The world asks, as it asks daily: 
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains. 
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain, 
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain, 
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, 
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, 
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. 
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

None of this had to happen.

Not Florida. Not the ibis’s beak. Not water.

Not the horseshoe crab’s empty body and not the living starfish.

Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely.

The asteroid might have missed.

The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves.

The radio might have found a different music.

The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside

each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.

The key could have broken off in the lock and the nail-can refused its lid.

I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed.

You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would,

long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in

at a certain angle. The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.

If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief

of what hasn’t changed yet. Across the world a man pulls a woman from the water

from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has entirely vanished.

From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live.

This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen.

—2016

At last understanding

that everything my friend had been saying

for the thirty-three months since he knew

were words of the dog tag, words of, whatever else, 

the milled and stamped-into metal of what stays behind.

Blackcap Mountain. Blue scorpion venom. Persimmon pudding.

He spoke them.

He could not say love enough times.

It clinked against itself, it clinked against its little chain.

—2016

Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died
     or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
     or someone you will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days

—2008
 

I wake, doubt, beside you,
like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,
like a cup 
undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,
work doubting,
go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,
as a herd of goats
sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,
nightly—
for what is the meaning of dreaming
if not that all we are while inside it
is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,
doubt, you are in me,
throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.
Left knee and right knee,
we run for a bus,
for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like
to grow content in you, doubt,
as a double-hung window
settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:
your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady
the open mouth of a window,
you hold me,
my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,
offering these furious praises
I can’t help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.

—2014