Pain Desire Delight

It dims
And you
Can live

With it
Dimming,
Although

You know
There’s no
Living

With it
Going
Away.

Living Never Dies

A sunny picture
Of a young woman
Smiling but bemused,

Sunlight in her hair
Staring out of frame,
No one more alive,

And the caption states
That decades ago
On this date she died.

On this date she died,
An old woman then,
And somewhat famous,

Far removed from that
Day she was pictured
Smiling up in sun.

Part of you thinks, no.
No one more alive.
No one more alive.

Senior School Days

There’s an ache in the core. Why
Do people call ache absence?
It’s not a hollow nothing.

It’s what’s there calling madly,
Call you receive somewhere else
In another filled-up space

Like your skull. So your core aches
In your skull and you can’t not
Attend to the ache’s presence,

Insistence anything but
Absence. There’s an ache at core,
And tomorrow there’ll be more

And you realize that the end
Is something you have to grow,
Something you have to learn.

Not the Gods Can Shake the Past

You could be new to this Earth,
So young you've just learned to read,
And still there’s not one moment

In your short past that isn’t
Part of the gigantic past
Of everything ever’s been,

Everything’s ever happened.
You’re in all of it, all you
Have ever done is done now,

Done for good, which doesn’t mean
You won’t do more, doesn’t mean
You can’t change things, reverse course,

Just that your tracks on the way
Back will overwrite your tracks
That you made on your way in,

Won’t ever uncreate tracks.
Try it. Carefully erase
All trace of how you found us,

How you made it to this poem.
Erasure’s only more tracks.
Melted, vanished snow still fell.