The kindergarten bus bounces past me this morning as
I shamble out to my car and a little cheerful kid waves
To me shyly and whatever it is we are way down deep
Opens like a fist that’s been clenched so long it did not
Think it would ever open again and for a moment I am
That kid and she is my daughter and I’m waving to her
Hoping she will wave to me and we think that we can’t
Write that for which we do not have words but actually
Sometimes you can if you go gently between the words
(Dicentra formosa)
Finally, a flower after my own.
You there, hanging
in unashamed bivalve clusters
at the feet of ancient cedars.
So few of them left, you know.
Is that what breaks you? Is that
what makes you wear your sweet pink
ventricles on your green sleeve?
Petals unfold from your tongue, you speak crimson
velvet freshness into being. An opening bud of careful
precision, a floral life floating on your breath, bees, and boundary.
You expand a mystery of molecules, at your word atomic spice
springs into breeze; you dizzy hummingbirds, intoxicate butterflies.
Shining beams play, shimmer, light your Shulamite, invite a tango.
“and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself”
—Vigilius Haufniensis, “The Watchman” of Copenhagen, The Concept of Anxiety
Kierkegaard’s canary was happy
as a lark until Kierkegaard set
it free. Now the whole bright world
spins out beneath its flight, its heart
in palpitations. Yes; the whole
bright glorious world spins,
the whole bright, blinding world.
Hauled an old longsleeved cotton shirt out of the drawer
Yesterday and once again time ground gears and shifted
Back forty years and this very shirt which was then more
Shirt than holes is handed to me by my lean gruff almost
Always quiet tall older brother who is of course my hero
And I gape at him unbelievingly and say Really, for me?
And he nods and so I come into possession of his college
Shirt earned playing football for a tavern or something as
Quotidian as that but not for me, not at all for me—that’s