Poem: August 31, 2019

Kissing

It's time we did some kissing.
None of that pursed-lip pecking
on the way out the door, or the
dry cheek sacrificial offering
before the makeup mirror.
I'm talking about kissing. Making
out. The kind you can't wait
to do the first time you go out.
The open-lipped, pulling each
other together, searching with
the mouth. The coming up for
air and diving right back down,
whole body kind of kissing in
which our lips can't seem to
ever get enough, in which our
muscles flex and hands grasp
and eyes close and our chests
are pressed together, expanding
like bellows, and we say Mmmm
into each other because aren't we
delicious. And you might think
I'm confused, that I'm talking
about sex (because isn't that what
happens when that bottle gets
uncapped). But I am talking
about kissing. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
The carbonated, blinding, mystic
space. The wet and wordless
convergence of our faces. The
celebration of tongue and teeth.
The slow, sloppy teen-age type
of race to the top of one another
that lingers at every. blessed. step.
The kind of kissing that sparks
and pops and leaves us panting
at the edge of an unguarded drop
into one another. A hovering and
heaving collection of pauses
before we are sent into the frenzy
and eventually relent, spent and
melted down, muddled, worn,
a puddle of our former selves.

Poem: August 30, 2019

Drawing Horses on the Program

At the funeral, I am interested
in the kids, the little girls with
their hair pulled tight into bows,
the boys with their scruffiness
and sports jackets. One child
spends most of the eulogy
flopped around her mother's
neck, looking back at me and
when the solemn hymn begins,
she claps her hands. My own
daughter, older, lowers her head
during prayer to fidget at the
buttons on her dress and flip
the program, front to back,
looking for something else to
read. As adults, we come to
recognize the structures of this
ceremony, our purpose here.
We let go. We say what needs
to be said. We hold our hands
out just so. We stand and brace
against an invisible storm that
we all have had to lean into, but
the children, not as used to the
comforts of hard and formal
surfaces, not as comfortable
with the tightness of ties and
dress shoes, still find in this
space their quiet ways to play.

Poem: August 29, 2019

The Point Is

They say you can't blame a guy
for trying, but at some point,
you can because after a while,
if he's still trying, he's no longer
stubbornly reaching for his goal
so much as he's aware that if
he quits, he will have certainly
been a fool to those around him.
People will laugh at him at
cocktail parties and say, "Do you
remember when you failed?"
But if he persists, he thinks,
he may draw the gambler's lucky
break, and prove the future wrong,
succeed despite clear evidence
and lengthening odds, and his
efforts will reward him with a
smudged trophy, a worn sash,
the title of Not Fool, and we can
blame a guy for trying not to be
a fool instead of trying to be wise.

Poem: August 28, 2019

Aujourd'hui, Je Veux être Tranquille

Aujourd'hui, je veux être tranquille,
assis sur un petit balcon au-dessus
de Paris, avec des géraniums en pot
à côté de moi sur une table en fer forgé.
Une tasse de café. Un livre de poésie
sur mes genoux. Des sons lointains,
comme des rêves, flottant dans les airs.

Today, I want to be quiet,
sitting on some small balcony
above Paris, with potted geraniums
beside me on a wrought iron table.
A cup of coffee. A book of poetry
in my lap. Faraway sounds,
like dreams, floating in the air.

Poem: August 27, 2019

Inflexible

People who can touch their toes,
or their palms to the floor, frustrate
me no end. I bend about as well
as a concrete block, my hands
barely reaching my knees before
my hamstrings protest and my
legs fold rather than suffer another
millimeter of stretch, and if this
was a metaphor, I would have to
feel ashamed, but it's not and
I don't and you can't make me.

