“Poems, like women’s shorts,
shouldn’t be too short.”
“It depends on your point of view.”
********
“I can’t see.”
“Open your eyes.”
“I see what you mean.”
********
“Do you travel to escape what you left behind?”
“No, I travel to escape what lies ahead.”
********
A house in the mountains is no place for the squeamish.
If a mouse doesn’t want to see one of its fellows
lying in a trap with a broken neck,
it should go somewhere else.
********
“Happy birthday!”
“Don’t remind me.
I’m too old to celebrate birthdays.
So what did you get me?”
********
On the wings of a storm
the woods are mine,
the wind-waxed drifts of snow
undulate,
soft and sinuous in the silence.
I ski alone
but for metaphors of you.
********
We assume roads go
somewhere.
We assume bridges connect
two places.
We assume time from womb to tomb
has meaning.
********
How do we survive
in the world today
all of us?
Toddlers washed up on beaches dead,
millions camped in foreign lands,
waiting forever to go home.
One in seven rich and free;
six in seven poor, chaotic,
white lands no longer islands in the storm.
We “cannot endure, permanently,
half slave and half free.” Or
one-seventh rich, six-sevenths poor.
If not the poor then who
will tote trash, excise excrement?
the rich and the poor: symbiosis.
Poverty like production globalized
The poor always with us,
and that’s no metaphor.
Anyone can go anywhere.
Oceans and tall walls
make fragile fences.
Forget morality,
open doors more efficient
than machine guns at every entrance.
How do we survive in the world today
all of us or none of us?
All of us or none of us.
********
At night
whiskey
on the rocks.
Under fertile fields,
land
on the rocks.
On rocky trails,
cairns, rocks
on the rocks.
Slipping on scree,
seeking to stand
on the rocks.
In a trembling time
desperate and down
on the rocks.
Like a rock
a helping hand
on the rocks.
You.
