Posts for June 12, 2025 (page 11)

You touch my hands
    because you have to.
The precision is essential,
and I’m a fumbling novice.
Your expert manipulation makes the chord sound nearly perfectly
so
close
But even more it makes me breathless…
Pulse like a metronome
Brain humming like the vibrating strings
    under my fingers
    under yours
Your breath in my hair as you circle behind to take my other hand
    suddenly clumsy as a child’s.

You say I need to be louder, more forceful
I know
I shouldn’t
A whole life relies on
    me keeping this quiet.

One more drink
Then I’ll jump in the ocean
Swim the Australian crawl
all the way to myself

In an annex of the white house at 25 Bardwell Street
in Lewiston, Maine, Mrs. Hirshler and her students
sat catty-corner while reading aloud from Les Faux-
Monnayeurs or La Divinia Commedia, she in her light
German accent, pausing to eat her diamond-shaped lemon
or almond cookies–fresh from the oven–sipping lapsang
souchong, and to watch squirrels under the birdfeeder. 
Never nostalgic for the pediatric practice she left to escape
the Nazis, a widow, eighty, she napped on the Greyhound 
going to visit Einstein’s daughter or her sons. One of her
sons found written on a scrap of paper in her phone book:
“Let the merciful interpretation of all things
be the main concern of our life.”

At first I felt bad
when they pummeled my windshield,
a hundred red-eyed
lives I never meant to take
reduced to guts splashed on glass.

At the pool today,
kids in swimsuits shrieked and plunged
beneath the surface,
shook off small winged assailants
buzzing blindly at their heads.

I watched one sputter 
on the water, no longer
caring if it died.
But a man reached in and plucked
it out – better man than I.

Things keep moving forward
        with or without our help,
                the arc of history & all that.

Sometimes, though, it feels like
        we’re always looking in the rear-view mirror,
                ignoring the oncoming traffic.

Sure there’s a way forward, sure.
        The question is whether we can find it
                in time, whether we can get the wagons

uncircled & heading off in the same general direction,
        whether we’ll reach the mountain pass
                before it begins to snow.

Hiss-pull, hiss-pull—

When dreams spin ‘round inside my silly head
And leave my fingers twitching for a pen
I think on all the people who have said
“I’m captive of the muses once again”

For those who’d laugh, they’ve never felt the plight
When spirit wants, but words cannot be found
When teasing muse, with visions of delight,
To cruel block a writer’s hands have bound

Yet no regrets have I with bargains made
To those whose whimsy changes with the wind
For visions granted, even with hands staid,
Are sustenance to feed this troubled mind

And when the muses do feel in the mood
They lift the block, so I can share such food

Reasonable Doubt:

orchard’s first brought in —
la belle pomme so golden
slips grasp to smash on floor

(from the Latin eventus: “out of…comes”)

out of thought comes changed reality