my mother used to say
sing before seven,
cry before eleven. meaning

don’t let yourself be too happy.
don’t think about it. don’t even try.
give up the morning and settle for dusk,

and don’t imagine what it would be like
if the lights never came on again, because
there was never any power anyway.

don’t conjure
hope
you can’t handle.

don’t ask for mercy.
don’t turn your bed into a music hall
and expect a dance troupe to come through.

the arms of god are nearly endless,
some poet said. point being, of course, that
they do end. i should know, because god’s got me good —

that bricklayer’s
paw up in
my puppet hole.

but i keep my mouth shut, and i feel nothing.
i don’t even hum when i get up. i was well prepared.
mom was smart. i thank her every morning.

The world’s big insurance companies have indicated that they won’t be adversely affected by the tsunami, because so little of the property involved was insured and the population was generally too poor to have insurance.

Here’s a link to the story.

Whew.

“how about that tsunami?” “the one in indonesia?” “yeah, that one”

All day there’s been a stream of visitors
to the world map on my cubicle wall,
co-workers come to look for the place where it all happened.

Should I be surprised that on at least five occasions
I’ve had to point at the Indian Ocean
and then do a quick finger tour around the rim?

Or should I be heartened that at least
they came by to look? Or that they knew
the map was here? It’s evidence, after all, that

the wave reached beyond Aceh. The wave
hit everything. It’s just that not everything
got wet enough to make a body feel,

and we have money, like paper towels, to
keep the damp out. I wish I knew if I should cry
or just keep going back to the wall to point it out again:

here is Phuket, here Aceh, here Sri Lanka, here Tamil Nadu,
here Pondicherry, here Chennai. Here is Myanmar
which has been silent. Here we are in the United States,

and here is everyone else.