Poem: August 26, 2019

Post Cards

Maybe if we had written poetry
instead of the usual Having 
a great time! Wish you were here!
we could have rescued the pleasure
of sending post cards, with their
maps and landscapes and slice-
of-life photography. Now it's all
low-brow humor, beer and busty
women. Something to be hung up,
where?, in a garage or bar? In
a fraternity house, I suppose, but
in college, I remember collecting
post cards, filling whole cork
boards and walls with Monet's
Waterlilies and Millais' Ophelia,
Count Basie in mid-performance,
a cow alone in an autumn field,
Bob Dylan, Han Solo, a black
and white still life of a microphone.
Rectangles to contemplate at odd
angles, a canvas, when flipped,
for a few lines- a haiku or rhymed
couplet, and who can say how
things might have been different,
had they been addressed and
dropped in the outgoing mail?

Poem: August 25, 2019

Ars Poetica

I come back, always, squeezing
sand and water in my hands, shaping
what I have in front of me into
some shape, rough and unfinishable,
that approximates what small
handfuls I can reach inside myself,
stripping away dimension, letting
only part of the light in, certain I
can satisfy myself, less certain I
can make sense to others, everything
crumbling on the page as it does,
and given that the days shift, slide,
and we all have our own shadows,
and blowing winds, and distances,
and lapping tides, and hours in
the day in which the light is just so.
So who can say, even, what we've
built together, who can say what
we've built alone? Press your fingers
in deep and it starts to fall away. But
I come back, always, rubbing hands
along grainy surfaces, building broken
cathedrals to celebrate, to bear witness
to the elegance of erosion and decay.

Poem: August 24, 2019

Windows Open

Today, we can finally imagine the end
of Summer, cool mid-70s with all the
windows open, enough to make you

pause and close your eyes, enough to
suggest a long stretch, a walk and a
whiskey, and a quiet nap together, or

perhaps an hour or two with a book
beside the fire pit- Donald Hall or
Theodore Roethke, maybe a novel

from the pile beside the bed. There is
shade, and smoke and shadows, all
waiting at the edges of this August day.

Poem: August 23, 2019

Alive

It's easy enough to understand
Victor Frankenstein's desire to
conquer death, to find the secret
other path, to flip the hidden
switch we feel so certain must
exist. Life is, after all, something
we understand, something we
have in hand until, one day, we
don't; and how maddening to be
given the gift of someone- a hand
on your shoulder, a song you sing
drunkenly together, an afternoon
in the crunching leaves- how
maddening to have even yourself,
and then to fade into absence like
that, without assurances and
without a plan, and all that radio
silence, static and vague rumors,
and ancient mythologies and hope
that the unexplained might be as
simple as turning on a light that
no one has noticed, or as obvious
a flash of lightning in the dark,
caught and offered as payment,
a revelation we can't believe
we missed, hidden in plain sight.

Poem: August 22, 2019

Figuring It Out

When you were eight years old,
I opened your bedroom door
two days after Christmas to find
that you had taken a screwdriver
and disassembled every toy that
we had given you- the robotic
dinosaur, the RC car, everything
we had saved for, everything we
had waited in late night lines for.

And I know you could not know
then the adult calculus that ripped
through my mind, the tectonic
parental shifting of complex
emotional layers, the blinding
ache of processing budgets and
mechanics and history and hopes,
while still cradling the one prime,
the more than myself that is you.

And as fathers do, I suppose, I
tried to respond in the language
of rules, to speak in the straight
lines of cause and effect and cost,
until that moment became a story
we told about you, a way to
explain who you are- tinkerer,
engineer, good with your hands-
a simple definition, something
we could work with, respond to.

As if anyone can be reduced to
common language, to a set of
ingredients, pulled from a human
pantry, mixed into a recipe, as if
who you are is mine to define,
as if I could ever have that right,
as if you weren't as immense as
an ocean, as separate as the moon,

but you are my boy, a cosmic
reality that cannot be reduced, or
diagrammed, or measured, or
limited, or plotted on a map.

