My crumpled tea packet
is an origami crane.
End of semester minimalist poem
End-of-semester envoi
It’s a strange lightness when the weight is gone.
Like standing in a doorway, pressing the backs
of your hands to the doorjamb, then stepping out.
Your hands float free, unbidden. Like mine now,
saying, where shall I go, what shall I do,
now I am no longer writing to guide your writing hand?
It’s a queer emptiness when classes end.
Full of space, like a mouth
when the braces come out, and the tongue
explores the new expanse. Demosthenes
with the pebbles gone. Wondering, what words
will come to fill me now?
It’s a curious blankness now. The days,
no longer sliced in two-hour tranches,
seem borderless. Outlook Calendar
begins to show white rectangles. Tabs vanish
from the laptop. D2L sites close.
Emails thin. Sometimes even the announcement:
You have no events scheduled
for the rest of the day.
It’s the moment of sudden falling
at the beginning of sleep. It’s the cartoon Coyote
running in air before he sees
there’s no more cliff. It’s what Sartre said,
the fear of freedom. Mary Oliver asking,
what will you do with your one wild
and precious summer?
Christ is risen!
Apokastasis:
I pray all may rise, and none
bring his hell with him.
Христос воскресе!
A tribute to photographers
I don’t do selfies.
The outstretched arms, the long sticks
recall the image
of the damned in hell:
long spoons attached to their hands,
they can’t eat. They starve.
Meanwhile in heaven,
strapped onto the same long spoons,
folks feed each other.
Your photos do this:
open your lens on the beauty
of your friends. Feed them
on your loving gaze.
My husband has painted the inside of the kitchen cabinets
It all starts with red.
Like kids, we choose cherry first,
not lemon or lime.
Ritual
I get up at four
to write my morning pages
already turning to
to-do lists.
Set the coffee on the right,
pen and old blue book on the left.
Laptop in the middle.
Try not to turn it on.
The cats invade. The grey
is holding the lap, the black
melting from the desk like a Dali watch.
I try to keep his fur out
of the laptop which shouldn’t even be there.
Each time the wrist is exposed, he paws it,
she licks it. She tickles. I think they are saying,
Ridiculous human, stop trying so hard
to meditate. All you need is here.
See us, feel us, offering ourselves to you
as Les Glass offered Franny
the perfect sphere of a tangerine,
or Bessie brought a brimming
cup of consecrated chicken soup.
Letter to Our Lady
Heart of the city’s first heart, you parted
the waters, sent up spires, and bent
over your people with protecting arches.
Inside it was always cool, summer and winter,
with the comforting smell of granite dust.
The windows were blue saturated with red,
red tinged with blue. Like venous
and arterial blood. When I entered,
my breathing slowed, my blood pressure went down.
Inside, the city fell away.
Only the padded heartbeat of the womb.
They say no one set you ablaze
with rags and gasoline, as in Opelousa.
No one pierced your towers with suicide planes.
It just happened – or you did it to yourself,
like that Buddhist monk who haunted my childhood,
self-immolating in a silent, endless loop,
with Watts, with Detroit, then with the Twin Towers.
Now in that silent film I see
towers all over the world falling, one by one.
Silently saying, humans, we can no longer stand for you.
We cannot protect you while you destroy yourselves.
Why do you mourn a building, and burn your world?
Reigning it in
My colleague Julie calls it “homophone drift.”
“Reign it in,” bloggers write,
swapping the horsey metaphor for a kingly one.
I think of the Orange Julius
and his “new-style presidential.”
He wants to be a dictator,
but it’s too much work. He’d rather
lie in bed, eat Big Macs,
watch Fox & Friends and tweet. Just
reigning it in.
This is in response to yesterday’s No/GloPoWriMo prompt, to write with homophones, homographs and/or homonyms.
Preuss Pets
Hyacinth macaw
Shrieks behind me in the bush,
Then says a sweet “hi.”
The koi are sated.
Too heavy to rise to crumbs
Thrown by eager hands.
Degu on a wheel
Runs endlessly, tirelessly.
What is he chasing?
I envy turtles:
Home and safety always near,
They can be patient.
To feel like a snake:
Imagine oneself all waist
Or better all neck?
Michigan menu: snow in April
Dining hall riot:
Our mouths are set for salads;
Creamed spinach again.
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