Three Poems

Heimweh / Fernweh |

I keep thinking I should want to go back but the wanting doesn't come. There's a feeling like a pipe that's full and won't drain somewhere inside the walls. I miss something, but I must be missing it wrong. No place, not people. I am nothing like I thought I would be gone, knowing which direction molds the shape I'm bent off. Instead, there's weight which isn't sadness, isn't fear, just dull perpetual fact of being here. Like a tooth is definitely here when it aches: present, in the same place as yesterday. I keep saying I'll leave but I mean I'll feel different about staying. Nothing's the same, it's all close enough. I hold home in my mouth like old water I won’t swallow.

Still,

The road becomes a sort of room, same pressure, and the paint changes before my eyes. I could leave but leaving would mean knowing I'm the kind of person who goes, and I'm not sure I am, or if I'd know how to be that in a way that doesn’t feel played. I’m tired of watching. I remember a self that fears and wants this badly but I can't find the want anymore, too much thinking about the want. So I stay, or I don't leave, which might be different. And the not-leaving fills the same space the not-staying would. I reach out and touch the wall, hear pipes rattling.

The Suspension of Damage |

I hang damage in the air,
I look over it, again and then away
to some other center.
It suspends there,
tinting the scene,
while I turn the lamp to new pages.

We have pored over the lacks,
focused on brokenness and technique for repair,
like pain might could stop if we named
and gave it another way. The search roots in us,
sends up shoots, sends us searching–
what does our body
of evidence eat and become?

Suspension is stopping the drill,
resting the dogs of inquiry.
Harm is not gone;
our attention may be more
than its measure.

like—forgive me this—
turkeys took the branches,
a whole family feathered in the maple,
safe from what surveys the night brush.
Their weight creaks the limbs,
their silhouettes are uncountable shadows
against the last bit of sky.

Neighbor child saw me looking,
leaned from the porch, I saw his confusion
crystalize into a shared understanding:
Why were we both looking at that tree?
His hands, popsicle sticky, rose to point
and he gobbled.

Isn’t this, too, study?
That joy comes unannounced,
with no data or context—
just animal rest.

Suspension, again. The damage.
Back to stillness,
to the hardsoft pause.
To know desire: more than the bruise,
not only a deficit,
records of more than loss.

A contiguous laughter to join in,
the quiet simple counting of survival
and respect for the sovereignty of dream.

Could this be my study;
without denial or amnesiac excuse,
or a disaster to reset the page?
Just suspension of damage,
long enough to hear the branches,
long enough for children to point and laugh,
for turkeys to settle their weight into dusk.
Long enough to feel
that joy roosting within me.

The Twenty-First Century as Feed / |
After Robert Hass

They sold us /
decided and told us the rising tide was personal failure /

recycling, a hitch in moral code, /
and a man at a vape shop /
wipes lack from his hands. /
A bell rings and he was making deliveries /
ten minutes ago. The bell rings /
and he is calling on behalf of /
a debt collector. The bell rings and /
he is a garbage man / 
hauling wet cardboard to and fro. /
He thought himself a flexible man, /
gigging prudence, freedom, shape-shifterly /
     gazes at the screen /
     for a hit of community. /

What a cloud it was, they made /
buzzing plastic, cumulonimbusly /
dripping drops down the cooling towers /
     a specific, curated dread /
magnetically spacing the souls out /
     in orderly rows /
     to be milked. /

The influencer is potentate of air /
and the podcaster is coloring in his studio box /
“unbound,” he likes to say, “by the narrative,” /
composes a long, grave defense of the lottery winners /
praising them gamblers what broke the house /
as if they were god /
pissing and shitting all over the place. /

Calls for sacrifice, they /
eat a hundred head of livestock /
     and the people /
go on trying to live without their heads, /
     applying numb fingers /
     to the stroking of glass. /

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