Would That One of Us Stayed Dust

Light in the dust on the floor—
It’s like a passenger flight
Flown in bright winter daylight

Over mostly level tracts,
Say, the midwestern US
Or southern English flatlands,

The peering down at glitter,
Bare windows, iced-up windows,
Which are mica in the dust.

Down there the world is spread out
In elaborate detail
That looks intent on detail,

But it’s the details’ details
That make them hard to square
With the mundane sanity

Of the large picture, the way
This day grows up to leave you—
It’s just a big kid. It keeps

Accumulating itself,
Becoming a little more
Distinctive as its own day,

And if, unlike some, you’ll live
To see the end of the day,
The dust will lie still thicker

Than it did when you began
To notice time was growing.
Days don’t dwindle; days expand.

Complex and Plain

You would like to ask the day
To stash you more scent events
As you crack the door for air

And a breeze, almost apples,
Slips in like a luxury,
Which it is, as you doze off

Once more in the glorious
High-canyon afternoon sun.
Apples. A watery smell

From heavy rains overnight,
Little richer in the world
Than desert dirt after rain,

The intricacies of soil,
Creating complex and plain.

The Long Black Cloak

Anything that refuses
To stop doing eerie things
Creates a minor new world,

A cloak wrapped around itself—
One morning, the canyon wind
Settled into a vortex.

Sometimes it spun more slowly.
Sometimes it was howling fierce.
Sometimes it engaged with rain.

But all morning the wind blew
And would not wander further
Than its invisible core,

From which it pulled up the dust
That it spun into a shape
From canyon floors to haunt us.

Non-Titled

It dawns on you, silly sunrise
In the desert in the autumn,
That you’re settling into the last
Of your poetry—it’s getting

Diffuse, and your memory reels
From time to time or loses threads,
But that’s not your soul wasting time
Anymore. These are the late clouds

Of the long storm you’ve entertained
For more than a decade, at last
Dissipating. It’s all ok.
You’re doing what you ought to be,

Given a world with less and less,
Little or no, ought left, only
Increasingly beautiful naught,
The fine outlines of nothing yet.

Just Don’t Be Persuaded to Pay for Anything

If you could become lost
Anymore, if you could
Stare at the instructions,

While your brain spun its tires
In sandy attention,
Going nowhere faster—

Would you bother?
Would you rather body lost
In place or the place found

At memory’s expense?
A gust of wind kicks up.
What words are these here now?

The War

You decided to wait for the piano,

For the crash, so that the first crack across you

Would be your last, no preparing anything.

You turned the back of your thoughts to everything

That stank of daily news, so as not to see

Any hint of what the local disaster

Could be, within the war’s general context.

You wavered after you deployed the term, war.

Your whole life there have been wars, over there wars,

Never war in your town, never bombs near you,

So that nothing much seems more matter-of-fact

Than war, and nothing much more histrionic.

Is this the decade, the era, over there

Wars catch the wind blowing them homeward? Is this

The time the rumors become the real? You will

Not prepare for it. At best you unprepare.