We’re the Latch

The faint light swells
To start the day.
It will grow bright,
And it will fade.

You’re not like light.
You’re not your pulse.
You’re turn and halt.
You’re and or else.

You’re the dim shapes
That break the waves
Of light to bits.
You count the bits.

You count them all.
You lose some bits.
You count some more.
You’re light’s locked door.

A Strong, Dark Start

It’s a sort of life—
Ghosts grow from shame; shame
Prompts the birth of ghosts.

Blame the ghosts or blame
The shame, it’s as if
You chose to blame eggs

For hens, if the hens
Grew up shaped like eggs,
Large eggs that hatched legs

But not beaks or wings
And made more eggs, still,
In some way, like shame.

It’s a strong, dark start
And a hard, pale end
For the ghosts of shame.

Seeds blow on the wind
To the eggs, but they
Keep what they take in,

Long since that wind ceased,
Since new kinds of seeds
Blew in. A ghost stays

Shamed by what shame was
For that ghost, and breeds
Ghosts for their own shame

They’ll take as they get.
For what makes a ghost
If not that it haunts?

Ghosts stay, if they’re ghosts;
The stay’s what makes them.
Shame’s just what floats in,

And if it seeds them,
It does not shape them.
If you can keep out

Shame, there’s a small chance
Your ghosts will die out.
Don’t let more drift in.

Sun, Sand, and Shade

The hard stuff to live with is the soft
Stuff you’ve got too much of, that slips through
Your splayed bare toes and feels good and warm

Right up to the point where it’s too hot,
And you’re in pain. In parts of the globe,
The soft means snow, in some parts the sea

Or rain, but here, half the year, soft turns
Sun on baked sand, sand blown off of stone
Packed down hard from what were sand dunes once,

Swirled and shaped by winds like these that now
Scour them to grit and spray once more. Sand
Lies in all its forms here—stone, blown, dust—

So there comes that time of spring that lasts
Through most of the fall, when love of sun
And light seeks out some frayed bit of shade

By a wall, at the foot of a pine,
What have you. A porch at dawn’s the best,
Next best just when the sun’s sunk back west.

You sit and sniff the dry breeze, the bright,
Calm bits of the hours not caught in full
Sun or fierce winds, and you think dried thoughts

In which the life of the flesh and soul
Are stitched by that breeze to fit this place
To sheet-sized word-sails, sun, sand, and shade.

Hooks, Bones, and Knots

As of now, the past’s all at once,
And that goes for all now, all time.
So a tale must drag torn-up past,
If true, if false, all lies, all facts,

If the tale’s told straight, day to day,
Date to date as the sun, or loops,
Twists, hops, clips, cuts, leaps, and so on.
All tales hack whole pasts to small shreds

They lay out in new sewn-up lines.
They have to do that—that’s the art.
If you choose to yank the line clean
You’ve still pulled that thread from the rest.

So what is the tale of your life,
Each such tale, all such tales, if not
Thin, stripped-down, chopped-up sales of parts,
If you speak them, or write them, or

Tell them and tell them to the dark?
You could trawl near when you were born
Or you could steer clear of clear marks.
It’s all there, all at once, right now,

And if you haul on some bits, more
Might come up in your nets, weird eyes
And lures, grave shapes you thought were gone,
Which means there’s still more in the depths.

In More Than One Sense

A word, like fix,
Will fix the world,
Peg out the waves,
Hold them in frame,

Make things work out,
Heal, make them real.
And not just fix—
All of us will.

We’re what you do.
You don’t hold fire,
Paint caves, build walls,
Box plants, dam lakes,

But for us words.
But for us words,
Your world’s all dreams
And dreams your world.