Poem: April 27, 2019

How to Pass Time in a Meeting

Stare at the screen. Nod from time to time. Squint
like you are concentrating. Imagine everyone else
in a new setting- a circus or a remote fishing village.
Look up and smile when you hear your name. Jot
down a word that someone just emphasized, then
draw a box around it. Make it your own. Add a star
or a question mark. Dream of new ways to use your
secret word. You would kill to protect that word.
Picture yourself under a street lamp on a foggy
night, your trench coat collar flipped up to disguise
your face. Repeat the word and know that you have
set the plan in motion. Lean back in your chair.
Lean forward. Subtly flex one muscle at a time.
Make a list (favorite movies, earliest memories,
unusual super powers). Find an opportunity to say
"I agree" or "That makes sense." Do the math and
figure out how many days you have been on Earth
or how many Tuesday afternoons you have left
based on average age expectancy. Add ten years
if you've been to the gym in the last week or so.
Text your best friend or your wife a random date
that falls in the next six months, followed by "That's
the day we make our big announcement." Ignore the
confused responses. Enjoy the mystery you created.
If you must text back, reply "You know what I'm
saying. Don't be obtuse." After that, radio silence.
Focus. Ask a question or say something clever.  Take
stock. Consider your gifts and failings. Celebrate
the wins. Forgive what needs to be forgiven. Focus
on the ticking clock. Try to sync your heartbeat to the
sound. Contemplate the spaces between the ticks. Not
the sounds but the absence of sound. Remember how
the sun feels before it gets too hot. Then, write a poem.

Poem: April 26, 2019

Personal Narrative

When you are a kid you don't
yet know what your story
will be, but you never tire
of the telling, reorganizing
the limited past to create new
meaning, like the time you
nearly died swimming in
the deep end of the pool
became the time you fooled
everyone into thinking you
were drowning. And the long,
blurry future becomes a
storyboard made of random
moments that manage to make
an impression- a teacher likes
your poem, a girl in overalls
holds your hand at school,
Quincy solves another mystery,
your grandfather laughs and
drinks and smokes cigars-
and suddenly a new reality,
or a plot twist, in the story
you want to tell about yourself.
Strange how some narrative
threads linger, while others
disappear until someone
at a reunion tells you a story
about yourself that feels
vaguely familiar, but with
details that have no anchor,
no pin on the bulletin board.
And looking back, it is your
past that blurs and seems
unlimited, and your future
that leaves little room (and
little need) for revision.

Poem: April 25. 2019

Gift

Mom made lemon biscotti
with macadamia nuts and white chocolate,
a recipe she was excited to share.

I ate two this morning with my coffee
and enjoyed their slow give, how meditative
a cookie is in a quiet room.

Poem: April 24, 2019

Salsa, Baby

The sweet and sticky kiss of the mango flesh,
the tiny spicy bites of the red onion,
the limes with their long pucker and smile,
the rough, heavy tongues of roasted red pepper,
the warm breath of the garlic that lingers,
and the sweat of the salt, dripping from the chip.

Poem: April 23, 2019

Sonnet 1

How often do we underestimate
the ways in which a child can use their gifts?
And when they ask us to participate,
don't we deter them from the heavy lifts?
They say, "We can." But in our minds, we doubt.
We fear the many things they don't yet know.
Dear God, what they might do or ask about!
It's best to keep it simple, take things slow.
So we give them easy tasks in tiny bites,
and we guarantee success with modest goals.
And if they get their own dreams in their sights,
we do our best to fill them full of holes.
Such limiting can't help but take its toll.
Is this about their safety or control?

Poem: April 22, 2019

Get Out the Map

You feel it in between your bones,
a stretching impulse, potential
energy wound tight, pulled back,
and aimed at an open road.

We ache. I feel it. Both of us
itchy, checking our watches,
aware of the weather, unsettled
because we are not in this moment
who we want to be, sitting here
behind our desks, directed at
screens and balancing spreadsheets
and breathing the air conditioning.

