Category Archives: Poetry

I found a stick
of Wrigley’s gum stuck
in the pages of a plum
red book of poems.
Big Red. A cinnamon
red gum stick
stuck to a poem
about birds,
about the wings of birds,
about red birds.

Cardinal. Rosefinch.
A poem about red
summer tanager,
red summer wings,
bright belly bullfinch.

Why I put cinnamon
gum to mark some
birds, some bird wings,
I can’t recall, but some things
aren’t meant to be
remembered, even
if they still burn the tongue.

Forgive the headline writer.
When he pens the phrase

GLOBAL ECONOMIC
MELTDOWN IMMINENT

he is just trying to make
a few bucks so he can
feed his cat

big bold
scary words

sell more papers
get more pageviews
get clicked get clicked

more often than

THINGS ARE REALLY
NOT SO BAD I MEAN
THE SUN IS SHINING
AND THE PLUMS
ARE ON SALE

The roots starve.

It has not rained
in days and days
and all the lively
shoots are drying
up and dying in the
brittle broken earth.

Such it is in the garden,
so it is in the heart.

Someone let all the monkeys loose
and now look at them,
yacking at the lions
because the lions are dozing
and too bored to dance for them.

Look at these monkeys
telling their children wild dogs
are hyenas and red pandas
are just giant panda bears
before they’re all grown up.

They are whistling
at the big muddy rhinoceros,
calling “Here, boy! Here, boy!
Here, rhino!” and in the primate house
they are gawking at the monkeys
and the monkeys are gawking back.

Go back to the clouds.
They miss you.
You have been too long from them
and they have had no one to interpret them.

Without you,
they have not been allowed
to become rabbits and dragons.
Without you, they are only vapor,
wisping lonely in the heavens.

Go back to the clouds.
Lie on your back and stare up at them.
Gaze at and speak to and transform them
into what you will. Elephants
and the roaring face of God.
Houses and mountains of cloud.

Allow your imagination to breathe.
It ought not wither, it ought not
become vestigial and useless.

Go back to the clouds.
Without you, they are only vapor.

While you sleep and you snooze,
he winds and he screws,
he gnarls and knottles and twists
your hair in his teeth and his fists,
your hair into lots of tight knots.

You wake in the morning a mess,
your hair like a tangled bird’s nest,
and he watches with snickers and giggles
while you snag your hair out of squiggles,
your hair full of lots of tight knots.

You asked your mother
if you could keep your baby teeth
and now you have a jar of them
on a shelf above your dresser,
beside a tin cup full of thistles
and a book of Buddhist prayers.
A red book, and purple thistles.

You told me once
you would like to die and be buried
with a mouthful of seeds, without a box,
out in a field of swaying green grass
so thistle could grow up out of you.
You said it was the closest
you could get to reincarnation,
and when I asked you
what the baby teeth were for,
you said they were for falling out
and for keeping.