Reaching into my clay
and gripping.
What I’ve seized upon forms
a ball, then a tube ridged
from where my fingers have dug in,
then it squirts away into nothing
because I’m strong enough,

but that leaves me with
an empty hand
and nothing with which
to work.

I wanted to make a bowl,
something to drink from;

the trick, I guess, is knowing how
to hold on enough
to shape the desired form
but not so tightly
that it disappears
from the effort.

It’s a trick
I’ve never learned.
I won’t learn it perfectly,
ever.  Too attached
to being right to know
better, even when I can
put knowing better
into words.

When you’re forever gripping your own clay
so tightly that you come up
with nothing but dregs on you palms, though,
yet claim that the air before you is now
a masterpiece,

I begin to see how to proceed,
and I let go…because

while there’s nothing I can make of myself
you’ll be unable to break,
nothing you’ll make of yourself
will actually hold the water
each of us needs to survive.

I start
by drawing a line around
the things I will address.

I stare a long time
into the nest of concerns
I’ve created.

When one leaps across the line
into what I’ve forbidden myself to consider,
I know what I must do,

and there I am in mid-air
dreading the landing
and hoping I will be brave enough

to follow it wherever it leads me.
It may be a slog through
filths and scums.  It may be

an orgy with undesirables.
It may be a red road of killing
and stench of fresh flesh torn open.

It may be a quiet road
with a fence and a family 
and a good dog at the end,

with a deadening blanket to lay upon
the very desire to be there at all.
It may simply kill me at first step,

candle me in a breath,
filet me at once.  Whatever it delivers
I shall accept, though not without

a longing look
back across the line
to the place I thought I should be

and a baleful glance ahead
at what I followed
to the place I actually belonged.

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.

Look — a childhood
with explosives
attached.

It’s
waiting.  Might be
waiting a while.
Might not go off
at all.  

It’s a little one —
it has blue marks
on it.  It’s hard to see
in there but it’s there
all right,

under the fat,
under the gray.

It’s mighty strong.
It’s got a bad
sting.  It’s 
whiny and terrible
and soft.  

It’s a childhood
laced up with bombs
and it’s waiting to blow.
It’s a fussy thing.
It’s OK, it doesn’t hurt
any more.  Needs

a mommy kiss.
Not likely to get one,
which
doesn’t shift the need.

And when the childhood
goes to work?  It thinks
kiss.  When it drinks?
It thinks kiss.  When it is
kissed?  It thinks
not this — and

it ticks.

Select pleasant certainties
of my prospective daily
routine

I can spend my day listening
to a variety of songs
comprised of three chords
strummed or plucked
on one or more guitars
more or less accompanied
by other instruments
and wed to
comforting lyrics

There will be
televised
affirmations 
of my lifestyle choices

People’s perception 
of my race and class
won’t change much

My blood
will mostly likely 
stay inside my body

Anything I say
will likely not
be used against me
as long as I affirm
what is obvious
and accepted

Select
pleasant uncertainties
of the day
are likely to include

a mutterworried monologue
about the success or failure of
my bitterflying
attempts at 
allying my regulated smile
to an actual good mood and

probably pre-damned gimmereaching
in the name of the spiritchore
it is alleged I am
devoted to accomplishing

this wordcoining of
magnifications
for tiny cells of soulpoo
that render them
stardanglers for decorating
the select pleasant certainties
of a daily routine

I could not do the latter 
without having the former
I do not know how there are those
who do not
yet who can

A select unpleasant certainty
is that I don’t have to think about them
unless I deliberately decide to
The daily public affirmation of my being
assures me of that
again and again

but I select
caring
and more to the point

I choose to identify outside the certainties
stardangling
myself
in the source of soulpoo
praying to become
a certaintybomb

If this is rejected
I am
certain
it will be
a source of 
unnecessary
mutterworrying

although 
it will be no doubt
deathlaughable
to some observers

We live 
in a net
knotted from lies.

Occasionally,
as it’s dragged along,
it catches on truths.

We reach for them
through the web,
grasp them for a second,

watch them disappear,
our hands torn from them
by velocity.

