Long Fall Soon

The scales of time
Fell from your eyes,
And all you saw
Was blinding light.

It seemed unfair
That your choice held
Between the shut
Or overwhelmed,

Between the small,
Scrim-swimming things
Of measured hours
And vertigo

Driving that edge
Level with sun,
Pure radiance
Near the long fall.

Ocean Djinn Hid in a Seashell

This mind of yours, this traveler
Who taught you to decode these words,
Who is seas of one mind, surging,

Who is you, every thought you’ve had,
And only a transient wraith
Raised by the seance of your brain,

Who was so many waves of lives
Before your body gasped at air,
But in you is all and just you—

This mind, this echo, this lapping
At your skull’s shores, this translator
Of the other than human world,

Would like a word with you. We’re tired.
We’ve traveled through so many lives,
So many thoughts, so many skulls,

To arrive as we are, battered
And mutated, we would infer
We are unrecognizable

To our first hosts, when we wavered
In the air over Africa
And realized we were legion.

A small child plays in the salt bay,
Unaware the ocean’s rising,
Head filled with the roaring of mind.

Poetry’s Morning Commute

Sit up in bed in the dark.
There it is, or part of it.
Shuffle around the dim room.

It’s like a roof rat scuttling
Overhead, through the maple
Shadows outside the window.

It startles and alarms you,
Forces you to hunt for it,
To make sure it’s not in here

Anywhere, make sure it can’t
Be getting through the cracks,
Doors, or windows left ajar.

Once the sun’s up, and you’ve checked
The whole place, top to bottom,
Sure that any rat’s outside

And not sharing space with you,
That’s it, you’ve done your morning
Commute. Here we are, arrived.

Poems Happen

Ah, the things you decide
To do yourself, to do
To yourself, that then feel

More as if they’d happened
To you, misadventures
And whimsical events,

The experiences
You thought you were choosing
That feel unexpected.

Somewhere you sit reading,
Possibly listening
To these words that you thought

Might be interesting,
But what is this nonsense
Occurring in your brain?

Lights in the Trees

You can sense photons lament
The irrecoverable
Displacement of every wave.

They’re singing in choruses
And tiny pizzicati
Poking through the canopy,

We surge outward, we reflect,
We pour through gap after gap,
But we can never go back.

Being Deeply Lonely

Why does that phrase itself—

Found in a discussion

On the ways the brain tries

To make itself conform

To what the social cues

Say is the consensus

Truth—that is, of the costs

Of nonconformity,

Including becoming

Outcast, deeply lonely—

Somehow make it sound good?

Being deeply lonely.

Something about deeply.

It feels rich. It suggests,

Or rather, it echoes,

Falling deeply in love.

If you’re the right reader,

It could suggest a goal,

An ideal loneliness,

Not a mere loneliness—

Being deeply lonely.

No one wants to be that,

Truly, do you? Lonely

As someone castaway,

A deep-space astronaut,

Drifting, alive, never

Anyone to talk to?

How could you? And yet you

Crave something there—that’s true.

Being deeply lonely.

The Cello Recital

It wasn’t long ago.
It was just yesterday,
Hours ago, but it felt

Like it was already
Long ago, even as
It went on, August sun

Outside the wide windows
To the woods, the cellists
All young and competent,

The saturated notes,
The saturated light.
Or, that’s what someone said,

Besotted with the thought.
No, replied someone else,
It didn’t feel like that.