Dark Matter

Smell of blood
thick-mixed with soil

in the air here above where
an animal fell,

where there is a depression
formed as it thrashed its last

at the root of the oak. Tiny bites of fur
from its coat cling to the bark.

The body itself is gone,
taken by its hunter or perhaps another

who needed it. I am not skilled enough
to tell by blood or hair what was here,

but it was big. It must have lived
at least a full lifetime to be that heavy;

heavy living that led to heavy lifting.
What remains floats in the air, lighter

than its death would suggest but still
thick-laden with mysterious red flavor,

and I cannot help it. I cannot help but suck that in.
I cannot help how heavy I’ve become.

Do not question why it happened.
Do not answer with your theories
if another questions you. If another
approaches at all, in fact, get up
and get out. This is no time for that.

Ashes in sky, ashes on tongue.
No imminent growth foreseen.
No reason to panic. Lie down
for a bit. Let what is leftover from burning
shroud you in dissolving gray and white.

Get up and carry your living out to a beach or a jetty,
out where waves threaten to knock you back
from that littoral space. Ocean remembers
you, knows you, and will push you back
if you are not yet ready to be drowned.

Days or weeks from now, you will still be
brushing ash from your shoulders as you trudge inland.
In hills ahead is a road that will pass through
or around your now-poisoned former home —
and regardless of route, you must go there.

I could win a title one day.
I’m sure of it. An honor bestowed
by others, a word that would force others
to bow. I haven’t done it yet
but it’s a given that the talent
is there, the will to win is there —
all that’s missing
is the hard work and the ceremony.
That’s the story of this life.

I feel that I dripped with gold medals
in another life — I must have,
I long for the weight so much it’s like
I’ve missed it since birth. It’s like
I was born to miss it minute by minute
until the longing for a return
to the deserved exaltation
ate me hollow and now all I have is anger
and emptiness over how I am owed so, so much.

I’m owed a title, an honorific, a power
I do not feel I have
and if I am not granted my due,
I will take it in due time, I swear.

A wheel, or a tide. A turning.
First daffodils alongside
a cracked walkway, soon to be gone;
the hostas breaking through, ready
for the start of their duration.

New blisters on a tender winter hand.
Raising and stowing the tarp
that laid over the containers
soon to be full of this year’s
hope. The first slow wasp.

Who in my life full of old people
will make it to summer? Nothing
emerging from the soil today
can offer that answer. A wheel, a tide;
a turning. All I can do now

is turn with it
and tend
to whatever comes.

“I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.” — David Ignatow

In some parallel existence
perhaps you were a wolf
but not a wolf
made by humans.

Inside you
there was just one wolf, and
it was always edging toward hunger.
It was the one you fed. It
was you. Inside that one? Not ours
to say.

That wolf was you
but you were not, you were full
wolf and sufficient without
interpretation.

Or perhaps
you were a hawk in another existence,
or a mountain; not human, you dealt
with life on the terms of hawk or
mountain, conscious in ways
not-human, stubbornly unaware of
metaphor.

The curse of being human
is that we claim we are filled
with starving wolves and aspirational
mountains pushing ever upward,
hawks with keen vision seeking
clarity.

We make everything fit into us,
insist everything else is
one of us and now, now?
See where we are —

knowing nothing of the world, staring at
posters hanging outside the cubicle,
working so hard, wishing we were
those fake wolves,
trying not to scream.

I am direct when, as I rise to the daylight’s challenge,
I say: appreciate the oyster for its difficult shell.
I am wearing no such metaphor on my own armor.
It is hard for me not to love the oyster

for such impenetrability. I burst into fragments inside
from quick, combustible self-disgust whenever
I use the word “I.” Who is here? Get out, musher, mingler.
Don’t remember letting this one have the reins.

Do not like to speak of this, so don’t push.
No oyster here, full of salt and sloppy gut.
Don’t care that you think this could be easily consumed,
a luxury for the luxurious. The rings of this shell,

ragged, a terrace whose contours could be read
well enough from outside, ought to tell you: get back.
Get out of my head, you miserable self. Get back from
the perimeter, readers, interpreters. Not here for it,

not your delicacy. You get what you are shown
and are entitled to little more than, perhaps,
a vain attempt to handle what looks like little more
than a rock. Put it down. Back away. Don’t assume

it will open in due time, in your time. Long time
you will wait for that, driver, handler. What is offered
is all. What is held back? Guess again and again.
No oyster here. It could be empty. It could.

Every day there’s a morning
I wonder how long it will be
before we damage the sun so much
it will refuse to show up, but it seems
we aren’t venomous enough
for that just yet.

Did the earth pretty well in,
tossed some junk on moon and Mars,
left a few things adrift to crash
where they may, if ever. Maybe the sun
takes no position on all that; maybe it’s
too big to be bullied, but somehow

I suspect we’ll try. It’s in our nature.
Someone’s going to try it. They
will wake up one day, point at the sky,
say, “Next. I got next,” and ball up
their fists and go to war against the sun.
The sun will flick us off like lint.

We won’t know when to wake up
on those first days. We’ll sleep through it
until it gets cold and we starve. The sun
won’t show up again till then and it will say,
“Apollo, remember? Huitzilopochtli, Ra,
Mithras, Inti — you forgot, and you found out.”