New Horizons
Hard reach
through black thick
slick full mooned symphony
and thin
air
and empty
Worlds, new and newly
passable: disillusion of
a taut familiar vast: rock rough heart: obtained
the cold rock
tremble-dances
Spring-eyed
spacecraft
of the serious
night
What stern soft
safe passage:
let us carry
to the underworld
balance weight coin
close mouth
no water
Sadness: The Necklace
When the necklace snaps the first time a cascade of rainbow stone beads
I am in a class of 10 year old boys. Like a fountain of fish scales from my chest
the beads spring; the boys, knowing this is a situation of gravity but not knowing
as 10 year olds how to react are, for the first time, stone still. It is as if someone
has pressed pause: the boys, some with pencils in hand, some half out of seats, some
standing on seats with paper crumpled in fingers clenched and only the beads
in motion. Lavender, green, striated, they bounce, then trickle, then stop. The boys,
used to making penis jokes and doing everything but test prep must see something
stricken in me, and as I start to shake a few stragglers from my hair and then gather
the lost beads in a paper cup from the water cooler in the next room they compose
themselves slowly, hands in lap, serious silence. "Are you okay?" one ventures. When
I nod—I have almost all the beads now, cool and piled, they didn't roll far—he tries again
"Are you gonna, like, die?" Meanwhile the class has reanimated, all
living color, stopped stop-motion, navy sweaters, orange sneaker laces, and lime green,
and the pile of beads in my hand so earthly and alive just filling the size of my fist.
Before the Cataclysm, a Humid Sunrise
pretend a silence not
desiring:
slipstream fall to the damp earth
the things I want
innumerable: snowfall, gulls
ecstatic upper atmosphere
turned red cracked, cocooning
I don't run to the warm parts
and only one planet wheel
flicker flicker yellow eye white flicker