But now
we know they’re there. 
And now

the net
seems weaker,
the knots looser,

the speed of the ride
tolerable, our tangle
less torture, more puzzle to be solved.

They stand around, looking for the source of the smoke,
wondering how far away it is.  When the first child
ignites, they are amazed at first, 
then push through disbelief to try and extinguish
the small blue flames racing up her back.  She seems
unfazed, more upset by the frantic patting and pushing
and rolling than by the fire.  Once it’s out, another child
starts to burn, and the process is repeated though
the boy’s reaction is the same:  no fear of the fire,
discomfort and fear at the rush to put it out,
the prescribed violence of the response.  Eventually,
all the kids are burning although they continue
to swing and climb the jungle gyms 
as the smell of meat fills the air.  The parents
are nonplussed but do what they’ve been doing all along
even as the kids protest and say, “It’s no big deal! Stop!
We’re fine! You’re hurting me! Stop!”  A learned expert
proclaims it a generational miracle and says that
perhaps this is the next stage of evolution:  a species
of burning humans who don’t care if they burn.  None
of the children have an opinion.  They’re just kids, after all:
what do they know? Something, I guess,
that the rest of us don’t, with their blue flaming hair
and their blue flaming lips, singing hot songs
as they play and dance
and see the earth
changing.

In the bluest eye,
a dot of brown.

In the whitest snow,
a gray morsel.

In the darkest night,
a light shining just to be seen.

In this second,
a small eternity.

Imagine, now,
purity.  Pretend it exists.  

Pretend flight
is endless, that what flies

never lands. Pretend
you never land.

Pretend earth under you
is invisible — no down to define

up. See how far
you get. In what direction

are you flying?  How far 
have you gone?  

In the clouds,
rain, lightning, hail;

in your wings, now,
an aching for rest.

the Work
took so much from him

that when he finally rested

he blew away.

where the husk landed
was a husk.
a heap of husks.

the Work stepped lightly
on them when it came that way

and they powdered.
they ended up as dust
on the sole of the Work’s foot.

in the steps of the Work
was the dust
of the husks.

if you look,
you can see the whorls
of the Work’s
bare footprint.
if you ask,
the Work has no
one human name.

the husks
remain somewhere
back on the trail of
the Work. 
if you seek them,
you will be

disappointed
when you see the pile

and unable to explain 
the Work
by sifting the shreds

through your fingers.
you will learn

how little you knew of him
that made him any different
from anyone else
whose husk
is now mingled with the others.

perhaps that news
is on the feet of the Work
but it is now
so far along
there will be no point
in trying to catch up.

She had a last vision
of a Brazilian river.
His last words
were of the endangered
Confederate trillium,  
glimpsed in the Florida Panhandle
on a college hiking trip.

Then he lost the marbles
and there were bullet holes
in the pole, the stripper,
the back wall…

fortunately, 
they kept a shotgun
under the bar.

He’d just wanted to shoot marbles again,
the game he’d learned from his grandfather…
He was no good as a shooter then.
She’d wanted to see the Rio Formoso again,
wanted to see her mother…
She was no stripper then. 

Lost his archaic marbles, then:

bullet holes,
dented poles,
the woman

vanishing.  It’s to him
as if she wasn’t there

but she was.  A marble
to be shot, so she was.

Wow, said the newspaper.
This is not making much sense.
Why would he do this, was there a grudge
or a vengeance?

A brain scientist will be called in
to explain. It’s fractal, she’ll say.
It’s got
infinite dust
to be cleaned up.

It’s revenge for the vanishing
Confederate Trillium, yes.
Revenge for lost marbles.
He forgot that at once.

She forgot the Brazilian river,
the beautiful
Formoso.

It’s fractal.  It cleans up
beautifully.  They
cleaned up beautifully.

Nothing new in the story:
crazy person, tragic
person…
just this,
unspoken:

Mama,
are you here?

Grandfather,
are you here?

No one plays marbles 
anymore, and
no one here knows
how lovely
the Rio Formoso
can be in the right light —

oh for the right light
once again on the leaves,
through
the translucent 
vanishing flowers;

no one here
can explain to anyone else
how beautiful…