Despite your puffed cheeks, playful gallop,
the lovable way you corral your young, I must keep
my distance. No, I cannot (cannot!) give you what you want.
Yesterday
looking for snails,
five students died
when their canoes overturned.
The soft-bodied snails
went untouched—never breaking
their hold on the rocks.
How much can a reservoir
hold in the dark? Ask
the moon who was not out
washing their bodies with light.
One student survived,
and he might grow up
to be a scientist with tremendous drive—
feel a need to get a move on
and figure out his atoms,
how they fly, how they stay
peaceably intact. The paper said
with all of their gear
they sank like rocks. Except
for the survivor who had been
asleep on his pack. The parents
are blaming themselves,
but they still want answers.
Yesterday, a mother broke
a stone on a stone
to see its center, and found
an ordinary middle.
When Fate Is Looking for You
A girl I knew in college was eaten
by a lion in Africa. Which could happen to you,
right as your life is happening. Its teeth
could have met the pink of your own spine, the one
your mother has slapped into good posture since
kindergarten, the spine still humming electric
with optimism and possibilities. It’s your brain
that the spine heads to, a brain that may remember
the television late at night running static
on an empty channel. Everyone is in bed, the television
didn’t get turned off, and you, conductor of voltage
out of the carpet fibers, touch it and are shocked.
Feel the buzz running down your spine as you
flip to the station showing animals eating their prey.
Sometimes, just one wildebeest goes down while
the entire pack thunders out of the camera’s view.
Colleen wasn’t looking for this kind of ending.
When it pounced, she could have been reminiscing
about her early days in Alhambra, the weight of her
blue school uniform gone for good. Or maybe she was
stringing nets into a wide stream all wrong—thinking—
I don’t have the hands for this, but I will try it again.
And the lion might have just been looking
to scare things, this might not have been deliberate.
Never approach a church at a moment like this
and expect those gathered to be ready to sing.
Having It?
The story likes to end with a body.
He cuts her open, takes the knife
to the bone, but finds her
to be just like any other goose.
I like to think she made the golden eggs
to bridge their lives. Why not admit
that we all do extraordinary things
for money and love?
Today the goose is made of steel.
She isn’t that rare. And we’ve quit
trying to dismantle her magic body; rather,
we’re trying to predict when the next egg
will fall. Sometimes people kill for it.
That’s how want works. Sometimes the goose
is disguised, sometimes a sign is posted
letting everyone know that the driver or cashier
is carrying a goose holding less than
twenty dollars. Luckily, for everyone, the real goose
is dead and imaginary, or the greedy among us
would be invading every farm, sorting through
even the clucking hens, turning their beds
over, tossing them around by
their feet. We’d be feeling inside them
with an oily glove, wanting the eggs
to be our miracle, certain their existence
had nothing to do with love.
Contemplating Light
Tonight the moon is perfect. She beams on every West Coast city—whole—entirely the moon. Jane Austen is lining somebody’s shelf, and it is likely that a silverfish has slipped into a binding again, to thrive on the starch. And even though the silverfish is the exact shape of a crescent moon, we should not blame the moon. She may dissolve. Astronauts have tried to break the moon, have kicked her under their hard boots, have drilled tokens out of her, have plunged a flagpole in her side. I know I am not the moon. Her light bounces off of my lit TV. She is giving me something. A way to follow the bleached stones home. My canary in her cage is under a dark cloth. It is night and she cannot take the moon. It makes her stir. It makes her cry and toss seeds and husks from her cage onto the floor. Her hard beak glistens, her tongue rolls over. She craves a darker night.
Breaking
The cats seemed to understand
that we didn’t love them—
barely loved each other—
and that we wouldn’t be lasting long.
We caught them from behind,
put them in our trunk. We weren’t
cruel. They were placed
in a cozy box. You
found a large rock to go
on top. Everything was safe
as we rattled to the pound. And are
these your cats? asked the man
at the pound. No, they aren’t, I said,
they were just cats, we were just a couple
who’d found them. Really,
they were my grandmother’s farm cats—
thin, sick, pink-eyed. She’d grown tired
of pouring them milk. And if no one
claims them, let me leave my name,
I said. (I didn’t want them but
I’d take them.) Good of you to have brought
them in, said the man, but these cats
were doomed—respiratory infections.
