Pursuit
Consider an arc crossing the cosmos
nine billion light years away
a bit of order making the chaos
spookier Consider a small boy
flying through a park chasing two
huskies one with gray eyes
The boy’s not calling their names
simply running and waving a strap
while his dogs scamper away
and don’t even stop to sniff
my own tame hound Who gives
a child such a task For a while
I follow at a distance then
cut the angle toward pines
and brush–home to rabbits
that might draw the truants
The gathering dark of course
swallows the trio leaves me
another sad adult lagging behind
staring up at stars I can’t name
World News Tonight
An inch of snow fell yesterday,
illumined the branches of trees,
erased curbstones, and covered the trash
that blows through the park. Tonight
has lost its edges and joined
a thousand years of nights. A scent
composed of leather and sweat
rises when I shoulder a door,
wanting in, or maybe wanting out
of rain and wind, out of a vacancy
I’ve learned to inhabit. Voices leak
down the hall from a half-lit kitchen
where someone is frying onions. Maybe
also a bit of beef and something sweet.
I slip out of wet shoes and enter
a dream past which is not
only mine. The tale’s more
than one family’s wars, trials,
and steerage berths. This frozen night
joins with other nights, the haunts
of a billion ragged dreamers,
selves adrift in a moving world.
Standard Changes
After “Nature Boy”
For lousy pay, I drove a van
between Detroit and Wapakoneta, Ohio,
spinning it once in a white-out storm
and sliding up the Luna Pier exit
to stamp and thaw among lost souls
in the moon’s damp firehouse. Later,
I shot weddings, shingled roofs, herded
children and was called, in each job,
by a different name. Adrift. While
he wrote about love, eden abhez
and his family camped out below
the Hollywood sign in forties L.A.
Today, they’d be jailed. Picture his wife
braving the wind on dry nights.
Maybe she was the visionary.
What do I know? I’m tone deaf,
sipping coffee and reading wikis
amid the tremors of another time.
Only that he moved west and changed
his name and slipped a hit to Nat Cole.
That they had to track him down
to sign the record contract. That we want
to unravel love, to get it or save it,
though everything leads to return,
love evaporating and falling like rain,
like snow, while we turn wheels
into swerves and utter strange
bird cries, waiting for a crunch.
after a line from Williams
The places we visit are new
versions of our city–streets we knew
house by house elm by oak
an alley where the phone pole
marked an end zone a park
on a river where mailboats docked
between runs to slow freighters
What was our town and what
might be draw together like lovers
in a doorway lips joining them
for a beat after arms and linked
hands release After sirens a rapt
child pulls her face from a window
and leaves a faint warm
convolution on the glass