Of Long, White Days

In the shade, then sun, then shade.
I move less than both of them.

Light glares at me from the stream.
Heat. Strength. Force. Fire. The first thing

To teach us pain is too much
Of a good thing, then it’s gone,

And that’s pain. I’m the small bear.
I’m at pains to make my life

Just right. The lost thief will come
And break in my house, and eat

My meal, and sleep in my bed,
And will find it all just right.

But, like most tales, it will fail
At the end. I won’t come home.

I will stay here on my rock
All night. You can have the bed.

Poems Should Have Lives of Our Own, You Know

We live in an age of lives
And poems of lives. If you write,
Write your life well for a prize—
Write your sweet, sad, harmed, charmed life.

I’ve lost my life. It’s still here,
But I can’t seem to find it
And don’t know how to write it,
So who cares if I lived it?

Is there a third verse for this?
Tell the truth. Do you crave faith
That the life you lived will live
Its own life, if you tell it?

And Where Did All Those Mer Folk Come From?

The part with the most soul is the fish.

The part of us that sings is the beast.

You wish. Why do we try to draw this?

Some of our dreams look like they could live,

Could fly, feed, breathe. A big cat with wings

Looks strange and would lack lift for such heft,

But it could run and pounce. It could roar

And rip prey to shreds and shit their bones—

It looks like it could, at least. But these?

These waist-up apes in the mouths of fish?

What the hell is this? And we like them,

Make up tales as well as tails for them.

You can laugh, but it goes deep, this thing.

They show up in lots of worlds, these dreams.

True, we’ve long drawn what we like to eat

As if we were part of it—horned heads,

Our eyes, furred thighs, clawed feet. We wish this,

To see the sea-change caught in the act,

The strange fact that we are what we eat

And what eats us. But this thing with fish

That cough up the halves of us that sing—

As if we’re the fish whose voice flees us.

What to Do When You Know—and You Do—Bad Times Will Find You

A line of cows files down the dirt road
Through the browned scrub oaks, and one cow lows.

Each turns her head to give me a stare
But walks on. Free range. The road is theirs.

The wind sifts through the slopes, as a boy
Might run his hands through an old jewel-box,

As if it were a chest of gold coins
From one of those tales once meant for boys.

No, that’s wrong. I’ll leave it in, but wind
Does no such thing. Each patch of trees stirs

In turn, and the cows are out of sight.
One still lows. Did you guess, yet? You know?