WORK SONG

Certainty 

prevails—only 

not the sort you wanted.

For God 

is not the manager,

the foreman—or even

the carpenter. 

No,

God
is the hammer—

and a hammer

just pounds nails.

EVEN STILL

There is nothing in this world

so patient

as our longing—

the way it curls

up like a question

mark and waits,

purring phrases 

in quotations which sprawl across 

the pillowcase

and conspire with 

our deference 

to keep us awake and explaining

again at the tail

end of another

long and tiring day.

HALLELUJAH LTD.

Splashing water 

in the basin—voices 

of the yet-unborn

sing: praise be 

to everything's

always and everlasting

trickling a little too 

quickly down the drain again.

VANISHING LINES

Who needs the lampposts

this late hour
of the year?—when

bright fire-

full ranks of condemned 

sugar maples tend

to illuminate, 

chiefly by means

of satire,

the uninspired 

deadends of our own
private boulevards: this 

compulsory drive 

we have to try 

to live forever.

THE LITTLE THINGS

In my humble opinion, 

no one has ever

climbed a mountain;

they have only
lifted one foot after 

lowering the other—

over and over—
until their desperation 

lessened. 

The implications of this fact
are both trifling and
far-reaching:

every hard thing
is made of easy pieces,

 
just like 

every large fear
is the sum of smaller misses;

and every night, 

sleep comes

to jumble up these scraps
like the flotsam 

in a snow globe,

just so they can 

settle back down again 

the very next morning

in a pattern just unique enough

from the one we found
delight in last time—

it's a slightly aestheticized
third-party situation 

that, when safely under
glass, we come to know 

as The Human Condition.

POEM ABOUT THE SKY *NOT* FALLING

It’s de rigueur 

to be alarmist—

as a poet, 

to notice 

what others 

might miss—

to stand in the yard
as the light shifts, halves, 

dims—

and see that the flint sky,
with her first stars 

just smoldering,

looks the way she always does: endless
and massive and complete-

ly unsupported.

But it's harder work 

convincing 

yourself than another

to cash-in your doubts

with no 

certainty rewarded

and write it down

without being 

coerced, praised, or scolded—

and harder still

(if not more
like borderline impossible)

to know there’s 

no proof 

she will stay up there forever,

but still rest
assured that you

don’t have to hold her.

TRIVIALLY TRUE

Weird to hear the Buddhists’ 

repeated stipulation:

no mud, no lotus—as if 

the muddiness of ground

were even worth 

pointing out—as if

dirt were a bad thing

instead of all earthlings’
fundament and nurse—

as if The Umbilical
were some sort 

of hideous noose,

and not the source of all 

warmth and nutrition.

But what's more: 

is there any dirty word

or base body function which
doesn’t have its season?

Is there any blameless reason
whose antithesis didn't 

play a precipitating part? So, 

of course a little unruliness

is the compassionate warrior’s 

greatest weapon

when it's not even possible 

do such a vulgar and 

autonomic thing 

as breathe in

and out again—and not
call it art.