whistle a basic six note phrase—
your anthem—suddenly, a decent moon appears
and there's a film of light over everything.
Each hour, afraid of the previous one, moves
on only to find it again. You whistle a little phrase.
It becomes your anthem. This is what a prayer looks like.
Ripple-skiffed by bird and stone
Tree is held in dark-water
The flowers fight up.