WEDNESDAYS

Certain days, when I feel
stuck, disempowered—
when there's

a creature in
the corner of the
room I can't acknowledge—

I'll sit down and look at
the word written-out:
W-E-D-N-E-S DAY

while allowing my
mind to pronounce
it as: Wenz / day.

The simple simultaneity
of the discrepancy
is such a relief; as if a thing

which is two things,
is all you need to triangulate
the size of your life—

to walk the uncharted
perimeter of its shape;
to peer in one misty

window—then another;
listening both places for
the better music,

but hearing
the exact same thing,
whether it's

this little baby getting
sung-to—or that little one,
gently wept-over.

LOOKING FOR HOME

Almost (but not quite) like
a Renaissance painter
who has masterfully hidden his
face somewhere

in every Last
Supper or
Agony in the Garden,
Sometimes I think there is

a little lost dog inside
everything I write—
perhaps a scrappy black-
and-white terrier named Richard

who goes searching all night
for that one signature
door frame he knows, combing row
after row of my odd

bumpy prose like
cold cobblestones
in the alleys of a hamlet called
Hyrule Castle Town

long after the market bazaars
have closed down and his owner—
a plump moon-
faced woman, whose name

might even be Mamayu Yan—
has returned home alone
to weep and pace worried
infinity symbols

around the stark wood interior
one of my many
flimsily-built medieval
slums of a stanza.

HOW TO WIN THE POEM

Work with regularity
and weightiness a while

to form the mallet
of your timing,

to whack-a-mole
those rising bubblelike

holes in all your feelings.
Sometimes you'll see them

because they gleam
with rhyme—

others because
it makes you furious

to the point of near
blindness when they won't.

5 6 7 8

Between the counts

of one and two,
something furious must
go missing;

between two and three persists 

a distraction, an Instagram picture: 

an idyllic waterfall—with Sisyphus 

photoshopped down at the bottom;

three will only hook-up with four 

the way a pale green door fits 

with its frame—thin ribbons of empty 

space all around it, 

a rectangle of light 

escaping from an off-limits interior 

too reminiscent of the house you 

grew up in to bear. 

For the choreographer—
whose idea of truth 

fits inside the cramped beauty of space
like lace

slippers inside a white 

workaday box,
whose escape from the real is 

the regimentation of the possible—

such profligate ciphers
must leave
not enough, or else too many
rooms for error.

JEALOUS GUY

There are certain disadvantages
to not believing in god

I remind myself grasping
and embracing are

not the same thing
but at some point one

turns into the other
for instance those people

who think they
were John Lennon in a past life

but still a charm
that works like a charm

in the wilderness that exists
out past the garden footpath

must be the the end
of the whole discussion

the sunflower
a bewildering eclipse overhead

the staggered majesty of
Douglas fir mountains

what are these
but swirls of light and matter

forms of that madness
which does no harm?

FISH ARE JUMPING, COTTON IS HIGH

In the dream, it is never raining.
The bees have plenty of time to talk.
The cotton is high, but the corn
is green and neat, and, though it nods,

it isn't listening. Above tree crowns,
the sky has become its own flag:
proud blue and rippling with starlings.
Beneath, huge fish—all exhilarated,

all silver—bullet their glistening
bodies upstream to spawn.
But then, something happens;
something dawns, or someone speaks—

in the gravel bed, an idea has dropped
and broken open; the honey turns
sweet and begins to get heavy.
The bees, those once-lithe teachers,

are drowsy. Clouds gather at far corners
like rumors: those salmon are running
toward suicide—and yet, soon every
reluctant student will wake and return.

LOVE POEM FOR THE WHOLE WORLD

You and me—
in such perfect sync

we never even
think of each other.