Imagine. Just ten hours and we
could be taking in the sea,
our feet sunk deep into the sand
and day-drinking rum, feeling
our muscles let go and our breathing
slow, pulling down some vitamin D.

It makes me wonder why we choose
to land where we do and put down roots
so far away from the salt air and
the cradle of the waves, unless it is
to be sure that we won't be tempted
to kick off our shoes, loosen a tie
and cross a threshold we can't uncross.

Poem: April 21, 2019

Square One

When the sun shines like this, I think about Atlanta,
about the first time I met you and heard you laugh.
I'd be making things up if I described what you wore,
a sun dress, I guess, but your shoulders were bare
and brown and the sunlight reflected off of you as we
walked down the street, two amid a pack of colleagues,
true, but I remember that moment with you. I remember
you seemed so comfortable and happy. So present and
pleasantly in place on a sunny day, walking in Atlanta.
Who is to say if that is where this began at all or if
point A must necessarily have led to point B? If nothing
else, it helps define a path we've walked, most in light,
some in shade, but I can say with glad certainty that I
remember that day, that I noticed you. I noticed
your smile and the sunlight on your smooth, tan shoulder.
And on bright days, like this day, with the blue sky and
the skyline, I turn and look back. Who wouldn't look back?

Poem: April 20, 2019

Shine

Someone needs you to shine today. So shine.
Throw your unfiltered light upon the muddy
places and standing water, the shaded corners
where nothing ever grows. Pour your warmth
on the pale and the seasonally affected. Radiate
and call forth from hiding, the green armies
of life that rise and swell and salute your light.
Fill the cold winds until they twist and return
as warm and gentle breezes. Shine for those
who cannot shine and to chase away the others
who create the shadows and lead with shade.
This is all you can ever do, and it is enough.

Poem: April 19, 2019

Making the Most

Our seconds pass so cheaply,
day to day. We have so many-
86,400 every Tuesday. Really.
Such wealth. More than one
can know what to do with,
more than enough to give
away, or to spend in frivolous
ways, and those who say that
we must treat every second
as a precious gift, that we
must make the most of every
passing moment, must have
other vast, even unlimited,
resources: infinite energy,
deep pockets, strong self-
discipline, and interesting
friends. The rest of us must
be content to lose our time
irresponsibly, casting our
attention and our talents into
the rushing and cluttered
streams of our existence,
drinking too much and
forgetting, sleeping late and
watching just to watch, and
if we are wise, we will try
to find just one precious
second every day, one second
in 86,400 that we pinch as
tightly as a penny, and hide
away like echoes in a vault.

Poem: April 18, 2019

Stream of Consciousness

What a nuisance it is
to have to pee. It always
seems to present itself
as an urgent need just
as I am sitting down
to accomplish serious
things, or when I'm
trying to focus enough
to find something hidden
among other things, like
when I'm wandering
the stacks in a bookstore
or library. And there
is no use to put it off,
so we head to the
indignity of urinals
or stalls, or in the woods,
the trees, to empty the
water or coffee or tea
that we consumed
what seems like just
minutes ago and to
experience the beastial
release of our bladder,
the interruption and
relief- too mundane
to be celebrated and
too toxic to be missed.
And yet, let's admit to
a tickle of pleasure with
every healthy piss.

Poem: April 17, 2019

At the Edge

Every moment
an eighteen-year-old kid lives
is like a deep breath.

On a summer night,
a warm car hood and fireflies,
whiskey and the stars.

Sexuality-
a wild charge between their legs,
a heartbeat, a catch.

Playing with limits
that they blow past and kick up
like dust, like nothing.

All dark red petals.
All gas pedals and motor oil.
Garden and garage.

When you hold a bomb,
the finer details are lost.
It's just that one thing,

as live as a wire,
as long as a starlit night,
rubbed raw, exhausted.

Young people play their
music so loud so they don't
hear the ticking clock.

Poem: April 16, 2019

Notre Dame

Our Lady, please teach us
that nothing lasts, not stone
or iron, except that we rebuild.

