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.

notes for a bestiary

Spider
Your home-spun work won’t
go unnoticed much
longer. At least when
I’m away someone
takes care of the place.

Sparrow
Your reappearance
at my window proves
curiosity
is the sweet song that
animates us all.

Honeybee
“What business is
it of yours what we
get up to when not
pollinating your
weeds or making sweets?”

Buffalo
Heaven you hope will
be much like earth: a
grass plain to lie down
in and next to you
a pile of corn.

A rug would preserve
your tawny color
but not your mother’s
eye for danger or
your dread competence.

Today little one
your appearance on
the horizon looks
for all the world like
a second sunrise.

Mosquito
Why should I want to
sit unbothered in
my skin when to be
desired is such a
bloody compliment!

Squirrel
Your winter store of
cleverness, redoubt
of all small creatures
such as ourselves, has
never failed you yet.

nocturne

Like the moon itself opposed
To sudden motion you await
Some late bus or other
In perfect stillness and repose

Like the softly spoken word
Awaiting your return at home
Dutiful and sighing
A white and windblown curtain turns

the garden

The tulips are in
bloom the shorn
grasses grow

faster than they can
be shorn down
again the

fountain will flow soon
into a
new basin

Dr. Borlaug thanks
I guess for
giving us

more than we know what
to do with
. . .