Strive
Once you write that first word
You have already marred the perfection of the page.
You grab some easy metaphor –
The crooked lampshade,
The masks on the display shelf staring at the ceiling –
And you know that it is already pretense.
Today you stood in the grocery aisle with a poet,
Each of you clutching sacks of oranges.
He said his heart almost exploded
The day the muse played hard to get.
One night he ran his aging body up the thousand steps at Suzzallo Library,
The next he woke up five hours into sleep,
His heart banging in his rib cage like a trapped kestrel.
Five years shaved off his life by looking for the right phrase.
You had that same sensation
The night before you read your fear of death
To a panel of dispassionate politicians.
You recall the month you killed your ten-year novel,
How you knew that you were dying
After thirty hours comparing airfares
To luxury resorts in the Bahamas.
That death was a slow suffocation.
The poet says the journals are all pretense now,
Academics vying for the best Italian phrase,
Serving up their cynicism with just the right Chianti.
You weigh your oranges and confess
That you’re not smart enough to compete.
The truth is you are still afraid to die.
You and the poet stand besieged by
The insult of frozen pizzas,
Stacks of marshmallow chicks,
The celebrity who cried on Oprah.
To face the cynics, you’d both have to acknowledge
That words are all you have,
To say them is to risk annihilation;
To say them is to broadcast that a poet
Is but one small step from madness,
Worse, that he’s a fool,
Worse yet that he’s not a poet at all.
You have the sudden urge to grab the poet’s hand and bolt,
To pelt the shoppers with oranges and gum,
To flip the bird to the academics,
To run those thousand steps and hear, on the final flight,
The yawp of your barbaric feet.
Jack
The day I stumbled into the house you built,
it was a labyrinth—
Chinese boxes
or Russian dolls,
each growing smaller
until I disappear.
You can get lost in a house like that.
I wonder about the rat.
Did he starve
when there was no longer any malt?
I could never begin to clean a house like yours,
all lopsided,
falling in on itself.
It makes me angry.
You should hire
the third pig,
the one with the bricks;
he knows more
about solid things
than you.
As it is
you trap people in here—
all the stairs,
windows that go nowhere,
the locked back door.
Drones
The night you stole the hives,
We had gone out—
A thousand of us guys—
One last rollick on the town
Before sampling the delights of our virgin queen.
The girls had fed us ambrosia for days
As they gazed into our compound eyes
And exclaimed at the size of our mandibles.
The queen could hardly wait, they sighed,
Assuring us that every man would have his turn
At ecstasy.
That night, mustered just beyond the apiary,
We boasted how we’d dive like comets
Over her—each one of us was sure
He’d be the first and best to rock her world.
But flying home, a little drunk,
We found the bee house carted off,
The homestead vanished,
Our drowsy queen
An adolescent dream.
And now there’s not a wing
To prove we’ve not imagined our own race—
No buzz in rhododendrons, no
Dancing grace notes on the wind,
Not one sweet treasure left on earth.
Unless it’s true the night you
Spanned the globe and made off
With a million honeyed palaces
You found some best-forgotten mercy
And left a scent the drones could follow.
It’s said that a year’s walk from the horizon
Where lone and level sands stretch far away
A solitary storehouse thrums with bees.
And so we wander,
Stingerless and hungry
For the sight of her—
A thousand consorts, who sweep the barren land
And mourn the kings we might have been.
The Fall
When publicly undressed
You must
Remain serene.
Do not notice
The breeze across your belly,
Tightness of shoulders,
Weight of your breasts.
Pretend
No one stands, head atilt,
Scrutinizing the curves of your body,
Crook of an elbow,
The intermittent catch of your throat.
Imagine you do not lean
Over a precipice.
Instead, be rain,
Shale, Snow,
Small tumble that shakes the mountain,
Behind your face
A clandestine smile.
You alone
Know your secret tipping point,
How to slide out of view,
Hidden in your skin.
Rockfall,
Facefall,
Voicefall,
Freefall.
Do not mistake
Serenity for safety,
You, who chose this starkness.
Danger attends revelation,
Like a brooding lady-in-waiting.
Danger
Has her own secrets.
Wait
For the one who will stare into your eyes.
Hold still and do not look away.
The earth tips under both of you.
Let it.
Fall
Like a flame,
Like a dying star,
And do not be afraid.
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