We gather around you in song
transfixed by your fire as all men
are transfixed by fire and made small.

In your long memory, you have seen
how temporary we are, how little
we have, and how we waste our energies.

You've witnessed our grasping for control,
our crusades and revolutions and world wars.
You've seen who we are when we destroy.

But in sight of your light and your eye
we have also aspired with more grace.
You've known Piaf and Monet, Hugo and Bartholdi.

Even your own great bones that define
a landscape against the human shifting of time
are the reaching work of our broken hearts.

So we pray that you teach us
to rebuild, to tend with patience and love,
the impermanent, beautiful work we create.

Poem: April 15, 2019

Away

In the late Spring
when I was a child
we would go
canoeing on
the Blue River
with my parents'
friends and
their many kids-
a whole tribe-
on a fourteen mile
trip, from start to
finish, and ending
just before
the swollen river
dropped over
the old concrete
dam where the
canoe rental van
would wait
to take our baked
and soggy bodies
back to the place
where we began,
and I remember
those days as long
diversions, a slow
wandering and
unraveling joke
in which the sun
burned our top
halves and
the water soaked
the rest, and we
would float idly
beside the canoes
between bursts
of rapids and
getting hung up
in the shallows.
We ate our lunches
on the sandbars
at noon, sitting
under the trees or
on the upturned
canoes, and
the breeze would
hold its breath,
leaving us sweating
and ready for
the water ahead,
and in the afternoon,
the odd quiet
of paddles pushing
the water, far away
from the city- a sigh
really, permission
to be both wild
and still.

Poem: April 14, 2019

Seeking Wisdom

So much of the world is busy work
that seems to be designed to prevent
the potential magic of idle hands.
We grind through our days, showing up
on time, doing the work we are assigned,
for what? For our chips, our ante in a game
so large that it literally shapes our minds-
the questions we ask, the ways our edges
are defined. We've diced our lives
into fine, immediate slivers of time,
so that we can only ask What must I do
right now? What keeps my job that
pays my bills that feeds the kids who
go to school to learn the ways they
will someday fill their time? And we
can stay, of course we'll stay, inside
the system that ticks and ticks and
promises at least to keep the wolves
they say exist at bay, to guarantee
in forty years, when our shoulders stoop
and our muscles ache, that we can step
with a sense of accomplishment into
the light of our well-earned retirement,
with fewer means and less energy,
and we can scale mountains and learn
to play instruments we always said
we'd pick up back when we had nimble
fingers, and we will read libraries
and build museums to hold our own
great master works, and we will ask
the questions that come rushing into view,
and finally we will be happy and wise.

Poem: April 13, 2019

Ghosts

Occasionally, I will dream of one
or another of them, my grandparents
now all gone, buried in the ground
or stacked in mausoleum walls
like mail in old post office boxes,
all of their bones, dressed like
the living, still retrievable
if one were so inclined.

And in my dreams they must
be in their early seventies, seniors,
certainly, but still coherent and able-
bodied and wearing clothes that I
remember they wore, I suppose.
At least nothing looks out of place.

They don't come to me together.
Husbands are never with their wives.
They come alone and silent and stand
off to the side, where at some point
I am surprised to see them there,
and I'm happy, like I have just found
a forgotten childhood toy or a book
I thought I had lost. It's just a moment
of passing rediscovery. You know
how dreams are. Nothing ever
lasts so much as lingers.

Waking, I lose them again.
More slowly than other dreams.
Their echoes seem longer and from
farther off. I might find myself
repeating a name, a breath
on my lips, just more than a thought.
Horace or Ida, Marguerite or Mitch.
The kind of names someone might find
written on an old love letter or on the deed
of a house. Names you find in cellars.

