"This Tree"
I stop walking,
and contemplate
the way the thin
arm of this tree
once bent upward,
before stretching
out over the river.
I’m just happy
with the result.
I didn’t need
to be here the
entire time the
way showed itself.
The arm is still
growing. I can
hear it drinking
the air a small
fraction of an
inch from its mouth.
I can see it,
the mouth, I mean,
can see the arm
because my hand
grips it—I’m trying
to compensate
for not being
here in some way
I can’t fathom.
I like how I’m
failing. It feels
good. A thousand
years from now, I
hope, the arm will
have made a bridge
that a sloth, or a
slight variant
of one, could cross,
its heart racing
to reach the end
before the river begins
to rise.
"Death Dream"
“An instant of longevity
is all it takes to make
a life,” said some sort of guru,
his whole body below
the neck covered in a thick robe
to keep the cold outside.
I had walked through the snow, falling
heavily, to see him.
Why wasn’t he inside?
“See this flake,” he said, “it’s falling
down already again.”
I kind of knew what he meant, I
yes, had walked through the snow, falling
heavily, to meet him.
I looked into his eyes as spring
entered, then spring was all
over. I began to worry
that there were two other
seasons to make disappear in
the same instant. “Worry,
he said, “but don’t worry.”
How did he know what was going on inside me?
He must have been some sort
of guru, or just a plain saint
whose eyelids had fallen
in a flash of freezing lightning
as his senses came back to him.
"Society"
The temptation to flee
it isn’t the same as
the temptation to turn
away from it, to turn
for a moment or two
into an individual
able to surrender
almost everything,
and then to turn back
to the daily, insistent
strife, to turn back to it
without hope or bitterness.
Without hope? The question
is, is society life?
Well, of course it is.
It is, of course, where love
resides, and maybe self-
respect is precisely
what love breeds in us
individuals. And those who
don’t find love? They can’t
be negated, at least
not a moment or three
after they flee.
I’ll never flee, not when
I can sequester myself
within society once
in a while, like abiding
highway noise breaking
down at midnight and dawn.
Abiding? Vestiges of
irony keep me awake.
Where am I now? I have
a rendezvous with
teeming life, only
obsolete twice in a while.
Where I am is a place
where strife isn’t deathly,
where politics reforms
every single crack
in a necessary sidewalk,
where a drugstore exists
at the intersection of
pain and free, where
the temptation to wax
sentimental begins to
harden, and then begins
to recede, but not to melt.
I’m either in or I’m
in. There’s no halfway,
and no quarter of an inch
confessing that it wants
even less. So, armed with
a little bitterness, I’m in.
Against me bitterness
has no chance, or a little,
as a car walks into me,
as its metal skin plays
an ambulance tune on
an instrument that flesh
and blood hands can’t completely conform themselves to.