what’s left

There is an equation for this:
an imbalance of temperature
added to wind shear
equalling an F5 swath of correction
one mile wide.  For us,
it’s personal, raising brick
of what used to be a city
to find some(one) any(thing) living
underneath walls, below floors
that were ceilings; roofs
torn open like sardine tins, keyless.

We put up signs with street names
so we can learn where our houses were.

We learn the sky is sometimes hungry.
We hug our children.  If we can.

After we count the bones,
after we tell the ashes
we remember a random sparing
of an indifferent giant
which is less mercy
and more chance, impersonal scythe
to life with a face on it,
pick for logic in a rubble
of computer monitors and picture frames,
but that’s gone missing too.

Easier to tally what’s lost
than find meaning in what’s left.

weird sounds: the bellgoat

Reblogged from eulonia country:

bellgoat comes from over the mountain. a bellgoat is
your neighbor growing out her hair. bellgoat knows
the anatomy by heart
of every dream in which you will end up running after something
you can’t see.

a bellgoat, incapable of lying, lying in a cape on the shore.
(this sentence intimates a cape: a body of water engulfed by sound…

Read more… 155 more words

My, God, I have serious poem envy right now. E. is brilliant!

velliety into volition

Paul (from somewhere in Romans):  For I do not do what I want, but do the very thing I hate.  

If only
I were a better mother
a kinder daughter
a truer lover,
less a liar sighed into air
and forgotten; inclination
minus drive leans living
in directions I won’t take:
a lightly traveled path
glimpsed and abandoned.

Still, this imperfect
skirting of rubber
kissing asphalt–
my do balanced after
I am
and I think
until the scales tip the equation
and I bite the apple.
I take the hand.
I welcome the kiss.

Choice is choice.  

 

the promiscuity of pollen

Summers, I drive past
regimented rows of patented plants
weedless and well-watered
behind signs saying where
seed DNA was spun,
like gold from straw was once,
magic from a mundane wheel;
but centrifuged stiltskin-like
and greedy for progeny.

There’s no stopping the spread.
Wind is innocent and bees
follow instinct as directionless.
Pollen is promiscuous and doesn’t care
who owns its code in the scatter
towards seasonal immortality,
the only way plants can know it.