"We're always in a room." and two more poems
A Bullish Run into Chambers
When a stranger is killed and laid to rest
at an altar for Public Mass of Remembrance,
African violets torn from a window’s sun
buttery as a tea cookie or rose petal,
prim Queen Anne’s lace for Diana,
buttery herself and silky, a fallen sulky,
for a child we will never meet,
a teenager who standing is caught
in crosshairs of our blood extravaganza,
aren’t we allowed our impersonal grief?
We pay to be hollowed by cinematic gore,
are immunized against capitalism’s rule:
a business must grow. The word was gore,
a bullish run into chambers born bursting
and broke. Along chain-link fences,
at street corners and Buckingham Palace,
wobbly petals mark our bid to be human.
A Territory of the Miracle
Cool the crude map
fired in your dark palm.
Slip around 1 corner,
then 2, 3, next
4. 4 corners squaring off
with Fate: It’s a start.
(Times x, a lifetime.)
Now a dusty path to
green sorrow growing shoots.
Stop short of the bog.
A shape will approach,
reach for,
comfort, your weeping
And that outshining ray of
sun with tumbled motes,
spinning cities—
take the keys—
incorporeal shrines glinting,
imbuing strength
to leave the haze.
A territory of the miracle.
There is no quantification
of smallest powers
which propel.
We’re always in a room.
So you can find us,
there’s a window in this one
with a view in
of us struggling
not to be a satellite to life
but to be the thing itself
flowing with exquisite humiliation
one day and awe
of the blossom
another, of the petal’s curve
and tenuous connection
of renewal and loss, of us,
meteoric and immovable . . .
