Lucky Break
A white marble wheel
has many uses: travel,
for example, or shaping clay;
a simple lathe but, like any tool,
needing balance. Else
the center, which is empty,
cannot hold, lets loose
its own purpose,
fragments flying untethered
from any force centripetal,
explodes its form, stone
wheeling, broken
into clavicle and pelvis,
petal and wing,
like disaster,
like the first creation:
joy and death spilling
from the cracked jar—ah!
the thing it isn’t and
ah! the thing it yet
might be.
What It’s About
with thanks to Allen Ginsberg
Spring is about standing in the dark under the darker eucalyptus
and feeling the future like an ache in the throat,
in the lungs like drowning,
like waiting in silence for the bombs to fall.
Bombs are about who’s lying and who’s counting, and counting
is about numbers we agree to. Agreeing
is about investing your money in the same things.
Money is about money and also about what you don’t have.
Not having is about pain and pain is about being broken each year,
being broken by promises by grace by the bursting seed-pods of deceit
and telling ourselves we will heal or if we cannot
telling ourselves it’s our place to be stupid and broken.
Our place is about three cars in the driveway
and streetlights and sidewalks
and sidewalks are about what’s worth protecting.
Protection is about terror and destruction and inevitable suffering
and suffering is always
about birth, about stains and mystery
and mysteries are always about the silence
the aweful, chilling silence that fills the right now before
whatever is about to happen happens.
March 18, 2008