We drove—days numbered—to a hotel
out of town. Upstairs, we walked in,
the television already running. What about
the rock? you asked. I have it,
right? And I thought about the rock—
a small moon resting in the trunk’s
blue carpet nest. All you could think about
was opening our window and dropping it
down four floors, aiming it into
a man-made lake. You pressed. I said no.
But you got the rock anyway. Out it went.
I turned the channel, hyenas laughing
over their fresh kill. You said it would
be fun. It landed on the pavement,
missed the lake completely
and split in two. You shut the window
and kissed my neck. This is what
I know about my body, it turns
to be loved at every instance, it feels
warmth and it wants and it wants.
About Myself
I am always sad and my garbage
is always stinking, on a curb
not so far away. Let me start again.
I wear my sadness like a coat
and the coat never comes off.
Its wooden buttons are fastened to me.
My mother made it. My father handed her
the idea. My pockets are empty
and it has always been too long.
I used to carry a hankie and a tiny mouse.
But my pocket grew a hole. No, the mouse
is not responsible. I felt all of its well-mannered paws
and they felt me. It had one tooth that kept snapping
loose. And when I approached a man
the mouse
would wink its left eye. And when I prayed to God
the mouse would crawl to my pocket’s velvet edge.
I woke up one day, the sky was blue,
and it and my hankie were gone.
I thought about giving my sadness a bath.
But why remind this heavy self
of how it is nothing like the tiny mouse
riding a feather out of town.
If, with my two giant feet, I could have tunneled
alongside that mouse, it would have led me
to a new world where mice die
at the drop of a hat and everyone knows this
and, therefore, exists bareheaded out of love.
Assignment: Write a Poem about an Animal
No, I told John. You may not write a poem about
your will. If not my will, he said, how about my soul?
I said no. He wrote about a male impala dominating
his female herd. Oh, I knew I could never trust him.
The antelope was not simply an antelope; its eyes,
of course, were the same gray as John’s, had the same
number of violet flecks. And unlike most impalas
this one wasn’t leaping through Africa; rather, it was living
on the outskirts of a park in John’s hometown.
Twenty-five and still shooting bb’s into songbirds and
digging through their bodies to get his bb’s back,
bragging about the women he’s conquered and the adventurous
ways he took them. He wrote the poems
I didn’t want to read. In his last, he gathered images
from LA streets, described the La Brea tar pits
off of Wilshire Boulevard, the curve of the mastodon’s neck,
his already-sunken hind legs and tail. John wasn’t sure
how so many got trapped. He wondered what kind of urge
led them into this bubbling mess. In conclusion, he used
himself to understand. Twice, rushing to buy condoms
and cigarettes, he ran across a parking lot and stepped
into puddles of oil and water, ruining his tidy socks.
They were mostly young males, he wrote, I guess
it happens. Which, in the end, reminded me of my own soul—
bright and impulsive with an important date to keep,
she too could overlook the dark and liquid road.
Happy Endings
I like the story where the cowboy lives
because the bullet struck the whiskey flask
instead of his thin-walled heart. Or the one
where the boy is thrown from the wrecked car
and lands perfectly on a pillow of grass
instead of the awful road. I’m to the point
where if someone has to get killed, please
deliver a clear lesson along with that death.
No random, Godless acts. No mad dogs, no
hatchets being wielded at good girls slumbering
in the folds of their warm beds. After reading Cinderella,
after observing the fat and happy cartoon mouse
weekly escaping the ravenous cat, after watching
my fellow earthlings pull together and pound
the Martians into the rock-hard desert using sarcasm
and sticks, I’ve come to appreciate the happy ending,
no matter how tacky or unearned. It’s today. And death tolls
continue to climb. You think I want the truth?
Teton Road
Bear on your path. Wolf at your thigh. Cougar
leaping from a low branch onto your back. Your back?
How can this happen? On a Wednesday? Daisies pop open.
Good Samaritans merrily travel to donate blood.
But here they are, beasts gaming against us,
growing suburban in the mountain valley. So much
like my neighbors—hungry, apathetic, bored. A child
was bit on the wrist by a prairie rattler
in one of the Dakotas and now she’s dead. All of her.
