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.
Wrapped in moss like a layer of new skin
over a third-degree burn, the hills invite us
for a picnic. Rain has washed out the stains..
Wet and moonless, the Japanese maple drips her pigment
onto a desolate, metal halide-lit stretch of road, until
pink-red rivulets parade ostentatiously toward…
It must take a certain manic energy, for an Arctic Tern to travel
25,000 miles a year, over every ocean and near every continent
on Earth, as though there were no borders, no checkpoints, no…
The first time I was called a poet, I took offense,
for poetry is good for nothing: it neither
makes love nor wages war, nor pays the bills.
The moon, cold and pockmarked and hard,
is not dainty.
The moon belches starlight,
has no gender.