When fed by darkness,
seek the tiny lights within it;

when fed by light,
seek the small darkness therein.

No one lives on one or the other
alone, at least not well:

muscles are built from striation
and stress; 

lungs must learn to breathe
both hard and softly.

The jewels in this living
that is sober as often as it is drunk

are always there to be found
as long as you know how to look

no matter the sorrow or the ecstasy
that can blind you to them.  

When Cat killed Mouse
we rejoiced and were appalled:

rejoiced at old Cat
and his obvious pride,

his swatting at Mouse
after the fact, that look on his face

that said, “You never expected
this of me, didja?”

Appalled at the mere presence
of Mouse, his laid out body

a testament to just how much
we’d learned not to expect,

how easily we’d forgotten how old
and full of holes this house is,

how obvious it was that it was not proof
against the normal incursions —

and more appalled than that, perhaps,
at the idea that old Cat (who mostly

sleeps and eats and begs for scraps
and steals those scraps then sleeps again)

is so much more on the ball than we
at what goes on around here.

You want them to be happy
but there are times when you say nothing —
you see where they’re headed, what’s 
headed their way,
and you say nothing.  

You used to pick them up
after they naturally fell
and speak small nothings
to make it better.  There were times
when you couldn’t make it better,
when you all would have been better off
if you’d said nothing.  

Now, even though you want to say
the most obvious thing you’ve learned,
that no one’s the center of the universe
and on more than one occasion
the universe will run over each of us, that
there was a wagon in old India called the Juggernaut
that taught this lesson with blood and crush
to everyone watching,

you’ll all be better off if you say nothing of it
because sometimes the wheel 
tells its own story best.

In the dark,
lying above the coverlet
in an air-conditioned bedroom
tastefully decked in calm and color,
you say nothing
although you could say so much
about peace, and living, and getting
here.  You say nothing to yourself.
You know this. You don’t need to speak
of the wheel and how it laid you out
again and again, and likely will again;
while you think of all
you could say to the crushed and bleeding
you so desperately want to be happy,

you know that nothing can be said,
you say nothing
and wonder why you hear that wheel
outside your door, when you know
that not speaking won’t put you into its path.
It’s just what you fear
impotent but pleading for grip
in the assumed voice of the wheel
before you go to sleep,

and then you go to sleep.