Caterpillar

The caterpillar was not bent out of shape.
Although he was, fleetingly, upside down,
he didn’t pause. He simply swiveled
his furry yellow body back around
and continued on. As if there had been no fall.
As if the great brown plank had not in a blink
given way to the pine needle paisley
of the forest floor.
No pause, only many legs
finding the ground and keeping on
toward a horizon of tall grass.
Both nothing and everything could change his path.
What with all those feelers, and the speed
at which change settles a course,
there would always be something,
in the scrambled pastures beneath the pouring sun
for a furry yellow body to touch.

Totem

Three girls summited a mountain
way out in northeastern California.
A couple followed them up, came down.
Curious insects buzzed around.

Some years earlier, on an Andean peak
in Argentina, three Incan children
were found, completely preserved,
the blood in their young bodies frozen,

the sun glinting off their onyx hair.
They had been chosen, their lovely faces
containers of every last secret.
They have since been moved to a museum.

Way up on their skyward perch,
the girls lay still as totems,
brought to half-sleep in the thin air,
while curious insects buzzed around.

Question

...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language... (Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke)

End of the week, brain cells brought finally to the bristling edge
on lack of sleep, I take a walk through the neighborhood in evening light.
Thoughts thinned, each detail beckons my attention--
the tangled telephone wire shadows on a white wall,
the peach-colored Caravaggian clouds, the old steps winding
to a boarded up house--each one begging the question
that is always at my heels, in the corner of my eye,
on the tip of my tongue, the question that wants to come
into focus, that keeps trying to rise, but I push it back down
each time as if to say, not now, not now.

The evening winds blow over the hills, familiar,
ruffling against my legs these old linen pants like some other time
I’d worn them. But when was it? I cannot pause long enough to recall.
How long before you let yourself hear me? the question implores
along shafts of light bending through branches
like shadows of Venetian blinds upon a wall.
But there is no wall. Only a moment
where the particles of pollution shimmer into sight
and then are gone. You see, question? Even if I reached out
to you, you would dissolve the way things do in dreams.
And if you didn’t, then how, oh how, would I begin to respond?

I can walk as slowly as possible but not stop.
I can let lack of sleep drown out almost every thought, but not all.
I can let every last memory rise up, but not stay for long.
I can step out of the house for a moment to stare at the sky,
but soon I’ll have to go back inside to where the people are.
Your voice moves in and out like an adagio
cresting, receding, and wandering on.

Though one day this house will be empty with dust piled up,
and in an evening light a bit of lace curtain will flutter out,
begging that old question to a walker on the street
whose eye it caught as they glanced casually up. And if
they wandered, helplessly drawn, up the crumbling stairs and inside,
would they find a scrap of paper on the floor that showed how I’d
approached you, and where I’d left off or the paper was torn--
the other half and I having become inseparable as we traveled
into the particles, into the tangled shadows, upon the shafts of light
through the branches toward the peach-colored clouds?

I really was very, very tired, had yawned all day long,
and with each yawn something was cleared.
My mind grew less cluttered and I more prepared.
By evening I was nearly delirious and could almost make out
the question that had been waiting all this time
not to be answered, but to be asked.

Cigarette Soliloquy

All is well.
All is precariously well.
All is precarious.
The glass tray perched dubiously
alongside my thigh on the couch
receives small gray flurries of ash
in the dim red light of the parlor room.

Here in California, life stretches on
like a long, shining hall
of sun and breeze and so many clouds
that puff and roll, fast and irresistable.
Each day begins with no memory
of the alarm that rose it.

Inhale. Thoughts wander backward and forward
and from coast to coast,
to the other side of the country
where I imagine my oma,
half asleep in lampglow,
resting her aching bones.
From out the window,
the jingle of recyclables
and bells of laughter come and go.

Exhale. In the parlor room’s pink hue,
the smoke hangs like a ghost
and disappears. Cigarette out,
the wrench falls from the gears,
sending time along.
All is precarious, I think,
with one final flick of ash,
all is precariously well
and that is all I could possibly ask.

Hatch

A thread of light on black
snaps you to attention,
and you blink a rapt eye
for the first time.

Scratch of keratin on calcium
as twitching feathers find the wall,
and suddenly, as though sparked
to some idea,

you begin to rock
back and forth
to the rhythms of the beat
that brought you awake.

With thunderous static
new muscles unwrap,
adhesives crackling from the bone.
There is no thing more obvious

than to unfold
into the ocean of eggshell archipelagos
where two silhouettes
bob toward you like boats.

Thorns

A bright full moon last night
and I am full of thorns
that right now bend and turn,
announcing the presence of ill
feelings and things.
Wild dreams of high up hotels,
sheer and white and celestial,
and below the ground
earth-shrouded apothecaries.
The rate at which the fates like a sine wave
twist gather to my core
and pull.
I've hardly even noticed the moon
and its knowing stare. As if
it were waiting for me
to glean some final answer. But actually
it's just there, lighting the evening
of these inner tides.

Another Night Poem

We climbed up a hill onto a pile of rocks that sits
like ruins over the city, and sat looking down

at the San Francisco night, at the spread of lights
sizzling in the air like a far away idea of grids and gears

and the turnings of our lives. We’d gone all the way up there
just to talk. Perched atop the silhouettes of rock,

while the garish city blinked below, we stared at Orion’s belt
and two tiny, honest voices rose, quiet yet clear,

what had been hidden floating up from the crowded corridors,
from the metropolis of empty words into the wide night,

like two lithe spirits from a wreck. So we spoke,
two brief ghosts, gossamer and substantial and true,

opening doors with little comets of honesty
before the ministering stars.

I said, “I feel outside of time,” and then, from somewhere below,
the chimes of a church bell tolled eight strikes. Ha.

Unable then, to let it go, we returned slowly to the city,
to road and rail and intersection, but now we crossed the streets diagonally

and climbed on stairs that were not our own, and linked our arms together
and knew each other that much better.