Rain has stopped
after all night dropping
on us and ground and roof,
falling into gutters, clattering down
to puddle the sunken end of the driveway.
It’s going to madly green out there
once it warms two more daily degrees
or so.  We call this Spring —

or, more often, “mud season,” 
the season when we notice
how filthy our cars are.

Spring here is a half-minute of breathing room 
between ways to suffer,
a half-second to knock crap off your boots
and your life — 
a half inch deep undrinkable lake 
in the scant soil 
of the backyard.

Season of slop — 
our city’s not pretty,
not clean, not bright.
Our roads are holy and pitted
like the path to Heaven, even as
we’ve been dreaming
of Hell’s heat
all cold season long,

and now it’s coming.  

It’s coming
in faster bloom than last year.
It’s coming
in smaller snow piles than ever before.
It’s coming
in our unease at how easy
winter was, how little mud
there is to mud season
this year.

It’s coming
as we get around to washing off
toxic grime from our wheel wells,
scrubbing at caked,
kicked up road salt
that’s tearing hell
out of metal. 

A warmer world
is coming,
perhaps the warmest one ever;

it’s coming, and
no one’s ready for the heat;

though we all say,
as always,
that we can’t wait,
soon enough

we’ll be staring at that depression
in the backyard,
marveling at the memory of it
full of water, wondering
if  we will ever see mud season again.

You drifted into this
as a boat unmoored
might drift:

predictably, 
based on past unmoored boats’
behavior
in an ocean with such well-known currents.

We suspect you’ll say now that
you were surprised
to end there of all places.
We have to call you out.

This was so obviously
going to happen. We shook
our heads about it
right in front of you.
We said it
right to your face
so often, we’re a little surprised
you didn’t dream about it
every night. It’s as if

you never heard us —
or maybe you did,
and then did everything you could
to be what you shouldn’t have been;

it’s almost as if you were determined
to end up there on that far shore
starving and broke and broken
with no way to come back, almost
as if you were determined to be
as far away from our good sense
as possible, and we’ll be damned

if we know how
or have the wherewithal
to rescue you now — look at you

sitting there, staring into the sun
as if you’d never been told
not to do that.

Studies have shown that
we are swiftly evolving,
losing obsolete traits; soon,
perhaps, none of us will have
an easily identified face
or name as the great
mass of us has no need 
of such things in the larger
System. This may be why
we are fighting so hard for them
right now — the last grasp
of those things slipping away,
sinking into a hole called 
the species, the course of
history, the past. Imagine
that — living without
any of the markers
we’ve relied on
to decide what to say to
one another.
Imagine the freedom
of not having to live up
to your own name;
imagine the joy
of perpetual first encounters;
try to imagine whether or not 
we could even care
for such things then —
imagine
how the definitions of joy, love,
and care will have to evolve
in order to survive, if indeed
they survive at all.

season of cold and 
crocus — purple chalices set
against mud-specked white

lit in the backyard
by headlights upon
late homecoming after work

exhausted, hungry
for shower, supper,
undirected talk, good touch

later, before sleep,
the making of a to-do list
that starts with raking the yard

once (of course) the crocuses
are done with their blooming
and their season is done

then it will be our time
to see to our garden —
but until then

we shall leave it to
the crocuses
to remind us that winter

will come to an end
will be marked
and announced

regardless
of us
spring will come

We don’t matter, 
you know.

As much as we’d like
to be important, 

that is how much
we are not.

Thank God for that
as God made us in

God’s self-important image
and that’s all we truly share:

the ego of Being as We Are
and no more.  According to

the Bible we were born to,
we named shit and then 

screwed up from there and now
we’re in the dark groping toward

a way back.  We’re a damn cliche
and are not even individuals within it —

there we are,
exemplars and not people — 

trying, desperately,
to make a mark amid

well-deserved skepticism:
we don’t matter, and isn’t it

a relief to not matter
in these times that might

give you a chance
to escape.

he was
the wrong guy 

for damn near every job —
modest brain and small brawn
built for clumsy
not for comfort
or smart 
or speed —

had one decent trait —
a modicum of skill
at stitching memory
to current events, then
making a song of sorts
from them — when
the memory started to go,
that went with it — it wasn’t 
much of a thing in the first place
so — 

he was
not pretty at all

in his own eyes — acted
like he was because 
someone told him that’s how
you get over but mostly

he was 
ridiculous

rankly bad at times
when it suited his cowardice
to be so but mostly just 
criminally lazy when it came to
right action —

his heart admittedly was
mostly in the right place
even if it was small and
moved around too much to ever
be a great anchorage —

he was
unreliable as narrator
and as man —

still he was

somehow loved by more than a few

which (he alone
knowing himself in full)
puzzled him enough that
he did not trust such love
to last and so

he was alone when he passed — 

it would be romantic to describe him as 
tortured but 

his struggle never
rose far enough into epic territory
and never led
to epic enough art

for the description to be apt —
the wrong guy really
for that — 

we say instead
he was throughout
a self-inflicted wound — 

now that at last
he’s not

we wish him peace and healing
wipe a scant tear away —

then
the forms having been observed

turn back to
whatever we were doing
before we found out

how dead he finally was 

Letting this night go,
this bird or giant moth, 
as it’s leaving us behind, flying off 
on powder-soft wingbeats.

It’s been either mystery
or mistake, no doubt, but we’re not
getting another word as it goes
away; we’re being left to fill

everything in — what it was, what it
said and how it spoke.  It will not
serve us to make up too much, but neither
will it be good for anyone to leave gaps

where we imagine the truth should fit.
We should tell what truth we know
whenever we can, even if the night
left much unsaid. So let’s sit

on a bench in the dark and talk
until we think we understand, or 
understand enough to say plainly
what we think we know, what we

are willing to commit to: how to interpret
the mystery, how to fix the mistake,
how to get to dawn from here as the night
rises on silent wings, wounded or not

but resisting in
the only way it knows:
by not giving up a secret without
a sacrifice or an offering.