Lonely Planet

You’re used to it, the way,
in the first wide-eyed
minutes, climbing from parking lot
to fire trail, or rifling through
cupboards in a rented kitchen,
I can’t help but tell you
we should visit here again,
my reverie inserting
a variation in the season,
or giving friends the room
next door, in stubborn panic
to fix this happiness in place
by escaping from it.
“We’re here now,” you say,
holding out the book I bought
with its dog-eared maps and lists
and, on the cover, a waterfall,
white flecks frozen, very close.

Difference

Talk to you tonight,
I wrote this morning, knowing
it would only be the afternoon
where you are, will be,
whole neighborhood still
wrapped in a tule fog
that won’t let up—so you reported
before supper
                       while I slept.
I almost wrote this afternoon
instead, taking your point
of view, dissolving into it—
but then imagined
you half-awake, and irked,
into my future/current noon
texting for clarification.

Jasmine

With dusk’s slow bleed, the scent comes back 

from beyond our gate, sickly-sweetly powdering the yard

and its scattered buckets, chalk, decapitated 

plastic fauna—how all the bright junk 

rushes to the pixelated surface 

in the final minutes before remorse 

douses the world in itself. High-tops on the phone wire

already mortared into silhouettes, like crows.

Roof rat in the plum tree, synching its intricate listening 

with the stop-start taps on my MacBook 

ten feet beneath. Wondering what’s taking us so long

to vanish. Its tail pulses from its rich perch 

with what I thought I had once—a hunger 

so absorbing it becomes, while nothing changes,

its own reward. Some hidden dark

where you could crouch and find a pattern. 

While nothing changes; while the scent of jasmine

flutters and drifts, like sympathy, living for itself.

Related Poems

Draft of a Landscape

after Paul Celan


              The hare’s
              dust pelt

against the juniper’s sky
              now

in the eye uncovered
a question clear

in the wing
              of the day and the predator

that writes
the animal’s luck, too.

Where is tomorrow?
Will tomorrow be beautiful?

Someone will answer.
Someone will remember

that dustcolored
              tragedy, incidental, belonging

to no one, arriving before
as a flock of cranes

protracted in a long descent
winging blind

to field—the days
are beautiful.