Inexplicably,
In that large gray canyon
A small, summerlit sound filled the air
Like the scent of lilacs
In Springtime
Inexplicably,
All the jewels of childhood,
All the string and willow whips,
Lay before me, and
All my aching heart sang along
Bitter snow
A handful of vagrant seeds
Juncos all alight with hunger
In the teapot
Leaves grow cold
Fall comes upon us
All gaudy and draped in red
Like yesterday’s blood
Sometimes I think the land,
the kind of soil,
the trees, the vining shrubs,
the water and what swims in it,
what crawls out of it,
these things fill veins
with a stronger wine
than mere genetics.
Feet of clay, they say.
Not much clay in these
Northern parts,
all sand and gravel
pushed and mangled down by
ancient ice,
time after time
until all memory is gone.
You’d think such persistence
would make smooth,
but all I know is raw
and open,
like yesterdays.
In those dim grassy
harp-infused summers, we
longed for gray days
in redemption of living well,
the irony cloaked in
naïve dissolution.
We rejected willy-nilly
all that was pre-primed, packaged,
brightly colored.
For us, the rough edge, the ill-fit,
the soiled and discarded,
dust-blown cowboys
blues men smelling of urine
pawn shops, dives,
anything
dismissed and mistreated,
we imagined our own.
How we trotted out our patchy
lives, how we dwindled in our
constructed agony,
tethered all along
to a safe and sorry fate
we could not quite discard!
Is it a kind of hubris
to deny good fortune?
Or is it mere antithesis,
the dark side of a moon
unworthy of its borrowed shine?
exiles child 