And so I use these inadequate tools,
these broad-brush words to bring
you into focus, to create a sense
of knowing you, to define you
through this story as curious,
to imagine that you see the world
as something to be examined and
figured out, which comforts me
because I have a way to see myself
in you, I can begin to explain this
unexplainable aching and joyful
tide, pushed and pulled by you.

And today, though you are twenty-
two, I know that you cannot know
that it would break my heart to
think that you had already taken
the world apart and had decided
there was nothing magical there,
nothing there worth finding.

Poem: August 21, 2019

Date Night Is Cancelled

When we first selected Saturday
as an official Date Night because
Sophia was invited to the sleepover
and we had no other plans, I wrote
it out- an announcement, a sign-
DATE NIGHT- in big block letters,
red outlined with black, and big
enough to fill the entire square in
the calendar, as if to crowd out any
other possibility. I added stickers
to signify the importance of this
rare evening, to suggest the way
it shone at the end of the week like
some exception, some beacon- a
kissing emoji and the word LOVE
with a heart for the O, so, yes, I
had expectations, because we so
rarely find the space in which just
we two can knock around, taking
up all the space, locking out even
the cats, so that I hear you and you
hear me and conversations don't
lose themselves in the distances
of hallways and the chaos of kitchen
cabinets, so when Mom came by
and asked if we could make the time
to visit with old friends we rarely
see, to attend what will, of course,
be a lovely dinner party, I hemmed
and tried to imagine the magic words
that would have made it impossible
to say yes, unthinkable to agree, but
that isn't who we are, and this wasn't
just any request, and even if we
both are disappointed, we love our
families, and we never close those
doors, and so we will postpone our
only Saturday and maybe meet
instead for lunch. I mean it's not
like we don't live together, sleep
beside each other every night, but
that is not what gets written on
my calendar, and I wrote DATE
NIGHT big and red and with
permanent ink. The stickers are there.
Consider the stickers. Consider
the empty space I've now filled twice.

Poem: August 20, 2019

Today is My Parents' Wedding Anniversary

In their wedding photos, my mom and dad
are kids, all trapped energy and white surfaces.

When I was in college, their friends joked
that they looked like pictures of me marrying

my mom, which spoke, I think, to both Mom's
failure to age and my physical similarity to Dad.

So now I look closely for myself there, checking
the fabric, but I cannot easily find Mom and Dad

because, of course, in this formal black and white
moment, in the dress and tuxedo, they are other

people, unwound from the woven progress, the
woof and warp that made their complex tapestry.

These are not my parents, not the people who
drove the red station wagon or gardened vegetables

in the co-op, and hosted late-night cocktail parties,
not the parents who went skinny-dipping in July,

not the adults who sang together in reviews, who
translated Willie Nelson into German, who acted

in readers theater and taught art classes and hosted
writers workshops, not the parents who remodeled

their old farmhouse, chaired organizations, gathered
so many friends around them, lost their own parents,

who dropped their children off at college and made
a home that children, grandchildren return to.

This is a photograph that cannot contain my parents,
cannot reference me, or my sister, any of us, though

I imagine the echos that follow from Mom's bright
confidence, from Dad's familiar, if goofier, smile.

It's so obviously fresh, that they became entangled
that day, threads that would not disentangle, but

my thread, Kristen's, haven't even been spun here,
so the subjects of these photos are, in a sense,

unknowable, in their reality, only referenced in
a few stories that serve as shortcuts, context for

a life these two could never imagine, so I am looking
through a window, rather than glancing into a mirror.

Poem: August 19, 2019

Ella Frances Sanders Quote (or What to Read When I Pass)
from Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe

A lot of our time is spent trying
to tie up loose ends, trying
to shape disorder
into something recognizably smooth,
trying to escape
the very limits that hold us close,

happily ignoring rough edges
and the inevitable.

We separate ourselves out
into past, present, and future,

if only to show that we have changed,
that we know better,
that we have understood something
inherent;

if only to draw neat lines
from start to finish
without looking back.

