I’m tired of being your illusion,
of reflecting back to you
what you want to see
just to keep the peace.
I’m tired of being a ghost,
something only half-alive,
dead to my own desires.
I’m tired of pretending,
of sharing in this denial
and delusion,
helping perpetuate it.
I’m tired of being tired,
of escaping into sleep
every chance I get,
just to be free from this existence
for a while.
–they call it frozen:
shoulder won’t ascend, straighten,
but it just claims Pain.
like a cat
at a corner
store
i am outstretched
completely and totally unbothered
no worries except
what my next lunch
should be
Lord, I confess there are days I envy your birds. Not so much their hollow bones
and feathered wings that give them flight.
It’s that no one tells them to hallow your name, or how.
You say you have every one counted, know when each fledgling perched on the edge
of its nest feels the needful prod of its mother’s beak between shoulder blades,
you see them jump, flap twice, fall. They still fall.
Lord, do you see them falling? Somewhere over the green moss of Washington State,
four pilots running routine flight maneuvers collide in their black war hawks.
Their soft bodies hit every branch on the way down.
But the mama bird will not demand to know why. She will not fail to pray
for twelve arid months. She will never casketside hear the phrase,
Everything happens for a reason.
She will not spend her nights on theodicies, will make no attempt to justify the ways of God to man. She knows nothing of God or man, lucky mother.
How light she must feel
unburdened by the many heavy doctrines I spend my life beneath. Perhaps that’s really how she has flight, not science or aerodynamics.
Lord, I’m sorry. Lord, I can’t imagine you’re very easily offended.
I know that pain is only human. I guess what I mean is, if others are right,
and we do get a second chance in this life, I think I’d like to return
as something less tender.
Somewhere under a Kentucky blue sky, I walk my neighborhood streets
as a thousand birds sweep overhead
held up by some unknowable gift.
the crescent moon parades its
escape in
unending
velvet
shimmer
life enfolded
bright
One childhood memory,
is about a yellow canary,
fluttering around the duck pond.
Door to door, we wandered on,
to reunite the owner’s bond,
But no one claimed the little bird.
From the bushes, we heard
quick, a flash of fur,
A burst of wings before a word—
Mom: “Well, never mind.”
We left the stranger standing there,
as the cat trots off with its kill.
I cried at nature’s crime.
