Let Us Consider

A little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice was eaten by someone with a sweet tooth the size of an elephant’s tusk.
         Ah, he said, this darn tooth, it’s driving me nuts.

         Then another voice is heard. It’s the...

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we’d gather at this feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy's gluey clothing
and we’d smell like Mumma's Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that’s all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongue
the blood of tree?

    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                            the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
     everything's okay,
  a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
                 the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
          The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it's night for many miles, and then suddenly
                                     it's not, it's breakfast
   and you're standing in the shower for over an hour,
                   holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
      Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep.
                            I sleep. I dream. I make up things
   that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
                      The trees in wind, the streetlights on,
          the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
      It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                  green beautiful green.
   It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.

We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...

night watch

You can fall in love
in a museum, but only

with the art
or its silence—or the stranger

you don’t mean to follow

suffering past the Old Masters
& the unnamed

servants. Rembrandt’s face
half in shadow—

you can fall for what
isn’t there already, or

with the 13th century—the...

In Central America
To whistle in your home meant you were making room for bad luck
Like a man who didn’t wipe his feet clean at the door
It meant you were the inviting host of an evil spirit
It meant you were asking...

You remember the mermaid makes a deal,
her tongue evicted from her throat,
and moving is a knife-cut with every step.
This is what escape from water means.
Dear Colleagues, you write, for weeks
I’ve been typing this letter in the bright
kingdom of my imagination....