It must be that some part of me
conjures them to fade again like a ripple
on a pond, and to what end? Except
to say that our stories are not ours alone,
and they travel from great distances
and genetic depths that are yet
to be decoded or translated. We have
hidden paths that connect us, each of us
casting forward and back, and either
we continue or we do not. That's a fact.
But time will pass, and those we've lost
still have some substance, some
presence in their former clothes, connected
to an impulse, a firing in our brains,
a catalyst to the fires of our mythology.
which also passes like the echo
of a name. Like an oatmeal cookie recipe.
Like a card game. Like cigar smoke
and laughter.

Poem: April 12, 2019

Special

A daisy cannot compromise, and neither can a tree.
A squirrel or turtle will only be what it was made to be.

No tyranny of others will make a robin change its song.
No jury of its peers, no tradition however long,

Can cause a rainfall to not be wet, or cause a stone to be less hard.
No force will change its nature, though it break it into shards.

There is no shaming rivers into abandoning their paths.
Mow grass down or burn it off, it cannot be but grass.

How sad we've set ourselves apart in choosing to conform,
To take the roads that others laid from the day that we are born.

To be given understanding of the ways that we stand out,
To be offered roads less traveled, but to choose the common route.

Poem: April 11, 2019

Black Hole

So now we've seen it, we have
the photograph in our hands,
taken with a camera that spanned
across our planet, and even
with that, the resolution
is as disappointing as it is
impressive. I know, I know,
we've been spoiled and we ask
too much. Imagine the great
distances, the logistics, and
the fact that someone decided
that what couldn't be done, could,
and what shouldn't be seen would
be seen if we just looked together
with purpose into the night,
far away into that dark eye.
And that is what it calls to mind,
the fiery golden smudge of an iris,
the perfect, impossible pupil,
inscrutable and dark, a circle
in which one might get lost
looking for some meaning
too dense to be given words.

Poem: April 10, 2018

One Hundred

A hund-o. A century. Three digits.
27.39% of the year and what have I learned?
That days follow days, that they stack
upon one another and grow tall
and echo and reverberate, page
becoming pages, images borrowed
from other days, and lined up,
sometimes like a chain gang, displayed
on the screen. I scroll past
page breaks, creating the illusion
of movement, animating my days,
and I am betrayed by the presence
of so much white space, surprised
to find that days that feel crowded
look so empty typed on a page.
But it seems that I remember that
these poems, first written in pen, grew
into the spaces made available
in various notebooks of various sizes
and various shapes, or on the backs
of notecards, and once on a Post-It,
every poem the size of its space,
every day written out to the edges.

Poem: April 9, 2019

The Reason I Must Never Give Annie My Denim Jacket

She'll tell you she asks
for so little and
that she's never found
another that is as good
of a match for her...
for what? ...her style?
Personality? Soul?

She'll promise to give
it a good home,
to never find
a replacement. She
cajoles me and uses
every tool in the box,
begging, accusing
me of some cruelty,
threatening not to care
for me when I grow old.

She'll ask,
"Don't you want
me to be happy?" or
"When was the last
time you even wore it?"

She fills me
with attention, hits
me with her attentions
because I have it,
the last and only
thing she'll ever need.

Poem: April 8, 2019

Butterfly

I think a lot about the poems that get away
because my days are frenetic and often
unpredictable and because other people
keep walking unannounced into the rooms
of my calendar, stomping their heavy feet,
scribbling their nonsense across my pages.

Poems can be skittish creatures and just
getting them to land long enough to be
photographed, to glimpse the inside
of their wings, tends to require stillness.

And the world is full of poems flitting
about, landing, hovering, moving on.
We ourselves are poems that dance around
the heads of other poets. We stop
at the edges of flowers and breathe,
a slow opening and closing of our wings,

before some sound startles our quiet
spaces and sets us off in new directions,
before some collector with a net manages
to contain us, before we get pinned down.

Poem: April 7, 2017

Kristen

This is for my sister
who keeps her expectations high
in a world that wants to lower them,

who wears her sense of justice
like a super hero's uniform-
all gauntlets and bright colors,

who hustles and dreams
and never settles in,
who keeps her wheels turning,

who will tell you what's what,
who can boil things down,
and who lives on a permanent simmer.

