Here are some poems from the attic! :)

The Bosatsu’s Lament

We are about to lose our beauty

and our friends.

We have wasted time

in the heat of time’s desert.

In broken homes

just before they break.

At kitchen tables past bedtime,

where people whisper oh my God,

is this the way

the story is supposed to be?

We try

to be as agile as vacuum.

But our weight is too ugly,

our will, too strong.

No one will miss us, 

we try to believe.


This was the title poem of my third chapbook:
The Dead Thoreau

I am lying under the ground.

There is soil on top of me, and grass above that.

It is not a time for snow, because roots

are busily burrowing through my skin.

Where there is no light,

there are other ways to think of time.

I am never the first to know

when the sun is shining, nor when the picnic is canceled

because of rain.

The summer squall means little,

save for that exquisite wetness, indistinguishable

from an afternoon of sweet gentle showers.

Beneath the hawk and sparrow,

my flight becomes the revolution of the earth. 

Tomorrow will arrive when it is ready.

When the sun finally seeps through my limbs

I need think of nothing but the world I am creating

as I wait for what will happen next.

Zealots

A woman

her gray hair up in a scarf

shrieks something about “the foreigners

taking everything over.”

Her lipstick is the only color

on a day where ice and salt

wick from the asphalt into soles

and overcoats trapped in the muted deluge

of frantic umbrellas.

In the days of Noah

her flesh would have nourished the benthic

snails and nematodes

awarded unthinking dominion

over every mountain, every soul.  Above,

laughter at a drunken father’s nakedness--

baying of donkeys, rats gnawing through

floors.

She grips herself like tablets of stone--

Again, the foreigners

are taking everything over.  Passing mortals

avert their eyes

as Moses must have

when first approaching the burning bush.

How dare she call herself chosen!

Would that a truck would hit her,

let the color bleed from her lips, more salt

to thaw the ice, the road!  Then,

as apostates argue,

let us search the sky for doves, a single

twig, the promise of virgin land.