Look, mom! The little yellow bird is back!
my littlest one cries, she, who is not yet too old for wonder.
The bird yellow like a shadowed daisy,
bigger than a hummingbird but so tiny, delicate…
I ached for dreams that galloped
through my head long ago—
fever dreams of Paul and George,
flying like Superman, in a red cape…
Joy has large and small containers as in the aftermath of a welcoming in-person chair yoga class
I hear Led Zeppelin acoustic ballads on the car radio while driving home from Lenox town to the
grace of a solitary chickadee’s contented melody from a rooftop as I pass below while walking.
One heart one bod
experience at first handsy
escalating intimacy
Can you picture it?
Could you make the leap if I asked politely?
Cruising through the interstate, one hand on the wheel, the other on my thigh,
Can you feel that rush, that high?
Sucks all the helium he can
to escape the blood hound on his tail
for petty thievery & having too much fun.
Hopelessness—caked in dirt
and tossed aside,
like the bird
with a broken wing
You may wonder who will reach
down to perform the necessary miracle,
and when and what: the white bandage,
pristine; the laying on of hands; the soup
and sleep and bread and bed.
This morning I woke to slow rain,
and remembered waking with you
sprawled across my bed in a toccata
of bones muscles skin and breath.
A swan,
His neck a staircase into
The white clouds,
Wings, oars
Of silk,
Toiling
Against
The waves of
Water…
The first time Elizabeth jumped, James was on the ground with a tarp; /
they were in different worlds and the two had never met.
“No one understands me,” Elizabeth said. She was lying /
on the floor of her pink-striped bedroom and was talking to the ceiling.
Leaving the hospital, she said:
“Today, everyone looks like something I ate.”
Right now? I asked, scanning the parking lot.
“Yes. And everyone throughout my life.”
I thought so. Most of the meat
Loaf I digested resembled
My eighth-grade class.
O phalanx of clouds,
formed against your own shadow,
diorama of the maxim that armies,
like lovers, come in pairs—
promulgate now in bulleted wisps,
conformist’s dark room dripping in chemical
& negative & clothes-pinned evidence
on the sunbaked
patio, a little girl,
discovers a snake
sunning itself
on a boulder
she runs into
the house
jubilantly reports
the presence…
I’m so sorry you don’t have the vision
I have. Like when Lesbia
showed me the new Cure cassette in ‘92
I was able to pick out
what would be the most popular songs
in two seconds.
color
came to me suddenly
not blood, but red, reddish
and burning. Only
at first abrupt,
like a punch line, a
jawbone or
hallway carved
The sky, a flawless blue,
the kind of California day,
that gets under your skin.
Scaffolds holding up the heavens
stretching against celestial infinity.
Is there a placeholder for me
in that expanse?
Flamingoes all pink and proud
at the Junior Museum & Zoo.
Kids & grandparents all aflutter
flocking to public feeding time
in a fluff-and-strut club of cute.
no music, only the daylight, the green
of the trees growing, so fresh and bright,
imagine a leaf, a single one of them
held to your cheek, in its chill,
its refusal of heat, this early in the year,
the stars so far from here, the birds
in their lightness going about their business
Discarded on the train tracks,
a crushed bag of potato chips,
bright red label glaring.
Two bus drivers linger
by their idling vehicles—
one bends to his lighter,
the wreath of smoke
drifting briefly
Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals
awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.
Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least
hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations
infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory
Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.
The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.