10/12/2007

For All Things Promised

A new thing comes
from all things: what were
we before they gave us
science?

Wherever we go, there
is conversion; I have
struggled to be what
you had hoped-

simple, free,
immaculate.

Torn from seclusion,
an oyster scraped and
eaten from its jagged shell

leaving only hollow
outlines of our missing
bodies; I have struggled

not to be what is
missing, but what is
touched and travels.

Afterward, the molecule
unwinds and passes on
its fiery promise.

10/08/2007

Just Deep Enough

For love, in ways of planting: seeds,
gloves, a hole just deep enough
to coat the husked tight bodice.

A wary eye kept sleepless, trained
in science, schedules chronicled
and followed; the wakened sprout,

frail green, lengthened threads
a burden on its troubled lover.
Chance, devotion: walking through

a garden, purpled, pulling vines
laddered to a thoughtless sky whose
education- light, a bird, a weeping cloud

and nothing else.

10/02/2007

A Different Kind of Debt

Those hours, formed
like rock, fasten
earth into its body;

violence is a spice
the taste of salt
and soil. I am, at last,

the separating wall,
hip from heart, lung
from blood, the sea route

from its buttressed
path. Landlocked miles
gather heat and fog like

memories of loss; while
water thrusts then rushes
back from shore.

These nights, I practice
flowing past the breaking
point; a wave whose arc

fixes on the waiting
darkness. There, dissolved,
extinct and silenced,

what moves, what strains,
what struggles
disappears.

What Did You Expect?

Wait. Your body
is a tool for measure;
surely, now you know
the helpless are immune.

Once, I saw
my father's face
stranger than disjointed
bone, blue and swollen;

I am not as
useless as I seem.
Someone sees what
someone else is missing.

On a stretch of
beach, fragments of
a shell. I gather pieces
of a whole and glue them

into art, into memory
nearly reaching likeness
or an effigy of God; how
marginal the difference!