Enfleurage

The language of morning has arrived.

Forget the flowers climbing through

the screen mesh

to sit in our laps.

 

The wail of the sun beyond the poplars

where the river is a long shadow.

All is surplusage.

We rise and attend to the day’s duties.

Out of clutter find simplicity

Einstein wrote,

and so we brush our teeth and imagine

that the body

is a skylight created to protects us

from the stars.

Who can say that the soul

wasn’t constructed originally

from polypropylene?

Then after that, nothing. We climb aboard

the bus or stand

with our hands in our pockets.

 

Our ritual is to believe

we are wading into our lives.

Are swimming.                                                                                                   printable

Boomers

 

After we cut our wrists, drank antifreeze, shot ourselves in the temples, left our bodies hanging from backyard trees,

 

engaged in unrequited loathing toward our parents,

 

read coffee-stained volumes of Gide and Marcuse and Camus,

 

licked Colorado River toads,

 

we were set adrift in our lives and found ourselves becalmed:

 

the ashy coat of night settling around our bodies and making of these hours a kind of sleep,

 

the incisions in our chests where they cut out our lungs to form this reliquary.

 

These emptied husks of days, the yellow anesthesia of a moon,

 

the years drifting down like autumn leaves—wind ferried and desiccated.

 

How the years pass, and the art of a life plays itself like the clarinet we abandoned in tenth grade,

 

like the crows gathering as bored auguries in our nightly dreams

 

when we see our dead mothers floating past in the river, their hair tangled with soggy leaves,

 

how they look at us with disappointment in their eyes and say we have grown thin,

how our fathers have been reduced to ashes in their briefcases. 

 

And we awake some days with parts of our bodies missing. A toe or finger that has given up, turning black as an old pear.

 

Or we imagine our lives as the rain that accumulates in puddles in the back yard, leaving the grass soggy.

 

The empty vessel of these mornings when we awake to the sun interrogating us.

 

While our tongues have been buried in the back yard beneath the tomato plants, and our hearts are growing green on the vines, the size of fists.

 

And we are like sailors abandoned at sea, waiting for any sight of land.                                  printable

                                                                                                                                 two earlier poems