I am awakened too early. I cannot be awake.
The growl of my neighbor’s leaf-blower is what prehistoric man,
cowering in his cave, cowered from.
How do you forgive your neighbor?
Remember when bumper stickers read
Free Tibet or End Apartheid, and we agreed?
Remember when there was just one war on TV,
like a movie whose plot you knew by heart?
For the promises I never made, or kept; for the
friends I wronged, or let down, or lost touch with;
for doors I failed to hold open, grandmothers who
bore their groceries unaided,…
Last night I caught a dole of doves
robbing me of sleep with their yapping.
They accused me of such terrible
things—an oppressor of birds…
For once, I throw my lot in with the rest.
At the bleak store that sells tobacco and liquor,
two bucks buys me this slip that feels sinful and
foolish in my hands…
Your flight delayed, you scroll your photos app.
There is the dog you just adopted, eyes alert
and energetic. There is your son roughhousing
with him on the carpet, wild with joy…
He was dying and I didn’t know it.
He was dying and the tests were inconclusive.
He was dying and I changed his diet.
He was dying and he couldn’t tell me.
Love, before loss, is an ode to here:
the softness of shampooed fur,
the quickening of a thousand nerve endings
in each fingertip each time you pet him,
the scratch of paws running to greet you.
I abhor the grass, the leaves that turn to blades
under the whetstone of heat, the worms, blind
and desperate and slippery, that wriggle forth
in the wet, the sucking of mud on bare feet…
Write a poem that drops me to my knees.
Strike me square in the face with a fist of birdsong.
Torture me to orgasm with silk.