It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

every morning god
I make of my body a
bridge, a cat, a corpse

I love the fully
inflated tire upright in
gravel – near the car

I don’t have to go
anywhere today – I move
to make the birds move

the finches threaten
one another simply through
acts of moving close

I long to meet who
I most fear – my mother and
her body in mine

tracing the boy I
see his mother – her hand out-
lined under us both

lifting the blinds – a
morning prayer – prepare this
house to receive light

again the seatbelt
would not go on – not with these
thrashers in the yard

the gate is inside
of me – I am holding it
open with a rock

She does not know
Her beauty,
She thinks her brown body
Has no glory.

If she could dance
Naked,
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know.

But there are no palm trees
On the street,
And dish water gives back no images.