From Figuring Ground:

'Excerpts from the Golden Book of Bovinities"




It is said that in the world before this one,
cows ate men.  We hid in their dreams
and fell upon them while they slept. 
The sobs they made as the instruments
were handed round struck all who heard them
as vaguely cow-like.  That part was the worst,
almost too much to bear.  And then
it wasn’t.

                           ¤ 

We’d gather them together in enormous corrals
and try to explain over the loudspeakers
that it was either them or us.  Not once
did they give us any sign they understood
or in any way appreciated the time and effort
that went into what amounted, in fact,
to a kind of apology.  Such creatures, we agreed,
were not only ungrateful but impossibly dim. 
So we tore them limb from limb.

 

Cottage life

Small lakes, having nothing else
to measure themselves by, simply assume they’re oceans.
A temptation hardly worth resisting. 

The absence of galleons or whales or icebergs
only deepens the faith.  Heaven keeps its distance,
face buried in a text.

Streams are proof of nothing.
Say river in their presence one fine morning
then closely observe what happens next. 

And really, wasn’t it about time we all stopped mewling
about the source of the sacred Nile?

Today your past as explored was a grand hotel,
right out of The Shining – arterial
hallways, carpets tortured by endlessness, windows
fungal with neglect.  But how fitting the air there was,
as on one of those home planets the bright ships of the future
touch down upon; science we were destined to breathe.

“I miss my parents,” you said, disappearing
around a corner, lost in translation,
sitting so still beside me on the deck. 

The sound could pass for water imitating glass. 
Or the other way around.  We’re none of us
in a position to draw anything but conclusions.

How many times Atlantis

Twice a day, the archipelago of small black islands
of rock a league offshore sees what’s left
of its million or so years go completely under.

Then the sea, with its absolute memory,
agrees to pretend nothing ever made place
or geography there. And we land lovers,

to whom the waters always speak
beneath their breath, look out, take the measure
of how warm Atlantis went;

the brittle, ashy pageant of its horror –
one world’s drowned and drowning history
reduced to what’s essential in the cold

grey muscle of a wave breaking in the sun,
lashed along its line to white, torn to spray
against the ruin of prophecy.

No place in their shape, or length, or sense
for such an end.  The waves don’t end,
of course.  Rather, they’re sent

crawling up the beach to thin to less than the depth
of skin, their force to limit spent, their edges
to transparency; what was dark now suffused with light

so that a thing of moment made, of pure surface,
might begin the journey back through no more
or less than all it entered in.

Father always loved the ladies

What’s left of my father’s white hair is cut brutally short. 
He looks like a prisoner because he likes the barber.  She
visits the home twice a month. He can’t grow it
fast enough.  He wants me to meet her,
one of the girlfriends he keeps on a string.
 
Other women wait to make their way to him,
to rest their warmth and fragrance on his bed, touch
the cold river in his neck.  Because he has bad dreams
and tends to cry out, it’s easier for all concerned
if he’s kept in a private room.

They are not preparing to call after him or weep. 
They will not ask God what happened.  They have
been down this road more times than you’d care
to imagine.  And they’ll tell you if you ask:  it’s best
when they go at night, get lost inside their sleep.

If I know my father, he will wait by the door
until they’re done, for one last pass
through their vague eyes, the soft confusion of their hair. 
I can’t think where he’ll go from there. 

My love

In her arms sleep hunted me through foreign destinations
with weapons borrowed from other men’s dreams;
rivals with a taste for reading too much
into casual concatenations of stars. 

She left the day I swore up and down
I knew every trick in the book.
Leave me alone, she said,
adding a smiley face under a forwarding address.

I’ve got troubles of my own, replied the purblind moon
when I looked him up.  He’d just discovered
that his heart had somehow gotten hold of the words
to every love song ever written.

Tell me about it, I said.