MEETING AGAIN AFTER DECADES
Our phones on the tiny table
like decks of cards
are silenced, but they light, they shake.
We know that they’re thinking.
Billions of years
none of the cosmic issues have been settled.
Water’s still seeking its own level,
the planet needs a few more eons
to figure out what it all comes down to.
On the smaller scale, it’s hesitantly spring,
and the server says No problem, back in a few.
Where we want to be is exactly
where we are,
but there's no way to get there
from here.
TRASH PICKER
It's Monday and our trash is out at dawn
when a pickup, one of the really old ones
(from the Forties, maybe?) with the puffy fenders,
like a creature twisted together out of balloons,
wobbles down the block, a little windblown,
looking for stuff that's not as bad as we thought.
That can't be an easy life, though I get the satisfactions.
We’re all still hunter-gatherers, at heart,
and our angle is hmmm what could I use this for
changing a stick or stone or shadow into a tool,
which is not a bit different from making metaphors,
and the free in Free Stuff means, whatever else it means,
free to become something completely different.
Yet when he stops and swings his tailgate down
there’s a tiny wildness tightening my chest
as if he were taking irreversibly and forever
every thought I never finished thinking
and all I ever meant to say to every person
I ever gave up on too quickly
or felt too quickly had given up on me.
WHEN YELLOW LEAVES, OR NONE, OR FEW DO HANG…
If life is a year, then this is
November, just about the day
I'm thinking it'll never get cold
and it gets cold; if life is a day,
then now is the darkening, serious
but not quite deep enough to sleep in;
if life is an hour, then I'm near the end
of a story I might or might not
finish in an hour. But life is a minute,
and suddenly looking up
from the page, who can tell
whether it's the middle or end
or beginning of a minute?
Note: “Momentum” first appeared in Harvard Review. “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang....” is reprinted from For Now (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and “Again,” “Essay on Clouds,” “Theory of Everything,” “Fire Warnings,” and “Sentence” are reprinted from During (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)