The problem is that chaos is always
only ever sitting just across the table,
frequently glancing up from its newspaper,
from its cup filled with discolored
and imploding stars.

Because chaos too waits.

Waits for you to notice it,
for you to realize

that it's the most dazzling thing you've ever seen,

for all of your atoms to collectively shriek
in belated recognition
and stare, mouth open,
at how exquisitely embedded it is in everything.

Because

we are not designed to be more orderly
than anything else;

seams have a tendency to come apart with time-

you and the universe are the same in this way,
which makes for a delicately
overwhelming
struggle.

So, then,
if you can't ever end things neatly,
can't ever put them back
quite the way you found them,
surely the alternative is

to remain stubbornly carbonated with possibility,

to never rest from your rotation.
To keep assembling stories

between us,

stories about how everything was everything,
about how much we loved.

Poem: August 18, 2019

Wasted Time

It's hard for me to imagine that
they did it that way, like my
grandfather who must have
gone to Kuesters Hardware and
bought a good length of sturdy
rope, brought it home, cut a 1x4
with a V-shaped notch on each
end for a seat, climbed the tree
in the back yard and tied both
ends of the rope to a thick, strong
limb, placed the seat in the U-
shaped cradle of the rope, and
secured it with bent nails, so
that I could swing in a warm
afternoon, while he sang,
I love you, a bushel and a peck...

or that my parents spent an entire
weekend with their friends, the
men sawing lumber, cutting
dowel rods, screwing in hinges,
and painting the wood white to
create a tri-fold puppet theater
while their wives sewed curtains
and six felt puppet characters
for each family, so that we could
make up stories, and perform
double-features with our hands,

and I am hardly able to imagine
a project that isn't bigger than
myself, that couldn't be bought
more cheaply, designed more
safely, that wouldn't sit unfinished
like an accusation, or that didn't
require more skills or tools than
a piece of IKEA furniture, not
when there is so much work to do,
not when we're all so busy, not
with so many TV shows to watch.

Poem: August 17, 2019

Red Lines

Today I will write a poem
in red pen to see what images
find their way forward when
they might have hidden themselves
(too bloody, too adamant
for my usual black pen).

These words licking the page,
pulsing like a threat, like a scab,
like an ache behind the eyes.
Everything dragging on, 
and everything cut
short.

The color red expects too much;
it insists, it insists on your
attention. Look at it waving
itself like a flag, wrapping itself
around you like bandages, like
capes, and dancing, flaunting
itself like a double dog dare.

Red is no good for writing.
There is nothing to be touched
there, nothing you would want
to hold to your face. Red
is difficult and unpleasant
and out of control.

Poem: August 16, 2019

Home Economics

I suppose we always feel poor,
limited as we are, held to a budget,
conscious of every mile driven
and every coffee ordered, hoping
to get one more year out of the grill,
another week before we have to pay
for a birthday gift or hotel stay.

And we know it could be worse.
Of course, we know it could be worse.

The bills get paid mostly on time
and we chip away at the cost of
last year's vacation and the unexpected
surgery/car damage/insurance hike.
We manage to save for the holidays,

and no one starves.

And the old blue carpet and the
hand-me-down chairs, well, they are
what they are- choices made,
de-prioritized, evidence of sacrifice.

The money goes and goes, never
waiting to be counted, never gathering
in stacks, no mountains of coins like
you see in the movies, no need
for a vault or even a safe deposit box.

We are solidly middle class until
those two or three days before the next
paycheck, when the leftovers become
precious and no one's going out and
the change jar lid gets unscrewed and

we wonder, at fifty years old, is this
what we've come to? Is this what
we've accomplished? Is it enough?

For those long hours we are poor, but
don't we always feel poor, knowing
the wheel turns this way every two weeks

until midnight every other Thursday.
Then we live the good life.

