I slept poorly, but rose at dawn to tend to my garden.
First I wrapped the world’s largest tree in aluminum.
Then I trucked seventeen million salmon to the sea.
Jeff Bezos did not leave the planet any better than
he found it, though he is rich enough to leave it and
return, alive. As I watch the skies, greedy mosquitos
stalk me like a herd of tiny buffalo.
My early poems aspired to Keats and Blake;
were about magic, dreams, and heartbreak.
Most rhymed, were trite, and told more than showed;
rolled off the tongue, no taste of the acid down below.
I want to smash a violin on the tree
it was made from. To soak up the blood
of martyrs with my eyes, die a glorious
death and live on, weeping, sweating
blood. It’s 118 in Siberia.
On days such as this you’ll find me reaching
into every nook and cranny, tidying up as though
I had it in me to put things where they belong.
Whatever the purpose of childhood beyond learning
to read and count, to say please and thank you,
it is this: to persist in playing long after Dada says
it’s time to go home, until, cold, wet, and hungry…
Every poem is a love poem, even one about plastic rain.
Why else bother to save anything—rainforests, whales…
The winter was mild by New England standards.
We stayed indoors, set the thermostat to 70, and
when the energy bill arrived—late, because, lest we
one day forget this epoch, the mail, like so much else
about our lives, was being sabotaged…
I breathe in the air that happens to make it through my screen
door and imagine what the particles contain—mist from Katmandu,
Dead Sea salt, dust of meteors, ground-up dinosaur teeth…
hail flattens the grass
not all bruises blister blood
each blade asks why me