Escape Routes

The ashtray overflows
onto hotel stationery
and we sleep where the sun
cannot collect from us.

Our lush apathy is a stale room-
service meal left on the table
half eaten, and because
our hearts weight us slightly
to the left, we let them sink
into the mattress,
spooning catharsis
from each-others' spines.

Tomorrow, or the next day,
we will run, but this
morning the thunder clouds drift
glacially, and nobody cares
about our tiny sequestered heaven.

Today the sun will hit the fields and not know where to go, hopping fences between nowheres and everywheres matched side by side in far-reaching patterns of green and gold and brown as far as the eye can see.

I am in Wisconsin, where the storms grumble thunder in the mornings and my grandfather has just passed away beneath the clear blue sky of the afternoon.

There is too much death in the broken backs of newly hewn corn, in the hazy sunsets over churning factories, in the cicada husks clutching the bark of oak trees that have seen these occasions come and go long before my time and long before my grandfather's, and I have seen these occasions come, but not pass, seen them arrive but not fade, so beneath this oak tree I imagine an acorn splitting shell and stone, growing upward from your spine, embracing bones with tender roots like open palms, blanketing you with leaves the color of sun on the fields.

Storm Chuckles Thunder

The word skyscraper is
some historian's pale attempt

at comparing a man-made structure
of steel and concrete

to thunderheads
like this one.

Strolling across the city skyline `
on electric legs, the storm chuckles thunder

at the sun, who is still
wearing the west hills like a blanket

over his tired head,
sleeping--or hiding--I'm not sure.

Storm on this sunday morning, I am listening:
muttering raindrops on tile rooftops

race eachother down windowpanes,
telling stories of puddles, rivers, oceans,

and the clouds now--the sky-
scrapers--are off in the distance,

electric legs skipping
over trees that rise to meet them.

Burdens/an awful tendency

Writers have an awful tendency­--
a number, I'm sure, but this one
in particular--of offing themselves.

Or, to be less callous, the responsibility
--the weight of knowing the literary recipe
for evoking love, fear, mourning--is enough

to persuade the staunchest souls
that no person should hold such power
over readers, nor such desire to use it.