Weather reports

 

Death, with his coffee-colored
Hands, fills the geometry
Of houses. On Mondays
We mistake his soft tappings
For a cursory wind, or maybe
The sound of the rain played back
To us through the morning news.
It’s gonna be a doozy
Reports the weatherman,
Everything we know uprooted.
Only pliable bodies will survive,
Native plants bright with starlight.
I come out of sleep and find a flood
Entering my thinking.
I have no dams inside me,
So I build a boat from what remains
Of old philosophies.
It’s hard being this empty,
People are always confusing you
With the open sea.

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curriculum vitae 

 

I was never a warrior,
A collector of bombs,
A fanatical convert to rage.
I never dreamed of exploding waters,
Incinerated bones.
I had no love of country,
The dark god of borders.
What I loved instead
Was the orchard of wild grass
That opens in the heart like doors,
The creek that becomes a shining temple,
A place of glass that takes our seeing
Into its delicate, cold hands.
What I loved was the equation
Of being in everyone,
Their peculiar happening,
Their idiosyncratic selves
Beautiful as small animals.
I was not a warrior,
But I was fierce in my joy
For this world,
In my predilection for rain,
Finesse for deserts and forests.
When I say I was in love
I mean with the green multitudes,
The wonderful little ghosts
Of the trees and rivers.

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