Tumble

Tear it down.
I bit back the thought, love
It’s a hard idea
And when I set the table tonight
And smoothed my napkin in my lap
And felt my own revolutionary hand
Wipe across my thigh
I made a “no” flick
With my head
To nudge the thought out

I am not the crash of an era
And this is not the eclipse of an empire
It is just
Dinner
It is not the parting wish of a prince
It is not the last cry of the last Caspian Tiger
Not even a plate
Holding a late October plum

But as the fork teeters in my hand
And I see the subtle bend to my fingers
The same bend I saw
My great grandfather use to clutch me
I suddenly believe in the evolution shaking
At the end of my strong young arm

And I bite
And I swallow
And I wait for the fall
And in my mind’s eye I watch me
Tomorrow
Full
And kicking the stately ruins
Like nothing but bottle caps
The tumble like trimming
To a wide and busy sidewalk

tonic

A comment wormed from childhood
Protests that life delays
And once averted stations us
In heaven, bounty paid
Used as a balm to every when
That hasn’t had o’clock
Quells private revolutions
If a thunderbolt unlocks
So just sit tight, appeals the voice
And let the tonic spread
Eternal life is promised you
Just wait here 'til you’re dead

Mine

Tonight, I am tasting the Atlantic on my tongue
I think of the spray as swallowing the end of my country
And sampling the beginning of Europe
I feel like an ambassador
Soul kissing the continents
I point my face in the direction of Ireland
And offer myself to it and the lands beyond
With America at my back
I say
Mark me, Old World and New
I exist to touch you like a builder
We have kissed and You are mine

Constant North

Tonight I stretch and think of you
I put on my new boots, the watertight ones
A coat, a scarf, two gloves
And I go out walking north
As an explorer would
The wind puts its hands on me
Like a bouncer
And I travel bent
Into the total eclipse of winter

I don’t think of arriving
Or the journey
Or even of you now
Only the sound of the trucks passing
The fixed harmony of machines
Invincible gears
Eternal hums
Behind me, at me
Longing away
Gunshot beams staring forward
Like the possessed eyes of a painter

Awe at first threatened me
But now
Makes me feel safe and steady
Like I, too, am inevitable
A tardy, but inescapable, season
Only
That thing that was my light
You
Is indistinguishable now
Behind the blast of constant horizon
Oh I fear the machine of me
Will continue far past you
Into Canada and beyond
Wiping all memory of home away
As an obstruction on my windshield

corners

It was a quiet little corner
And I had gently folded up
Like human origami
Arms crossed on my lap
Neck long and twisting
Ankles laid one on the other
A single paper crane

I saw the other woman
In her little corner
Leaning on her bracelet
And cutting her eyes sideways
With one remaining yawn of shrewdness
Extinguished
The man, smiling back without delight
His arm around her shoulder
Like he had slipped it
Into her purse

My corner felt big
A lifeboat before its filled
Still lashed to the side of a ship
A hollow but friendly vessel
Agreeing to carry a paper bird
As they gathered like a crowd
On a dance floor across

Then, perched in my corner
On the verge of wondering at
The spectacle of their clinking glasses
I abruptly dismissed them
The way I'd inevitably turn from
The sight of a vacationer
Fretting before the whizzing windows
Of a slot machine