Living By Example

Who will go about the work
of cleaving

branches, those trees
falsely thin, affixed

to the ice-flossed marshes
children skim out on.

They report how thick, their heels
rocketing through sores

of water, frozen
ambery leaves. The ice

wincing like a milk bowl
below the spear head of a spoon.

This is not the dream you thought
to wake from, waking

certain to be surrounded
by darkness, but you like it

the way you liked the summer’s oar, distal,
prodding forward

a boat near shore,
the mast splintered.

Holy, Holy

The child slumps her halo
against the brick and green-grocer sign—

This is not the book
where the hero returns
to save her, nor is it the story
in which Jesus, himself, weeps,
stepping into the humor of his own sick joke.
The world is tired of acting those plots where

rain drizzles and sweeps
along the road. The child
slings hot arrows
into the low-lying city that ducks its head
inside tapestries of handmade love.
Sweating in the congestion
of out-of-service buses,

you find yourself too,
waiting. You watch
the closed curtains of
garden-level apartments, gardens
bailed out and soggy—

the wind swears
to put you on your back.
To want is the mark of the story—
You will also have an end.

All Life Is Furniture

Chairs and tables in rooms where no one drinks
or smokes the way I do. Alone, in my company

the stationed chairs, lacquered thick in syrupy shellac.
Ask a chair a question and it answers in intermittent

cries of tenderness. Like a woman, maybe up close,
but not in love, who fills up a glass each morning

with her languid shape. I let her break
into my bottles and spill out their insides.