The Lord hath called and no one answered.
Call in a whisper. Bird on the fence must
be twittering, what the window makes silent.
It convulses. That blue is impossibly blue.
Do you think of rocketing up as far as limits
permit, birdie, or are you eyeing that seed
on the patio below? Careful. Kitty’s near by.
In the summer, we took our allotted heat
and bathed in it, sitting in the evenings
on Adirondacks we bought from some
Mexicans who made them and drove them around
in a pickup, unfinished, thirty dollars a pop.
We painted one blue and one aqua.
The birds we watched seemed wing-damaged:
we always caught them curving left (their left),
and we worried it was harbinger of some
unforeseeable thing. Their bodies sent them
into tighter and tighter arcs. So it seemed.
I drank my beer, sitting in my aqua chair,
and my mother sat in the blue by me, with her
iced-tea in the tall plastic cup. Those evenings
the sky was broken by darting shapes, curving left,
always as if under an unseen dome, as if that dome
they say that housed the stars that were really gods
directed them with their gaze toward that horizon
and not this one, the one from which the sun
would come, if it came at all.
Kids! I don’t remember asking my wife,
split in two. I watched it with my own eyes.
I asked all right, for all sorts of things,
low-hanging fruit, milk shakes, a CD of some band,
things I got. Gone or worn out. I can’t even
remember life last week. I remember
The Empire Strikes Back, standing in line,
running around later in the backyard
with the sugar blues working all out.
All was hazy, I didn’t know what it was.
Scared happy. We had a hill above the house
covered in ice plant, little purple flowers,
and my dog running around, I was kicking the air.
The kids are making sounds outside, snorting and
grunting. Animals. I could use something to drink,
coffee maybe. I’m telling you, my son
came out purple and wet and not breathing,
like a prosthetic baby. Years later now a pulse.
It was me, around ten, over the top of the skateboard ramp,
the quarter pipe at the dead end, six or seven feet up,
over the back of it, no helmet and into the wood
pile behind. My neck was broken, I thought,
I’m gonna die walking around gasping.
That’s what it was like. It wasn’t the ice plant hill
with me Han and my dog. It was a little nightmare.
They used a suction cup to pull on his head,
I was awake, and they’re asking again
for something out on the grass. Knock it off.
Spill the Wind
let the jig luff
and the tiller be loosed
somewhat the course
slackened and each knot
tied firmly
let the course
slacken but remain
aimed work out the mean
and what's not on top
of the water the
boat breaks its easy surface
in welcome cuttings
the coil of line is by
a turn of the rope
with each turn then a
loop and the end pulled
through and through there's no one
waiting for us the ticking
isn’t heard over
the wind rush there is
no rush the mother always
waits over the child always if
conditions are best
whispers
hush hush
