1. Poetry Brings Me Metaphors for My Body


The meditative serenity of the flight lounge.

Trails of soil pushed up by the blind moles,
each with a fresh hot surface time will fade
to yellow-newspaper-left-in-the-sun.

Two unreliable narrators in ambidextrous
argument over how to handle the task at hand,
suddenly decide to just drop it.

		An old alarm clock 
I can’t turn off keeps startling me awake.

A shaft of southern sun strikes 
for an instant,  just 
before the late 
August clouds arrive.

One I don’t know but who knows me, speaking with insistent intimacy.

Denying we’re acquainted even though we met only a moment ago.

The Magician is the questioner—
but the seer can’t see 
what the other cards mean.

Swimming frantically against the tide 
I at last concede to find I’ve been on the shore, 
looking back at a frantic swimmer.

Robot-alacrity. 

On the bus, I rest my head on the window,
on the bright blurring world, steeped 
in the ennui of travel—I sleep to pass the time.
I wake to consume it.

Reflected in the store window, a woman 
walking by without looking in or at.

The blank page becomes tattooed 
with images of gibberish script.

Home after a long absence,
in time with the screams of cicadas.

			The problem is
the solution, a key with no lock;
			
With no other tool at hand,
I use a thorn to remove the thorn.


2. My Body Brings Me Metaphors for Poetry


I read it the way the sea reads the sky:
in perfect indifference, and in odd tenses, 
like I have been. I walk to music, but distrust 
the beat of my own heart, too impatient for long lines, 
gaze in distrust at short ones,
wary of the first person. 
				I fear repetition, 
a habit of the unconscious: the mind’s carpel tunnel.

An unconscious editor, 
chronic and progressive, a river 
eats its banks in meandering bends; 
chronic change, progressive meanings. 

In dreams, I am a metaphor;
to clarify, I sleep to see.

Time is the magic that wraps the body of work
as stiff fingers transform into laurel branches.

I am the memory of the tree on the hilltop,
the one you can’t forget when you have forgotten all else.

Redemptions past and present,
written in the hall-of-mirrors mind,

I speak but never know what I’m thinking—
I can only wave to you. In the silence—O,
the silence!—there is a chaos of echoes,
and memory is an event. In solitude 
you can read it like the sea reads the sky, 
and find what you represent is not what you meant.