KING TIDE

The boardwalks scuttled like diving reef schooners –
a walkable Galilee if anyone dared, but each jogger rears
to higher ground. I’ve lost my son a half-second here
or there before I pulled him up, his lips like planks,
in tubs and pools and once a mirror lake – the obsidian
endless kind that really ends abruptly in roots and husks
and carcasses and muck. This country’s full of them.
All summer we swim bellies up, avoid anoxic thoughts.
 
The joggers, any other day, linger at the point
just long enough to catch their breath and contemplate
an app, perhaps the sun. Yes, there it is, afloat. My son,
I need to know what you thought of water when it first,
again, surrounded you. Your eyes were wide. You didn’t
make a sound. Not one thing was born or died.

THE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE OF THIS WORLD

​The successful people of this world
are always busy. They work all day
then come home and need to do something
so they cook the dinner, wash the car, cut the grass.
 
It's because of the successful people
that we have water restrictions:
this side of the street on even days,
that side on odd.
 
They like that kind of thing: schedules,
they are usually big fans of schedules,
and when they have free time in theirs
they spend it composing new schedules.
 
When they take medication
they always put it in one of those plastic things
that divides the pills up by days.
In conclusion:
 
the successful people of this world
are busy and efficient, their actions
are their own rewards, and a green lawn
during a heat wave is their poem.


"The Successful People of the World" previously appeared in The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). 

FORECASTS
​
​it is how  our footsteps alter              the flurries
how we move through the breeze
 
                                                          in the boughs of our hope.
 
when time stops           in the sideways glance
you will find me                         in the missed heartbeat
 
see me                 in the many moons of your longing
and furies.
 
                    in the place where words        fail us
with a sharp               astute  parlance            and
 
war is upon us and        the sun sets black
                                                               under the yoke of
 
                            a darkening century
             
again
                            we are going nowhere          fast.
 
                                                in storms and tornados
of prognosis and forecasts
 
                             over a horizon of planted crosses
 the weather turns     passive aggressive on us.
 
and there is no way  we can say                     such things
                                                                      about the weather
 
as we forget how to move through              the elements
that we are.   
 
it’s up to       you and I               what we’ll do
in this tortured           oil-spilled         winter.
 
                                          where                 even in sleep
loneliness             alters us                re-interprets us
                                                                                      holds us
hostage.         
 
                           how     I even begin to smile at people
in my dreams.
 
how a little bit of light brings nuance to the shutter
in  the prolonged exposure photography         of  grief
 
where the struggling light   shreds            
the clouds of our sorrow
                                                   into the rags of tomorrow
 
and
of course       
              you will also find me here    waiting
                                                                                     for spring.
 
​