I feel the appalling ache of existence,
And dip my swollen heart
Into the unfurled warmth of arms,
And skin, and words, and thoughts.
I’m insane, or at least not well, my brain
A flooded grave, the coffin cracked by roots
From a forest overgrown…she has slain
The dead once again, and from me no fruits
When children by gunfire die,
When the dreamer and the warden clash,
When statues betray the sculptor, we proclaim
This is not who we are.
And yet, is a kiss that different from a hug,
from a poem, from a text? Neither nature nor science
has anything to say on the matter. Love follows no rules
save those set by her practitioners.
“Would you break the law then pay a fine
If it helped the bottom line?”
“Yes,” says the CEO, “this job is mine
So long as I grow the bottom line.”
America was born mulatto, stillborn
But for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
Aphorisms written in blood with hands trembling,
Terrified of the dark engine that drove
The clouds roll in on rails
Freighted with storms headed West,
A great chain of color clanking
Across the sky, a mass of iron
There is something to be said for purpose,
Is there not?
The lilac tempts the bee,
The politician seeks the voters’ approbation,
The poet pursues greatness;
We embrace like rough hot stone slid against rough hot stone,
The space between us vanishing, a horizon in lifting fog,
The back-and-forth sway of stomach in breath a ship that
Approaches then recedes from the dock,
Each approach staccato with the hum of two engines
Dying in our chests: put-put-put, they seek to anchor
In my garden I have sought to wrest from nature
what’s untamable in both of us.
What grows here, grows because I have knelt
in the dirt, have spread seeds, have weeded and pruned.