Flight
Is your skin porous
Sometimes I must trace its lines to be sure
Find again the telltale blemishes
The assurance of your humanity
In dreams I hover
Fourteen inches above the ground
Press forward and let the earth become a rushing blur
Can you see me then
Shifting my weight between worlds
Breaking and shattering into a thousand pieces
Hiding beneath the support of all things
Heat
It is hard to keep these double-edged words sheathed,
With my hand on the hilt and blood
drowning out sound in my ears.
It is hard to keep my eyes focused above the horizon,
Against the sun’s bright glare.
Tomorrow may be cloudy and cool
but today the heat stings upward from a glaring pavement.
Contours
I feel the shape of last night
A great chasm
Endless black stretchings
Estranging me from the past
Darknesses upon darkness
Terrifying and shapeless movements
Too grotesque for the eye
All the more sickening in the pale light of dawn
2013
Why such high hopes for a new year?
What grace is present in a blank calendar?
How does such inspiration and idealism spring
From this arbitrary demarcation?
But ‘hope springs eternal’ and cannot long be quenched,
So here are the hopes for the year just ahead:
Happiness through focused optimism;
The creative maelstrom uncurbed;
A bleeding, open heart.
When the year rings in, may these sparks find true life;
Springing from the ashes of a year whose hope is spent.
Three Sisters
On the day the world began,
I was born with the earth and the moon.
If you wonder how old I am,
It’s billions through and through.
On the day I was conceived,
The sun walked among mortal men.
As daughter of light I do naught or do right;
I can lie neither by lips nor pen.
On the day I came of age,
The moon claimed the night as her own.
My youth is tied to her domain;
As sure as the tides I’ve not grown.
Summer
corn, it seems
springs full grown from the ground
to towering heights
and soy leaves
in their months-long dance
sway with the wind and rain
The grub feasts and
the sparrow as well
in shade and brush and dirt
for the summer sun beats relentlessly
sustaining all things
Soliloquy
I would like to think I could be a poet on purpose.
Delivering smooth lines to you convincingly.
Stunning you not with what I said, but how I said it.
But it doesn’t really suit us, talking like that