Jigsaw

Tonight I’ll build a puzzle piece by piece,
notice how pleasantly one curved edge fits with another.
A red streak will become a barn roof, and three blue hands will
Fill in the form of a sky.
I’ll piece together hay stacks and silos,
Autumn trees gripping tight at few leaves;
Match gold to gold, red to gold.
I’ll hold the eyes of man in my hands,
The outline of a fist and a pitchfork.
Marci will pace about the room,
Disgusted with her blossoming,
Angry with the tidy house,
Good friends, white shoes. I’ll
Let her brood while I shuffle through pieces
Looking for a corner. And for just a few minutes
My back will be turned to the world;
A world where the sky is falling,
Ground crumbling,
Passing up pieces that I will return to.

Together We Stand

Sometimes I see you
Clothed in similes.
Standing.
Canopied by the sound
Of wet tap-taps of rain
On the old tin roof.
Or sometimes I see you
Singing to “Honey Pie”
And you think no one’s looking.
Standing.
Waiting for old time
Like--
Like waiting for the news.
Or sometimes I see you,
You mighty mountain of a woman,
And I tear up,
Because I know that mortality
Is knocking on your door.
So I stand too.
And Through and through
I’ll stand too.

Volcanoes in Alaska

When I was young my head could wobble on its base.
Back then when I was happy and useless as a calf.
While out in fields, with dew asleep on blades,
(Wind in the rushes, wings on the orchard blooms,)
I would sing. I miss when time was a jukebox,
Penny for a song.

I remember when all the paths of the meadow led back home,
And you could travel across the whistling paddocks all the way into July:
Hearts leaping from bare chests,
Skinned-knees gently brushed by willow braches.
I remember when my heart was above my ribs,
And I carried my dreams with me rather than lay them beside the hearth,
(Hoping maybe the fire will pick them up, so I don’t have to.)
I remember a time before death when I was stupid and weak
And sweet and soft
And when petty things
Like loose shoestrings and an inability to whistle
Were the only pains I knew of the world.

The world: a cute, explosive volcano of existence,
Waiting to be explored,
But with magma barely at bay
just below the surface.

Dramatis Personae

I don’t know if we’re only beginning
or if this is the end.
They never tell me those things.
All they say is here
take the script
learn it
know it
be on time,
never less than perfect.
But Heartache is sweet to toy with.
Practiced mirror faces of sad happy smile
Make crow’s feet and require

non-cheap wrinkle cream. I sometimes
tell my agent n-o m-o-r-e crazy,
the characters are wearing off on me.
But it just laughs.
We’ll take what they give me , he says and

that’s that. I pour
I pour I pour
Myself into it until there’s nothing left.
Leave it all on

the stage
Is my strong, my true mantra. But it’s days like this that I’m reminded
Life is not a movie, and that this isn’t simply a rehearsal:
“Do you even love me anymore?” she said,
And I’d forgotten my line.

Landscape

I don’t remember how the phrase goes
—“shriveled up like a plumb” or something like that—
but that is the first thing that comes to my mind
when hypnosis sets in during the thirty-second minute of my shower.

I can picture my jovial wall of a grandmother shaking her index finger at me.
“You look like a prune,” she’d say and we’d laugh. (Not too long, though)

But it’s not a prune that I see while gazing into the sutures of my morbidly-hydrated, teenaged palms.
What I see is a landscape:

My thumb is the soil of an arid desert, triangle patterns with cracks in-between. My
ring finger is the frame for a rainforest, foliage-clad . My
index finger is a flat, fair-weathered peninsula. My
middle finger is a bloody horizon settling behind a corn-shod plain. My
pinky is a lonely bonsai tree with limbs grasping at empty air. My
palm’s deepest line is a cool stream from which my children’s children’s children’s children
will dip into
to quench their thirst for existence.