The Red Toothbrush

Here’s where definite
And indefinite
Have some leverage—

In determining
Narrative structure.
Stories about red

Domestic items
Have different flavors
Whether they waver

Indefinitely
Or call attention
To their uniqueness—

A red is one world,
The red’s another.

Smiling by Instruments

Some days, you have to say
Were good days since you failed
To compose anything

That would have made you feel
That you’d had a good day.
A day can’t be too good

If you want to keep it
Good for good. A full day
Leaves no room for the day

To store some thing you made,
And so it’s spent—good day,
No poem, not a good day.

So this one, you could say,
By instruments, was good.

That Ship Is Canon

Life’s so busy in language,
Especially in writing—

But the life of just living,
The substance of most living,

Is less frantically peopled,
Even in noisy cities,

Than it seems to be in poems—
Less interactive, less snarled.

In ordinary moments
Of quotidian function,

People carom and scatter,
Bouncing off of each other—

People fall into daydreams,
And boring activities,

And stretches of nothing much
To do with one another.

But in texts, relationships
Take over, grow entangled,

Become engines of thinking
About being--what it is,

Or what it could be, should be—
Texts are lousy with people

Entwining most of the time.
Sometimes, the easiest way

To get away from it all,
Is to put away the book.