Dear Distant Star

Dear distant star,
We have highways,
And lobster,
And Republicans.
We have ways of appeasing,
Ways of being appeased.
We have our sprawling seed
And no way of knowing
How deeply or truly
Our existence extends.

We worship entities
Hard felt,
Hardly known,
And we wonder,
Staring into your
Lonely sparkling eye,
If we are the only
Experiment unleashed
Upon a world
Unequipped
To survive our hunger;

We wonder through
Our days if and when
You will call,
Or if our inquiry
Is merely the reflection
Of a desire to be seen
And understood
And loved,
And we are still waiting.

Topography

Because I grew up
In the short hills of this world
I did not learn
Until I saw the mountains

That such an earnest array
Of altitudes was
Bound to happen,

Bound to bear me as
I traveled among them
To pinnacles that confounded
All I had known of gravity
As surely as they baffled me
With their utter probability.

The definite reaches I had once invoked
Under the vaulting sky
Were mocked to flinty bits
When I saw how far
I still stand from the heavens.

O April

O, April!
These new shapes you yield –
These new memories longing for old ones:
The silhouettes of trees in round windows,
Boughs white in bloom,
The long-sleeping branches coming to bear this stacked light.

How can anyone think
That they are the same body that walked
On an April the year before?

How can anyone mistake the sudden warmth of
Your breeze for anything
But the dream that they had in
The wombdark of winter,
Of the promises made to them?

We did nothing,
Nothing at all;
We simply waited in cold terraces
Sweetly freezing our bones –
All we did was to wait for your unfolding

And it is all we can do now
To quiet the greedy pulse that wants more warm
To feed its little fire –

So here we are, April.
Another birth perched on the bale of years,
Another open mouth
Clamoring, once again,
To be fed -

So, we are fed.

Not the Next Living Thing

A square of light
On bushes is
Mistaken for a deer
And then mistaken for nothing.

Mind goes blank
As a pane of milk.
I record muscles’ recourse –

Knife edge of alarm
And then
None at all.

So this,
I think with the unanimal brain,
This is what it was like,
Waiting out all the old years
For meat to come along

For the membrane to pale
And then, of a sudden,
Break.