Poem: August 15, 2019

Background Check

There is a woman in a yellow bathing suit
in the background of a photograph I took

of the kids in 2004, while they splashed
in the waves, their four and seven year

old faces surrounded by sparkling water
droplets and foam, frozen in the moment

they were flung by the churning engine of
the gulf tide, and you can see how happy

they are, Annie in her floral print one-
piece, Riley with the scar on his cheek

pulled into his smile, and all the while
the woman in the background wades out

toward the horizon, her arms down and
her fingers splayed to touch the tops of

the incoming waves. She's no one we know,
a woman unnoticed in the instant I snapped

the picture, and easily removed with two
clicks in Photoshop, but I leave her there

since she appears happy in that place, in
that rescued second, everyone deserves

these moments, so I give this to her as
a gift. We only have so many places

we wish we could walk back into, we only
have so many waves we get to touch.

Poem: August 14, 2019

Less Popular TED Talks

The haunting music of public restrooms
What we can learn from misspellings
The secret life of dryer lint
The art of stapling
The most dangerous font
How wallpaper transformed my living room
The future of alchemy
The fascinating (and dangerous) world of chalk
The transformative power of worksheets
Harmonica as a form of breathing
Table manners in the animal kingdom
Why we sleep. A new theory.
Three easy steps to more contentious marriages
The secret to addition
Turning coffee into pee: a journey
Hair is gross. Don't argue with me
Discover your inner bully
The exquisite beauty of being well-armed
Why the world needs buildings
The simple power of vacuuming
An ode to socks
Why I collect fingernails, but not toe nails
What I learned by watching the news
The silly things I get paid to do
Embrace the hate and live bigger
Nothing matters. Here's why
A listing of my grievances
Want a better neighborhood? Build it with LEGO
10 traits I noticed my dog has
The three words that can get you arrested
The obvious upsides to global climate change
The scientific explanation for breakdancing
15 minutes of silence: a celebration
Your many multiverse you's would not be impressed
Feelings, everybody has them apparently
The many shades of lamps
Butterflies are the jerks of the insect world
Inside the mind of a C student
The hidden beauty of buffet lines
The twenty-seven reasons I find myself fascinating
How money proves you are better
The secret language of the French

Poem: August 13, 2019

Juicy

Oh those garden tomatoes,
split skin on top and impossibly
red and warm from the sun,
sweet and immediate and dancing
through me with every bite,
counterpoint to every memory
of food, like waking up and finding
the reality is more delicious than the dream.

Poem: August 12, 2019

Rain in August

You said we could use the rain,
and here it is, a proper shower,
going on forty minutes, enough
to wash the dust away, enough
to cool the pavement, enough
to go down deep and loosen
the soil, and I hear it at the
window, music, a whisper,
the soft crescendo of water.

Poem; August 11, 2019

Time And Relative Dimension In Space

I'd like to build a full-sized TARDIS
(the electric blue police box that Dr. Who
uses as his mode of transportation through
time and space) in my small back yard.

I'd enjoy the look of it there in the back bed,
planted among the tiger lilies and black-eyed
Susans, like it just materialized, light flashing
and making that mechanical wheeze, visible
from the bedroom, one would be tempted
to imagine grabbing a bag and dashing out
the door to discover the mysteries of life.

My wife thinks it's a bad idea. What would
you do with it, she asks, what would be
the point? I suppose we could make use of it
as a yard barn, keep the rakes and shovels there.
Maybe use it as a potting shed, or a place
to store the wood for the fire pit. It could be
a tiny library. You know it wouldn't actually
be bigger on the inside, my wife says.

And really, it's not fair to make her be so
realistic, to be the one who has to say no.
I know she has her own forms of whimsy, but
with so much to do- seal the chimney, finish
the basement, replace the back door, weed
the beds- a project like a full-sized TARDIS
would seem superfluous to any reasonable person.

