The rejected being
was appointed to
a special committee
examining the status of 
healthy creatures. 

The press photo of them all together
in their meeting room was
lovely enough: everyone smiling
broadly, any tension in their eyes
probably a result of bad lighting.

The rejected being took it as
a small step toward acceptance
that the camera
picked them up at all 
as there had been periods

of utter invisibility
in their career. Times when
they knew they’d been at the table,
had done good work, been acknowledged
in the group, and then disappeared

from view almost as soon
as the work was wrapped up
and tied in a neat bow.
(Theirs was the finger
in the center of the bow.)

When the rejected being
suggested early on that the alleged health
of healthy creatures was
in many ways a confidence game, 
the others nodded as if

a nod was better than the wink would be
to a long-dead, well-beaten horse. 
After that, the rejected being could smell
dead horse permeating the meeting room
so often it seemed that

there must be mountains of them
somewhere nearby, invisible
as the rejected being had once been.
They began to speak less of the stench, 
spent meeting time staring

at the press photo
hung so prominently 
behind the head of the table,
where the chair couldn’t see it
at all.

Raptor alone on high:
dull-black speck

against sky
a shade of deep yearning.

Somehow both bird and observer,
I am seeing myself up there:

alone, seeking,
soaring, desperately

not looking straight down
as if seeing myself there

so far away
from what I desire

would initiate
a dive to solid death

for both
seeker and watcher.

Cloud of unknowing:
a hospital bed. A hallway
full of sounds
likely meant for others
or perhaps this time for you,
the voices of better angels
come to give you comfort.

Cloud of unknowing:
the ceiling above, the 
holes in the tiles that likely
lead nowhere except for the One
that opens into a tiny gateway
to the peace that may be waiting
when you leave.

Cloud of unknowing:
when you rise from forgetting
to an awareness of how little
is in your control but you decide
to rest while you can. You will
return to the world soon enough
but for now, you choose
the cloud where all you can do
is wait, and marvel, and heal.

That annoying piano riff that opens
that annoying Coldplay song
is running over and over within me.

I just want it to stop
so instead I can hear
one strong memory
of a living river
I’m not close to
anymore:

Rio Grande
between Santa Fe and Taos;
white water
by the road

where I pulled over thirty years ago
to sit and listen
straining to hear the wind over
ghostly penitente crosses
that might stand
lonely out there still
somewhere on land no one
can get to now because we’ve 
forgotten the way there 
in the cloud of clatter
where we are forced to live.

The lights went out long ago
in the lodges of the penitentes,
and their voices have been
drowned in
noise:

in my head,
that annoying piano riff;

down the street,
the Sunday morning mower
cutting a ridiculous lawn
down to community-approved size;

on a neighbor’s radio,
the allegedly
newsworthy voices
of the insistent dumb;

and in my head,
louder than all the rest,
roaring sorrow and 
invincible ticking down
to a near certainty that
I will never return to
that notch in the side
of the road. 

Some things, I know, 
cannot be saved;

but for there to be
no compensation
for such loss?

Like that piano riff:
ubiquitous; an earworm;
nearly unbearable.

In the unlikely event that I become the center of the universe
I would like it to be known that while I did not ask for it
I embraced the necessity of being the hub around which
this great disheveled wheel can spin as it threatens
to whirl off into the obvious darkness that waits to receive it
when the final day arrives with or without fanfare. Know that

I did not have to do much except sit there as my hair flew
on the undulating wind that rose around me from this whirl
of decay not slowing down but speeding up in a reversal
of what I always thought I knew of entropy, once again
revealing the limits of my understanding and even of my ability
to understand the wide repercussions of what was occurring. Know that

in the unlikely event that I become the center of the universe 
as we know it, I will have been as humble and as much a servant
to the mystery of how things tumble and fall as I am now, when 
the only universe I know keeps me edged out on the fringe of the spin
where I can feel it and see the trails of far away centrality 
that do not include me, have never done so, promise me nothing at all.

first we say now
then we say then.
once we know how
we say now is when. 

we say this
with one mouth
while still
of two minds.

so say we both
as we lose faith
and hope and
all the rest.

on a day 
in fall float
above the body
watching the body

open the capsules
and pour bitter
tranquilizers
into a green glass

of water until
it is half sleep sludge
and the rest is
not at all clear.

we say now and then
we say no. we say
now and then we say no
and then we fall away

into yes and yes again
and then no. and no.
and then no
thing at all until

awakening, bitter.
the mouth tastes it
when it is of one mind
at last again. sick

unto death but not
close enough. shove
the glass into
a black corner. close

our mouth and pretend
we are whole. we are
fifteen and already
a failure. we say that.

For one long moment 
before October ends
in cooling November
after bursting
from September’s fire,

we stopped under trees,
thinking about
dark ways home
from here. 

One day.
Here, now.
A long time coming.
A long time still ahead
(even if how long
remains undetermined,
even if still shorter
than what’s come and 
gone).

A month
like this one just passed
was not promised.
No September
ever has been.

But October?
October,
threatened October,
is a different matter.

Put our clothes back on,
our jewelry. Walked out of
the woods
to the car.

Found a dark way home
to wait for winter.

Drive fifteen miles north
into the forest between here
and the next place people
are bound to be, leave the car
with the keys still in it
in a rest area, walk some distance
across the leaf beds below
the huge old trees until
you cannot be seen from the road;

take off everything — poor clothes, 
random adornments, your long-inadequate
glasses, the bandage on your left arm;
lie on your back and stare up along the trunks
toward the sky that’s a rare shade
of black-tinged blue between the crown-shy
upper limbs of — what are these, oaks
or maples? You lift up a leaf to your eyes
and try to define and decide
but without glasses it’s all you can do 
not to close your eyes and say, enough
with naming things. Any other day
you’d have known without thinking.
Today, thinking is forbidden. No more
definitions, only one more decision
to be made — and the former wound
is already bleeding so even that 
seems to be complete.

What a sky to be under.
What a bed to enjoy.
What a time to be alive. 

On Sunday morning
you discover you are not
who you were 
the night before.
You were a mistake,
you’ve been corrected,
and it hurts but still you try
to maintain a facade of 
used to be
for the sake of
those you love.

Sadly, your hair
betrays you,
its random gray
and consistent wispiness
whispering, casting
your purification as 
perfidy. You plead 
that it’s not true,
but you can’t explain it 
well enough, and you are cast out
of the castle you’ve built
with all the ones you have loved — 
but the question remains:
if you have been purified,
if you are better off now
than you were
when you fell asleep
last night,
were you betrayed at all?

The air or the light?
Something’s red.
The green house looks red —
what’s tinting it? Maybe
it’s neither air or light — 
instead it could be that
my eyes are bad, full of rosewater
or fruit punch. Or the sun
is blushing from
being caught out
this early — a rise of shame, 
tiptoeing up the sky
until it can brazen it out.
I’m haven’t mentioned the air again
because it’s everywhere and it might
hear me and then who knows
what would happen. The air
might choke me or it might be
indifferent. Or perhaps it might say
“well done, that was a test just for you,”
and for a change the air
won’t depress or oppress me today
and all I will have to contend with
is the red light or the 
paint in my eyes which of course
might be blood, I just don’t want
to say that too loudly, it never pays
to acknowledge that the bleeding
you see in the world is all you.