When the last fireball comes trundling through,
earth on its list poised to be crossed off,
try to find the platitude in the boast,
or see the plodding repetition in the sunset,
or the sheer tedium of mortality,
as if fear were a mere sauce for eternity,
for the certainty that in an infinity
of worlds all will have come to pass
over and over and over,
and even that, over again.
My brother, lost among
fragments of memory strewn
like clues among the weeds
Trees grow in the rain
outside another cabin
constructed of trees
My poems come from pith,
just below the hide of me,
from the circus trance of
living the long moment,
the split between inspiration
and expiration, blue with envy
of the sky, such security!
We’re doomed, aren’t we,
to just missing it all,
to the rear view,
to always thinking,
“So that was it?”
Never mind.
It orders itself soon enough
into personal mythology.
You know the stories,
how this and that
caused something or other,
you either played a part
or didn’t. Nevertheless,
a certain wistfulness,
thin as a spider’s wiry grip
and as strong,
betrays us every time.
Occasionally, in winter
I take a turn into some vast space
–an empty parking lot, a parade field–
shorn of summer frippery
and I’m there again, there
where each single blade of grass vibrates,
where every grain of sand trembles
and the sun,
terrible in its wintry beauty,
fights back the clouds,
never mind their insistence
on seasonal priority.
Hard to stay home on such days,
all the triviality of existence
concentrated in a mote of dust
poised by the window,
ready to make a run for it,
unaware of the relentless
inescapability of it.
exiles child 