But on fall days, I bet it would look especially
nice, as the maple leaves- all red and orange-
pile up around its door, and it stands tall and
solid and blue, a curious monument to how
many places we might go, a tribute to the fact
that our lives can always have the potential to
surprise us when the wind kicks up and we
step across the threshold despite ourselves.

Poem: August 10, 2019

Wedding

Suppose we were to marry again,
starting today, the whole process
from proposal to wedding night.

What would you hope to remember

if you could concentrate all that is
the two of us, distill our ideas about
ourselves and our future lives into
the swirling density, the sweeping
complexity of a wedding day,

with all of its lists and decisions,
the vows and songs and venues,
the toasts and menus, what would
you want to remember in 10 years?

What decision could possibly linger?

Would we gather in a church or
in a forest, or on a beach?

Would I wear a tie? Would you
wear white?

Would we make a toast, alone,
by candlelight?

Pasta? Muffalettas? Open bar?

Would we invite our friends
to say a few words? Would
anything need to be said?

Every decision a reflection,
a definition, a wish we tie to
ourselves and to our future selves,
a paragraph we take our time
in writing, and why wouldn't we

want to place ourselves there
in the center of ourselves, drawing
plans like architects and dreaming?

Poem: August 9, 2019

Erasure

And how do we keep
from being evil
except to insist
on nothing,
to refuse to speak
or make
a single mark?

Existing in space
and time with
any other existing
thing that
possesses its
unique will
is to be other,
and thus,
a comparison,
a threat, an evil.

Light is
the dark's evil.
Indifference
is agony
to both hate
and love.
The grass,
well the grass
we know,
is greener, more
lush and
intends to grow.

Offend or fade,
the longer you go,
the thicker your lines,
or the thinner your paper.

Poem: August 8, 2019

Redefined

The other day, as my daughter
headed out to work, I said,
Don't take any wooden nickels! 
a phrase I picked up as a kid,
probably from Saturday cartoons,
and, of course, my daughter said,

What are you talking about?

Even my wife (9 years younger.
Go me.) stared, confused, as if
maybe I had just experienced
an aneurism, which is how I know
my relevance is fading here.

I remember when my daughter
would gobble up the things
I said, even repeat them,
the weirder the better. Don't
take any wooden nickels would
have killed back then, instead of
eliciting an eye roll, exasperation.

Why are you so EXTRA? or some
sarcastic, open-handed Okay, Dad...

And yesterday, my wife reports
that after I had gone to bed,
the two of them stayed up late
to talk about sexism, and
apparently I'm the worst. I'm
not Woke. Also my memes are old.

But I feel woke, and I don't feel
extra, and I can look at shifting sand
and explain how it is shifting, and
I know that Age-ism exists, so
how about them apples, sister?

And don't we all want to keep hold
of our cool, to stay in the conversation,
to be challenged to adapt, and not
be handed a That's just Dad, as if
I can't be changed, like I'm best left
to my Bugs Bunny and my patriarchy,

like when you pack up your room,
and some things don't make it in the box.

Poem: August 7, 2019

Misdirection

You have to know where to look:
in the shadows cast by candlelight,
in the formalities of childhood games,
in the inner design of ripe tomatoes.

It's not out in the open like some
sudden loss, not a casket or highway
collision, never in the moment it hits.
It's where you can't think to look.

Three feet to the left of the locked
door. Not the food eaten, the food
left on the plate. Not inside the hat,
but held in the hand behind the back.

Poem: August 6, 2019

The Open Road

Traveling south on 41
with all the construction
and the left lane closed,
so bumper to bumper
for miles, when suddenly
I pass an oncoming
worker, his orange vest
and yellow hard hat
reflecting the morning
sun, walking alone, head
up and shoulders back
and arms swinging like
life couldn't get any
better, and he's smiling
this big smile through
his orange-red beard
as he strolls down the
middle of the empty lane,
a whole wide path to
himself, and I think,
I bet that's what freedom
feels like, as I make my
way to work this morning.

