Like Watching a Boat Leave the Shore

And in the day itself, it wasn’t
Any more complicated than peace
And affable affection, with food

And physical comfort. Giving gifts
And taking photographs and being
A little selfishly contented,

And no one putting things in context,
Saying aloud this could be the last
For us, for one of us, for our world,

That’s what made the day memorable
To the private memories that could
Not retain most of it, not retain

Any of it too many years more.
There were smiles and more hugs at the door.

The Shuffling Pile

There’s no life, only fragments
You happen to remember,
Which change daily, hour by hour,

Even second by second.
It can feel continuous
And, in happening, it is,

But in memory, it’s not.
And if not in memory,
Then where, what else have you got?

Clean Face

It’s the prospect of reunion
Makes the world more vividly fine
As your time as your time dwindles.

It won’t be long before you are
A part of everything again,
No drowsy part of you apart,

Half observing, half narrating.
Increasingly, bare air feels rich,
Not in that you will be going

But for knowing you’ll be joining
Phenomena only being,
Not being aware of being.

Home looks good, doesn’t it? Doesn’t
The thought of not thinking on it
Seem to wipe the grime off of it?

The Haze Thins

There’s not much space, if any,
Between misremembering
And sheer hallucination,

Although imagination
And dreaming make do with it,
Entrenched in the DMZ

Their whole twilit existence,
One side confusion, one side
Phosphorus-bleached delusion.

In recent weeks, painkillers
And mild sleep deprivation
Have snugged the trenches closer,

So that sometimes, around noon,
You could swear guns were firing
At memories of airports

And old people familiar
From childhood were wandering
Shadows seeking out small talk

As memories defected
To freedom, apparitions
Surrendered for home-cooked food.

Making Soup

It’s there, tucked in there somewhere.
A person staring blankly
At a blank is a person

Wanting to see what they want
Emerge from what they’re watching,
As if something from nothing,

The engine of all wishing,
The magic part of magic,
To get something from nothing,

To witness true creation,
To stare at the smooth forehead
Of the world and see gods born,

And every blankness observed
Is the stone in the water.

Meta Hodos

Take a well-known myth
With literary
Bona fides. Flip it

By inhabiting
A side character’s
Perspective or by

Gender reversal,
Or something like that.
Work your way through it,

Wired for ironies.
Weren’t those myth-makers
Such assholes? They were.

Now you have a poem,
Maybe a novel.