Find and share the perfect poems.
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.
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.
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.
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.