Poof. Even though the cock crowed in the morning,
stirring the farm and assuring everything within earshot
that the same familiar circle had been started anew.
Even the penned hogs believed this. I can barely eat.
Gnat on my heart. Mice in the pantry. I won’t snap
the strawberries from their happy vines. Bargain:
How about I never destroy anything? Solution: I’ll stay
always in this chair. Now from stage right enters
a conversation with myself. ME: You can’t do it.
ME: I can. ME: Cats starve. Clams are sealed
so tightly rarely do they love another clam.
But you—you’ve got promise. ME: And my chair.
ME: On the other elbow of this country,
a meadow shivers, and a fox has been outfoxed,
its leg in a trap. ME: But if I leave the mountains,
I can’t imagine my life. ME: I have given you
all these chances. Take them.
III
Half-Hazard
They can put a girl on the moon right now, I suppose.
The details wouldn’t be too hard to crack.
Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.
Earth faces venoms, disease, foes and woes.
Free of that jeopardy, she won’t rocket back.
If you put the right girl on the moon, I suppose.
Some might worry alone she’ll face lunar lows.
Does a girl who lacks parties turn blue in pitch black?
Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.
Like Buzz, Neil, and other above-average joes,
she’ll travel in space boots and wield a screw jack,
if we put our best girl on the moon, I suppose.
We’ll blast her above every bloom of dog rose.
Let her farewell our bright spots along with our wrack.
Dangers here. Perils there. Who will own how this goes?
Prepared for the darkness and cut off from schmoes—
whole girl, half-hazard. On a zodiac track,
we’ll put that girl right on the moon, I suppose.
Endangered. Imperiled. And watch how it goes.
Gardening on Alcatraz in July
Cutthroat plants overtaking other plants. It was new to me.
The needs of the calla lily. The habits of the rose.
There is one artichoke growing on the island. How it
arrived in Officer’s Row nobody knows. The prison
shut down and the plants grew wild, persisted for decades.
Concerning the gardens, I know the long story
and the short one. The veteran gardeners have arms
marked with scars from tearing out the monstrous
blackberry and rose bushes that overran everything.
Volunteers pulled for months to uncover the survivors.
Most famously, the Bardou Job rose, thought to be extinct,
is alive again, back in the world, shocking rosarians.
Now tourists trickle down the windy side of the island
on the west road passing the cell house and a steep slope
of drosanthemum lit up in pink. Tended by robbers and
counterfeiters, fed by bathwater, restored from photos
these flowers are back. On Sundays, I lead this garden tour
from the dock to the summit, again and again, month
after month—Machine Gun Kelly on their minds—I show them—
tell them—really want them to notice—foxglove, aster, fuchsia,
sweet pea, sage—all rupturing in their persistent blooms. Because
we should all bear witness to what we didn’t expect to see.
What We Did before Our Apocalypse
We stockpiled all the bottled water we could find. We argued
over Christmas tre
es until all the good ones were gone.
We drove less. We starved ourselves of carbs. We buried
Muhammad Ali in Kentucky. We ran on charisma.
We took the batteries out of the smoke detectors so all the toys
would work. We jiggled the toilet handle to try to fix the problem.
We let people who were acting like assholes merge into
the carpool lane. Orgied out, we debated canceling HBO.
We packed our suitcases without hairspray and barely
any liquids at all. We reversed our vasectomies.
We fled to the mall and bought shoes. We battled the goddamn
kitchen ants again and their relentless thirst for grease.
We watched Carrie Fisher’s heart stop on a plane. We fretted
like bigots over bathrooms in one of the Carolinas.
We cherished Alec Baldwin and reported every rogue backpack
to the authorities. Underneath the table at Buca di Beppo
we all held hands and prayed. We watched an old man insult
nearly everybody and then let him fondle the nukes.
State Lines
Geese fly and refuse to honor them.
White-tailed deer graze unequally
on both sides of the boundary. But I’ve
had to decide, time after time, and declare
a street address, a spot I am now stitched to
by my never-ending mail. I owe so much.
Envelope after envelope, a steady flow.
I understand why some delinquents blow
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