Incidental Music
It goes without saying the saying
goes sideways in the child’s mouth
before the hand yanks it out,
makes of it a gun whose smoke takes
a lifetime to fan away, if ever, and if so
it’s because of the exceptional dancer the child becomes.
It goes without saying that
dancing is how a body laughs at
the lens cap of other people’s expectations.
It goes without saying
the child who pictures his mother
walking into work and actually
punching a clock deserves a promotion
to ambassador of cloud shapes.
Afternoon’s Idiot
A dark-eyed junco lands on the porch
and checks me out for a good
two minutes with the teetering head
of the perplexed, as if it can
see in me the potential for insult and missiles,
and chooses that as reason not to
fly off when I rise,
afternoon’s idiot,
to see what instead of clouds
I can fit between two slices of bread.
The Oldest Story
You find yourself walking
down the road in the eleventh version of
yourself, eyes wiped clean by the wind.
There are groceries for sale
in clean, well-lit rows. Some traffic
moves while other traffic stops.
A plane passes overhead. It looks
like a hook pulled clean from a giant cloud fish.
It will arrive on time.
You convince yourself again that
there is order inside this cyclone,
that this is the course a life should take.
You operate under this false belief
for weeks, maybe years, until
love flips you over like a beetle
forever altered by a raindrop.
You find your legs again. You shake your head.
You watch a blind nut find its squirrel.
Stitches
You appear as a dark curtain
and say my name, your mouth
a crease in the fabric.
I feel like a baseball
in the tall cemetery
grass, mistaken
for a second as a flower.
When I wake and
you are not a curtain or a person
in my bed I feel like the boy
who hit that ball over the fence
and stood there before deciding
not to retrieve it out of fear
of the stone angel sewing him to a tree.
Bedtime Story
Steam is the ground
guiding home lost clouds.
