exercise

My God what else is there to do but fall?

the fellowship

Mr. Jackson knew that
anticipation is
everything. Nerds will
wait hours to learn again
what they already know
and can never forget:

in our case the fate of
a ring and the ragtag
crew assigned to see it
through what evil weather
green pastoral hills could
be made to reflect through

what tricks of perspective
trivia and riddle
lay to narrative’s hand
through darkness by torchlight
disconsolation by
song fear by truth of heart

to the mountain of its
destruction: and whether
it or this fellowship
of fellow travellers
made friends along the way
will be the first to break

the cup

Risen by your hand and
fired in the kiln of
ingenuity and
happy circumstance it
rests its heft upon the
table with your other

wares, none else of which have
quite this purple shade of
glazing as an ocean
wave in morning starlight,
accidental, perfect
in its imperfection

rhapsody

I can’t quite get my shirt tucked in right but
the street piano player playing Queen
he doesn’t have an audience so who
am I complaining is it hot or what
can you believe the sun? Is it the t–
shirt off my back you want or what dude
he’d say: roll up your sleeves and carry on
as I do satisfied in of yourself
and confident in posture to perform
along the street such covers of the Song
as are impossible on instruments
much better tuned than this one! Clothes are worn
the best by those who live as if to say
it doesn’t really matter anyway

the maple seed

There might be any number of
small universes out there, long
and turning arm in arm with ours,
the way a maple seed when caught
on spider thread will take all day
to fall and not stop spinning. Here
might be a lesson. Not much one
for spinning, still I fall along
a tender thread of gravity
and every day turn closer in
toward another universe,
each moment an eternity.
But I will settle to the ground
eventually, and there beside
the wind-spread maple seed
will set myself to growing.

self portrait of the artist turning twenty-four

Some title you’ve put down there. But
that’s what you do: start strong, before
reality can dampen the

confabulations that your poor
nearsighted memory depends
on in the absence of a more

developed visual sense, and then
hang on and hope a poem forms,
which now and then does happen.

It’s not so much like looking for
an answer in a fogged-up mirror
as much as it’s like leaning toward

your bare reflection without fear
as lovingly as you can stand
and asking nothing of it. Dear,

this morning as you raised your hands
all cupped and overflowing, clear
hot water streaming down to land

between your image and your ideas,
to say that I was pleased is not
enough: I was relieved to see

that four and twenty years have wrought
of you a poet, serious
beyond your needs, who yet when caught

disrobed of your precarious
suspicion of appearances
and washed of all your various

pretensions is, and cannot help
but be, good-looking — and what
is more, appealing to yourself.