Soft Names

Are all love is in text,
Ink stains in sheafs of songs,
The small shades of what’s next.

No one in love’s not wronged.
What wants, hurts, and those terms
That fit best don’t fit long.

Of all loves, life’s the worst,
The wretch that begs for breath,
Wet-lipped soft names to curse.

Waived Lengths

We form them, but they, in turn,

Shape us. Graves in crop fields turn

Out to be safe spots for lives

In threat from us and from our

Way of pared-down kinds of life.

Near death, near our own dead flesh,

Waived lengths of life that teemed once,

We tread less. Our steps are light

Where we come to pay our griefs,

We with a yen for the lost

Of us, who want them, their names,

Their ghosts, their souls, to come back,

To float from where we sunk them

And tell us what we should do,

What it means, where they got to,

Where we’ll go. Most of the year,

We leave our graves to their peace,

And if we don’t get the ghosts

We’d hoped, small lives, plants and bugs

Thrive in the shade of our loss,

Of what we left as set off

For what we were. The grass waves.

A Sea

Pops in and out of the heart
Of each speck, each bit, each core—

Six kinds of quarks and for each
A fetch that morphs in and out

With it—a blur that, when merged,
Looks at first like just three quarks

There all the time. We cite this
From those who know it, found it,

Since it strikes us that it shows
A thing at the core of all

Things—that they are not all thing,
That there’s a storm in all hearts.

A sea is in front of you,
Far past you, deep in you. You.