"One"

I do not believe happiness is a sustainable movement,
desire’s existence being a kind of absence.
And the emptiness of anything threatens to fall
unexpectedly over even the most reasonable of days:

resplendent sunshine, soft wind, argental clouds
stretched thin like gauze so the city is glimmering
in a tango of light, then more vibrant light, then topsy
turning colors, the oranges and brick reds of autumn

rolling themselves over. This, one thinks, is all that
can be asked of life. Libations, clear weather, the
sounds of people anticipating happiness, but also
what comes after: the remembering, the longing,

what it feels like when ease and joy has moved off.
Pleasure itself is an absence, or its looming shadow.
Then, one thinks, such gluttonous wealth could be
exceeded. There could be a woman, or there could

be the newly minted space where a woman has just
left, the furtive shade beneath an oak tree where grass
has been matted down by a slumbering body, now
gone, leaving just a slight hollow, the weight of

superfluous matter being displaced by denser matter.
There could be such a luminous space in my heart.
Instead, there is winter beckoning not far off, the
hibernation of color. Happiness, which originates

someplace free of matter, manages to decay just the same.


"Two"

The earth in our minor corner -
not a corner at all but a small sliver
of rock, dirt, and improbable life
sliding precariously above magma,
nickel, and other more volatile substances
which have preceded our tame existence
with unconscious roiling, and devastation,

also building, and great shows of fire
gone un-witnessed (though imagine
a distant intellect, many billions of light
years away, marveling at the phosphorescence
of our planet in its infancy) -

has shed its summer green in favor
of the silky rusts and auburns of dying.
A small girl bounds down her porch
into the mauve, near dusk day,
her father in close pursuit, his mind
full of terror, (love spends an inordinate
amount of time flirting with terror)

while across the street a young man
tosses a ball high into the air, and
a canine - inhumanely happy, panting -
awaits its descent.

Life is full of so much searching,
and then you find compassion
swells up in waves for all our failures,
for all our resistance to the ineluctable;
our stubborn cling to breath, though
what has such desperate holding
given us? This hour, not yet dusk.

~

Frailty is our only fact, and this
can be moving, if we let it. Or
it compels us to hold tighter,
when there is not any linearity to the
sky, the patterns its clouds have
spun themselves into, the thatched
crystals resembling bone marrow
under a microscope, the ribbed columns
made of the same architecture of a ship’s
innards. Blue, silver, white, all pleasing
disorder. For form is reactive, is fear,

and the seeking of origins. To find a
point that life becomes tangible, a burst
of central light to admire, that lodestar of
meaning. Can a poet without conviction
of such a point be worth his pages?

My conviction is that language is slightly
more abstract than touch and sight, slightly
less than most everything else. Meaning
is no different than God, or beauty - all
human intuitions, inherent and also
relative, and affixed rather fluidly.

Who is to say a tree is not grass
(our hands sing out, Grass is cool
and tickles our fine crevices!) Who
will correct us if we have mistaken
love with lust? (our esurient soul
is quiet, begs, Give me both!)
Things must be named, even incorrectly.

This hour, easily forgotten, ephemeral
and already escaping, will be named
Happiness, though my heart - so
frail, so keenly moved by creatures that
will someday die - thumps back, No,
this quiet space you think of as
existence is simply loneliness,
and it, too, will pass, becoming
a luminescent void, free of names.

(the sky is the deepest violet of a contusion)