Hide When You Feel Seen

City or country
The cloud’s on the left
The moon’s to the right

Suburb or city
There’s some kind of sky
Prison not so much

Hospital only
Those times you’re in luck
An open window

Can send lots of things
Into awareness
The odor of dirt

The squawk of a jay
They’ll give you away

Where He Lives Now Is Uncertain

Lambs, apples, attics,
The dawn is flowers.
That is as you please—

Edo period
Sedges and pond weed
But many blackbirds.

In the hospital
You swam in jaundice
Yellow as lemons,

Pulling together
Phrases remembered
But not the places

Where you first met them
And said, There I am.

No Wonder

Take your pick—would you rather
Imagine the lost wonders
(Flocks of passenger pigeons,

Bioluminescent bays)
Or imagine how wondrous
Your ordinary today

(Motor vehicles, airplanes,
Music gathered from the air)
Would be to those from those days?

This is not rhetorical.
This is a survey question.
Would you rather imagine

The wonders of the future?
Seriously, what do you dream?

Plura Fecit Nihil

You misremember
The past so you can
Empty a cavern—

You divide the piles,
Beauty to one side,
Prelapsarian,

A mass of horrors
To the other end.
You stroll in between,

Expressing longing
For lost innocence,
Diverse abundance,

The plants and creatures,
The arts and textiles
Before those horrors,

Which you explicate
In their reeking heap
Of guano and rust.

Now there’s a clear space
For you to stand in—
Good witness, human.

Taken One Evening

Back to taking in the evening
While it’s possible, the fading
Light along the lines of the cliffs,
The almost turquoise hints in it,

The ridiculously slow pace
Of any evening without clouds
If you’re just watching it, no lamps
In the house, no suburban lights,

A broke and broken luxury,
Evening to not do anything,
Speak to no one, pay for nothing
Much for now. You be the monster

In your borrowed lair, the torches
Not coming for you, not this hour.