She has fallen, in the blueish glow of the nightlight,

Asleep, her face pressed in the carpet, her hand

Still curled around the fat yellow pencil

She has used to write my name on the blank page

Of her spiral notebook. NotMom, butKate,

TheKtwirling, vinelike, umbilical, funicular,

Down to a nest of scribbles within which

She must have sought the outlines of the four

Different letters that compose her name—the name

That is hers alone—for which she alone

Must take responsibility—but which she cannot

Yet discern within the clamor of her text

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 12.2]

It was somewhere over the northeastern coast of Brazil,

over Fortaleza, a city of which I knew nothing,

except that it is full of people—

the life of each one a mystery

greater than the Amazon River—

it was there, as the toy plane on the flight monistor

nudged over the equator

and veered east towards Marrakech,

that I started to think again of hands,

of how strange it is that our lives—

the life of the red-haired French girl to my left,

the life of the Argentinean boy to my right,

my life, and the lives of all the dozing passengers,

who are being carried fast in the dark

over the darkened Amazon—

all of these lives are now being held

in the hands of a pilot,

in the consciousness of the pilot,

and I think of other hands which can hold our lives,

the hands of the surgeon

whom I must meet again when I return home,

the hands of the intelligent, black-haired nurse

who unwound the birth-cord from my neck,

the soft hands of my mother,

the hands of those others

who have loved me,

until it seems almost

as though this is what a human life is,

to be passed from hand to hand,

to be borne up, improbably, over an ocean.

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 12.1]

As for those who face their death by wind

and call it by the weird name of forgiveness

they alone have the right to marry birds,

and those who stopped themselves from falling down

by holding the wall up or the sink in place

they can go without much shame for they

have lived enough and they can go click, click

if they want to, they can go tok, tok

and they can marry anything, even hummingbirds.

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 12.1]

I am beautiful. Do you love me?

You may kiss my neck if you want to.

How could you not want to?

But remember, I am tricky,

most impossible to follow

and will not be here much longer.

While you have the chance then

to talk and be inside my presence,

you should try to be more aware

how quickly all this slides away

how quickly all this slides away

and so act with some dispatch.

Live deep within your own beauty

as you repeat after me. The poem at this point,

you know, might loop into itself

and start again, like Pete and RePete

sitting on a fence, but no. Nobody falls off.

It goes instead: I am beautiful.

Do you love me? Of course you do.

I love you too. Let’s take a walk.

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 13.1]

You have closed yourself against me.

Tight as a ship. I will seep in

as you rock and waver, beating at your

windows, eating your rusty seams.

Knock me down and I will rise like

waves. Tell me our collision left no

echo in your hold. Tell me

your rope does not shake at a wind’s

whisper, water hurling chairs on deck.

Tell me you have no recollection of

mornings washing over us. Show me

more of your armor and I will come

breathing as a leviathan to open

memory, then I will lie enormous

along your beam to soothe you and

bring you weakened, aching to shore.

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 13.1]

The dog barked that year,

Delighted with its gift

To the family: a crow

With a broken wing, barely

Alive and struggling to remain

Here, in its mind, on this

Planet of remarkable birds.

When Bingo, the dog, barked,

We ran out and scolded him

For the effort. I remember

The look of sadness

That came over him: not

Unlike the look my father

Unleashed that morning,

Before his final sunrise;

In 1985. He’d been

In the throes of cancer,

So looking sad was pretty

Much the one vestige

Of giving he had left.

His dark eyes glistened

In that special way

Those about to leave us

Give off. The crow

Had it, too. Speaking

Of that crow, it died when

Bingo, in his excitement,

Stepped on its other wing.

My father left us sometime later.

This, then, is about gifts

And the unconscionable

Sadness they bring.

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 12.2]

My birdwatching friends tell me, “You’re always seeing birds that don’t exist.” And I answer that my eye seems to change nearly everything it sees and is also drawn to making something out of nothing, a habit since childhood. I’m so unreliable no one asks me “what’s that?” knowing that a Sandhill crane in a remote field can become a yellow Volkswagen. The girl’s blue dress is easily the green I prefer in moments. Words themselves can adopt confusing colors which can become a burden while reading. You don’t have to become what you already are which is a relief. Today in Sierra Vista while carrying six plastic bags of groceries I fell down. Can that be a curb? What else? The ground rushed up and I looked at gravel inches away, a knee and hands leaking blood. Time and pain are abstractions you can’t see but you know when they’re with you like a cold hard wind. It’s time to peel my heart off my sleeve. It sits there red and glistening like a pig’s heart on Grandpa’s farm in 1947 and I have to somehow get it back into my body.

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 12.2]

What ambitions does a man past fifty still hold?

His dream is but to sit and drink a glass of beer

With his long-estranged grown-up son

They clink their glasses together

This is the way they hug

It is also how they are reconciled

Then they say nothing

As the son gets up for another glass

The father stares blankly as the foam on the rim

Slips to the  bottom of his glass

[Featured in Five Points Vol. 14.1]