The one who knows the things I don't,
who's amazed when you can't see
the answer that's sitting right there,

who moves the product
and finds the angle,
who fills and empties rooms.

This is for my sister
who loves what she loves
fiercely and in big ways.

Poem: April 6, 2109

Hard Up Blues

You know I'm in the mood, girl, for a trip around your bend.
Yes, you know I'm in the mood for a trip around your bend.
Let me slip around your corner and then bring it back again.

It's been way too long since you cast your shadow across my face.
It's been a month if it's been a minute since your shadow crossed my face.
We could play long chords in the afternoon. Play your treble against my bass.

CHORUS
There's a time to throw the switch, and I believe that time is now.
Can't you see the red lights flashing? The ringing bells? The time is now.
We've held the curtain for far too long, so come on out and take a bow.

Woman, I see you in the kitchen, but it's the bedroom that's on my mind.
Yes, you're standing in the kitchen, but I've got the bedroom on my mind.
If I can't have you in the bedroom, then the basement will do just fine.

When you come home in the evening, I can't wait to hold you tight.
I imagine every evening a new way to hold you tight.
I want to feel your whole body touching me when I go to turn off the light.

CHORUS

It can be hard to sustain our breath while our fingers play the tune.
You know you might just catch your breath while my fingers play the tune.
But just keep pounding out the rhythm and howling at the moon.

Can you hear my heartbeat calling, echoing inside my chest?
You have to hear my heartbeat calling you from deep inside my chest.
I can feel the earth is trembling and this wave is about to crest.

CHORUS

Poem: April 5, 2019

The Meanings We Assign to Things

I've been boxing up some of the kids' things-
Riley's LEGOs, Annie's books- and I guess
it surprises me what they leave behind,
the toys they played with, the stories
they read, the gifts they were so excited
to open years, even a decade, ago. To me,
they seem monumental, these plastic bricks
and worn pages, physical representatives
of events I easily commemorate in strange
moments like these, when we are cleaning
out closets or rearranging rooms, and I
find myself paralyzed with indecision.
What am I going to do with these great
monoliths, these talismans and relics?
Shouldn't I expect the kids to carry
their histories with them into the world?
Or is our home to become a museum?
And one can't help but wonder in these
situations if somehow the divorce
had something to do with this, that maybe
the kids learned an early lesson to distrust
attachments or to better tolerate transience
or to expect impermanence and travel light.
And probably none of this is true since
we've all left toys and books behind us
while carrying other totems forward
for a time, and who can explain
the strange magic we use to choose
the items that will contain our souls?

Poem: April 4, 2019

Thin

The office is full of murmurs and the sound
of the traffic outside and the tapping that my
cubicle neighbor is making between her nails
and her keyboard. None of this is intrusive,
and none of it delights. It's grey like the carpet,
the filing cabinets, the ceiling and the sky,
and I, I would rather be somewhere warmer
and in bloom, some earthy spot, and removed
from the plastic and laminate and the tapping
of keys, some place to breathe more deeply.
I've got places that need filling and hands
that feel too clean, and the only soft treading
of feet or the occasional beep fails me, fails
to resonate, fails to wake me from sleep.

Poem: April 3, 2019

Water Flows

Your new tattoo says Water Flows,
an Atwood quote of which you are fond,
and a truism, I joke, since one might
just as easily have said Water is Wet,
and yet I understand your meaning,
your intention to go forward, to go
where you want, surely, through or
over or around. You are calling on
old gods, using sympathetic magic
and ink, calling up your own power
not to be sunk, but to, in fact, sink
the obstacles foolish enough to place
themselves in the path of your slow
and patient and terrible force, your flow.
And who am I if not the stone placed
steadfast and stubborn at the center
of your river, the foolish and worn
optimist who tries to divide or redirect,
caught up in awe of all of your moving?

Poem: April 2, 2019

Accumulation

It seems however many shelves I build,
I blink my eyes, and they are filled.

So many possessions are content to hide
until a new cabinet makes them rise like a tide.

