Once the temperature hits fifty
regularly, I scorn to wear a coat. 
It’s bravado
or fetish, really, not about
not being cold anymore, just that
it’s time for winter to go
and I figure maybe if I tough it out
it’ll get scared and back away.

Tomorrow
it’ll hit 70 for the first time
in 147 days.  I’m ready.
The daffodils that have been hanging tough
on the end of the walk can’t either. 

I can feel for those first daffodils,
the set on my corner, flashing their colors.  Tomorrow,
they’ll come into their own.  If they could swagger
and tag the neighborhood, they would. 
So would I.  The heat’s
got its eyes on us. 
We gotta represent. 

Still as
the cat
on my covered feet.

Open to whatever
crawls in with me
to accompany my sleep.

Prepared to answer
any question
a rare dream may pose,

or at least to entertain it
long enough to decide
if it’s worthy of an answer.

Good night, 
good night.
I shall hang in the dark sling

till tomorrow’s
first moment,
waiting for it

to swing me loose
into whatever day
may bring.

Once upon a time,

a dead lamb woke up
in a parking lot, inside
a minivan.  Struggling
against the shrinkwrap
and the styrofoam tray,
she looked up
at the dome light
and thought:

where’s my mother?
and where are my limbs?

Now, it’s old news
that an orphan
will fixate on a dim glow
somewhere above
and demand to know
where its missing parts are,

but what happens next —
the escape, the horror of the shoppers
as the lump of meat bounces bleating
from the car and charges haphazardly
across the asphalt toward the meager grass
on the islands between the rows of spaces —

that’s something else.
We feel hope
under the shiver
running up our backs:
a small chance of salvation

We the
dismembered,
born to be killed,
then packaged and consumed, might have
a chance at redemption;

even if the life
we regain will be short, unnervingly strange,
and red-lined with incoherent noise and pain,
at least it will be
ours and ours alone.

The look
of rewired surprise
on the faces of those who see us rise
will be enough to require the phrase

"happily ever after"

to be returned
to the language
as something more
than just the end
of a story.

1. Inevitable

Nothing is.  Not even
the old saw about death
and taxes was correct.  You can escape the latter
through the former, and as for Death…well,
Death is just damn good.  Hasn’t failed yet
on the most obvious level,
but he’s been missing a crucial opportunity
all this time. See,
an amoeba formed
at the dawn of life has managed to keep
some identity, somehow, by dividing often enough
to make the concept of individual death
less clear.  There’s a man or woman,
or maybe a llama or a deer,
somewhere in Peru or perhaps Bonn,
who’s got enough sense
of origin inside to make it plain
that something has always survived,
and that something keeps spreading itself
around.  When it goes at last
into the Big Light, Death will follow it there
and they’ll each have to concede
that if Death is inevitable,
then so is Life, until the day
when they prove each other wrong.

2. God

Boy, did we get this one wrong:
for one thing, God’s neither
infallible nor all knowing, and God’s
got no fingers in anything we care about,
famously saying once through a middle man
that he’s bored with the sound of our assemblies.
He (and I use the pronoun with the full sense
of how he’d snicker if he were paying attention)
spends far more time with dice than we think.
Everything’s a gamble to God — the free will,
the predestination, the mysterious ways,
the whole rigamarole we’ve established
to console ourselves as to what happens
as he pulls back, releases,
and waits for them bones to settle. 
Which explanation we choose for the roll’s result
is left entirely up to us…exactly as we should expect
from a gambler who wears lucky socks
just to watch his dawn catch fire every day.

3. Peace

It doesn’t come from absence
but from presence.
It defines itself better
by commission than by omission.
We expect too much from it —
the instant it’s here, we agitate
for its continued existence, forgetting
that it lives for the moment
when we stop thinking of it
as an unusual, exotic creature
and let it graze on our lawn,
doing whatever it likes as long as it is
unenforced.

MTV2 is playing
as I read a poem about
about a man
eating a live fish.

I look up
to see a heavy metal video
in which someone is scaling
a large fish —

proof
that if I do have
a personal savior, then
verily, He rocks out.

in this garden
grave markers
have been repurposed as pavers
for paths among
thorn bushes

the name
“deborah”
visible
under a thin cloak
of moss

beloved helpmeet
of isaiah shurtleff
died in childbirth

daughter’s name
rubbed illegible

two hundred fifty years later
and still
underfoot

In seventh grade
none of the boys
wanted to have a crush
on Patty Reilly
but it seemed that all of us secretly did,

because she was the only girl we knew
who shared our passion for
Magic Words.

A lot of us were into Magic Words that year.

Some of the words
were obsolete but still tasted good, like
caltrop, trebuchet, and main gauche;

while others not only satisfied but still could conjure, like
landmine, trajectory,  and blood groove.

But Patty loved
the most potent words of all,
the ones that sizzled behind her teeth
and made the adults cringe when they were released:

Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Panzer, Mauser, Luger.

She cut her black hair short
and let it fall over one eye.
She wore a lot of brown
and even goose stepped in the halls
and somehow got away with all of it,
her and her long legs
and green eyes,

and the fact that she was
always, always laughing,
and that she was always, always smarter
than all of us in any class,
and that she told everyone
that she didn’t approve of it,
she just found it all
fascinating.

You had to be in love, a little bit,
with Patty Reilly
if you were a boy in my seventh grade class.
We never could have gotten away with that shit,
but she did,

and we learned how —
and about magic —
from watching her.