To my daily tasks:
fold the laundry, piece by piece;
scrub the toilet with
abandon; using
wave-like motion mop the floor.
Be a servant to
the greater good. This
way terror drains from body
and mind. At least for
a spell, the place shines
with lights and darks, welcoming
friend and enemy.
Our cat is either
ardent, serious, unmoved,
or all nimble play.
She licks the bottoms
of my wife’s feet as she sleeps.
Such pretty, pretty feet.
She lands in my lap
out of nowhere, shuts her eyes,
and shrugs when I rise.
She challenges me:
“Copy me in your silly
verse, my quick changes!”
A pure white moth zig-
zags above the parking lot
this hot afternoon.
It’s hard not to look.
Something about its wayward
passage, that it is
at all – a mere ob-
ject, fellow creature, sign – all
as it disappears.
We woke still in love,
the wall behind our bed layered
with ice. A few streets
away, on Grizzly
Peak, Milosz, great poet of
guilt and grace, unknown
to me at the time.
And his friends, later my friends –
Arthur and Leonard.
Spring came, the Golden
Gate red at sunset, Eros
holding friends at bay.
Once in a grove of
Eucalyptus, we spoke and
I knew Agape.
Now in their absence,
we pick up where we broke off,
talking and laughing.
In one of my job-
less interludes, Providence
rebuilt itself. It
showed its river off,
raised highrises between us
and the green beyond.
Emptiness has mixed
uses. I watch with others
from Prospect Park. From
now on the use that
has no use is my study
as the dust rises.
It happened once. Stars
snapped at me, a child, bare feet
tingled by the grass.
A single blow, like
an old-fashioned camera
flash: did it record
me, as other, or
as now seems, communicate
“Please leave us alone.”
Discredited is
it, the phrase “our fallen world”?
Well, yes, if only
it’s we who did it.
Islands disappear. Bottle
caps lacerate the
guts of petrels. God’s
images or nature’s, we
have put paid to them.
So yes the world is
ours. We’ve remade the abyss
after our image.