Poem: August 5, 2019

Breadcrumbs

And if I died tomorrow

would you find the pieces

of my life that scatter,

that fall away, and finding

them, would they matter?

Would you pause over 

crumbs collected in 

the corners of my chair,

would you stare like

you were staring at

some pieces of a puzzle?

Spare change from 

my desk at work, 

photograph of me laughing

with people you don't know,

some recipe for food 

I never cooked for you

on a notecard, in a book.

Would you find 

a turquoise ring, my

fraternity pin, college papers

and grade school report cards,

the Star Wars toys in the attic?

Would you find these poems,

written only for you?

And would they cast

a shadow you never saw

me cast? Would you ask me

in my absence who I think I am?

Poem: August 4, 2019

A Mood

I raise a glass to the uncomplicated,
to the well-worn path from A to Z,
free from hard lessons and unsettled
law, and to the status quo when the
status quo is pleasant, to the obvious
choice when the status quo is not.

To the autonomic reflexes that pull
our strings and to sympathetic ears.
To confirming our biases, to preaching
to a crowd, to logical fallacies and
the joys of emotional responses.


To the food pyramid we like- Salt,
Sugar, Fat, Carbs, and Caffeine.

To air conditioning and easy A's
and minimum expectations

and listicles.

To our power to go nose blind
to our own stink, to look away from
the heaving and swelling of the world.

And to all those who advise us to
forgive ourselves before we forgive others.

Poem: August 3, 2019

Idle

My friend Melinda had an African Grey parrot
that, among other tricks, amused itself by calling
the family dog, using the voices of the people
who lived there. Here, Duffer. Come on, boy!
the parrot (Sydney) would say, and the dog would
run around, looking for an invisible playmate,
all tail and smile, until, finding none, he would
settle back down for a nap, and the parrot would
wait still as stone until Duffer closed his eyes,
then start the whole game up again, a happy grey
tormenter, bored and idle-clawed, head tilted and
joyful, which is a great story, but not the one I
intended to tell, which was that we successfully
taught Sydney to tell Melinda's mother, Marty,
that she was a saucy wench, sounding all delighted,
Marty, you're a saucy wench! And we'd all laugh,
and you will never convince me that Sydney didn't
know what he was saying, or that the summer we
passed repeating that phrase wasn't time well spent.

Poem: August 2, 2019

Sitting Still

For a few minutes here,
around the fire pit, and
maybe a bit blurred
with wine, you might
forget that we are living
in the middle of town
because up there in
the neighbors' oak tree
you can see the outline
of a bard owl against
the dark blue evening
sky, and crickets hum
over the sounds of traffic
on highway 41 and
the lights from the alley
behind the house have
yet to kick on even
though it's almost dark
and the fire is lit, and
the smoke crowds out
the smell of trash cans
and grass clippings,
and the neighbors are
all inside their houses,
so you and I are far
away and alone and
reflecting the firelight,
still and smiling and
just barely leaning in.

Poem: August 1, 2019

I Would Tell the World

We are breaking our own hearts.
Our fury and offense,
our anxiety, are evidence
of our brokenness.

We are too enamored of
the perfection
that only we can see,

too convinced of
the power of our hands,
our voices, our grit
and righteousness,
to pull our own heaven
from the muck,

too sure of our responsibility
to do so.

As if we were alchemists.

As if only we could see
the arcane wheels turning,
could understand pressure,
heat and time.

As if the conjuring
of gold and longer lives
was just and justified.

As if just our one self
was the only one self
perfectly aligned to what
must be for the whole
of everything and all time.

Broken and blind to it.
We believe we must
mend that which is beyond
ourselves, bend
everything to fit us.

And the failure of the world
to take its proper shape
shatters us.

Sad that we do not see
that to mend is to mend
ourselves. To mend
is to only love,

and in loving, find
beauty in flawed and
broken things.