Easier to keep things than to cast them away.
We pack attics and basements day after day

so that year upon year our lives creep and expand,
and we fill all the spaces that we have on hand.

Poem: April 1, 2019

April's Fool

I like to dance at the edges of mistakes
and to play with tools instead of toys,
to find joy in some potential foolishness
and in the limits of what I can or cannot
reasonably predict. Give me a trial by
fire any day of the week, some situation
in which I know enough, as they say,
to be dangerous. I'm game to give it a go.
Nothing could please me more than to
take on some project with missing pieces,
to improvise with the tools I have instead
of the right tool for the job, or to have
to imagine the four or five critical steps
that have been left out of the instructions.
Anyone can cook a meal at times that
the pantry is full and the recipe tested.
I prefer the mystery of unimagined meals
and the chance to see if anything burns.

Poem: March 31, 2019

Trying to Look Busy

It isn't fair, I know, that I ask you
to keep track of time, the details,
the scheduling of our lives. Or that
I tease you that we are always late.

We live busy lives, and some things
are bound to fall through the cracks.
We are late for the art show or miss
some deadline, and you take the blame.

While it must appear that I'm muddling through,
a passenger in your car, another child to herd
out the door, one more detail to be managed.
You've mentioned that I can seem oblivious.

And, truly, some details fait to occur
to me as having the importance you seem
to have assigned them: What on earth are you
wearing? Why hasn't the homework been done?

But I managed, I managed to get along
with very little crashing down upon me
before we took our vows to one another
and even now I tend to other details,

such as the keeping of our poetic history
and the stoking of our metaphorical fires.
I am cultivating our creative spaces, and
filling the pantry we use to feed our souls.

Poem: March 30, 2019

Secret Identity

These days I spot myself in the mirror-
doughy and gray, pale from days spent
at a desk, arranging names or numbers
into tables or creating "Save-the-Dates"-
and in these reflected moments I see
how I have faded from the page, become
scratched with age like a vinyl record,
and, of course, there is something to be
mourned, a kid who was never quite
captured properly in the photos that
my children pull out of the shoebox
marked College, the pictures they hold
up and ask, "What is going on here?"
And I know how foolish it would seem
to even imply that I wished those pictures
were my reflection, or maybe not those,
but the one that should have been taken,
that I am sure could have existed of a kid
with energy like fire and a careless
sense of style- such long, perfect hair,
jeans ripped at the knee, worn red
Chuck Taylor high tops and vintage
glasses with wire rims, arms full of books,
the casual scratch of a Zippo and flick
of a cigarette. The kind of wiry kid
who lives at ease in the dark of barrooms
and in the brilliant light of college greens.
The kind of kid who could really ache
and radiate, who prickled with charm
and the confidence of potential energy.
It's the reflection I still half-expect to see
before my eyes come into stark focus,
and I find the me my children see.

Poem: March 29, 2019

Directions

Suppose you wanted to go from here
to, say, Boulder or Boston, somewhere
far away, or hell, pick a place nearby,
someone's new house in an unfamiliar
neighborhood, in a different part of town.
These days, the exercise is simple enough-
some form of GPS connected by Bluetooth
to your vehicle's entertainment system-
In 300 feet, turn left. Drive for forty
point two miles. Take exit twenty-six
on the right. You have arrived at your
destination. And something may have been
lost along the way with no map to invite
questions, no compass to make a steadfast
promise, no stranger to lend a hand.

Poem: March 28, 2019

Listen

If it's real it has its own music
almost as solid as itself:
the cracking of sticks across your knee,
the swish of leaves, the warm call
of a cardinal in spring,
and the creak of this old chair,
as solid as a hundred years, or
the stroke and scratch of pen on paper.
I can close my eyes and I feel
the echoes of fingers forming chords
on guitar strings, of other fingers
pulling in plucked patterns, and the hum
that fills the hollow belly. And at night,
your heartbeat stomping beneath
your skin, the intake of your breath,
the clock's rhythm stepping, always,
like someone in another room.