A Selection of Poems
“Ecstatic Truth” in North American Review 309.2
Ecstatic Truth
for Werner Herzog
Open the bleakest realism, even
a crack and you’re at the back of
a door we’ve already stepped through.
Skin’s soft earth silts and shifts,
tall grass drifting but not adrift.
Eye and I, and eye and I
brain’s electricity blinks
without knowing why there’s
something instead of nothing.
Why the world isn’t a machine,
why words are more than things
we hold with trembling hands.
“Against the Grain” in North American Review. 308.3
Against the Grain
after Lucille Clifton
I always wanted to be
the kind of person who
chops wood, assembles
a stack to awe-strike
termites and bring
over those neighbors
who never even wave
to say, “Almost too
pretty for the fire.”
I’d know where one
just fits to
another, allows
for the frayed
edges of necessity
by which nature
invents art.
Whole seasons
of downed crepe
myrtle and pine and
my shiny axe
swung high
for gravity
to do the work.
That’s how
the world splits
and splits,
hewn orbits
falling from
a cutmaking hand.
I always wanted
to be the kind
of person who knew
how to be deliberate
and could burn
what’s beautiful.
“What It’s Like to Be a Bat” in North American Review. 308.3
What It’s Like to Be a Bat
for Thomas Nagel
You can’t sink into inversion
or swoop the wind’s bright
carnival ride. You will never
hear night’s cold vortices
or taste the fecal bonds
of love and hate.
These are closed
to you, nailed shut,
laid to ground.
And whatever else
you dream or do
on earth or in
the hereafter
you’ll never
make the human
a metaphor
for the bat.
An earlier version of “Camouflaged” appeared in New Verse Review. 2.4
Camouflaged
If this were real life,
I would come eye to eye
with a pair larger than mine
on the back of a black
insect, unseeing neon circles
painted by nature
to deter predators
like office experiments
enforcing honesty with a pupil
taped to a collection jar.
It says something like God
is always watching. Eye teeth.
Conversely, camouflage
hides us from others, a work
of deception designed
to blend in such a way
we forget even ourselves
as in those dreams I’m
a wide winged thing circling
this fat green fig on which
an arthropod feeds, my eyes
keener judging I can take
the fruit and beast at once,
that these circles do not see me,
that this neon is no poison,
that the uncanny is human,
that no one watches above.
“Cloud Chamber” in You Are the River. NCMA
Cloud Chamber
after Chris Drury’s Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky
Down in the summer canopy
a stone grown so green you’d miss
it but for the door ajar until
you are inside: push hard
and something ancient floods
that was always waiting there:
a deep emptiness in the dark
solid ground a mountain cold
as in the beginning: then a nearing,
an almost, light’s softest shadow
warm as we imagine cave paintings
by the fires that lit their way:
the leaf gardens on the walls
flicker, float, and fade.
Here even the air breathes.
Reach, root this thirst from
bare bracken feet to the heart
rushing in your ears,
offer to the chambered sky all
your growing things like flowers
thrown to a performance:
in this wood quiet dim
sanctuary is the light
that lifts our skin.
An earlier version of “Necessity Creates the World” appeared in ISLE. 26.4
Necessity Creates the World
The tallest longleaf pine, one of a pair,
was struck by lightning, a bolt that blew
a solid bird box to inches of shrapnel
and twisted wide margins of bark
from the top to ribbons at the base
a strange reverse Maypole.
The man who climbed and cut it down
weeks later saw southern pine beetles
and blue-stain fungi in the wounds,
spiraling their way from points
of entry like a slow hurricane
or the dusty pattern of a galaxy.
The crack was so loud that at first
I thought a large piece of airplane
had fallen in the yard, a wing
downed above us by the storm
(the tree was close to the house,
the house close to the airport).
I forgot to mention this
but I remember it now because
I need to tell you what I’ve learned.
Electricity, a convenient metaphor,
ranges from the tingle lifting our hairs
to School of the Americas torture.
We’re addicted to it, of course,
as we are to our other, darker
power source. In Idaho I’ve seen
green fields of glowing grasses
with white turbines three times as high
as my pine and beautiful as the lines
of modern abstraction, of the Guggenheim.
Addiction often powers ingenuity,
new contexts, conditions for beauty.
What I’ve learned is this:
the larger a need is the more
we make from it.
It is the Sistine Chapel
spark of contact. Thoreau’s
injunction, Forster’s plea.
“Peeling Eggs” in North American Review. 301.4
Peeling Eggs
You’re afraid. I am afraid
for you, watching your fingers
turn too slowly trying
not to dig into the eye.
You want yours whole
but it need not be perfect.
You know how to live
but you see
too far, past cotton wool, past
the blue expanse. You see the tear,
how it can line and grow and spin
out of itself, spin itself out, the round
earth of egg funneling to vortex,
a gyre of timelessness,
a fall into space soft and ripe
and terrible with becoming.