I'll Get Back to You

It’s hard for me to cope
With this Earth’s love for me,
How much the Earth wants me.

It’s hard for me to stand,
To find how best to rest
My legs, my arms, my hands.

I’m tired of dread. It’s hard
To keep my head up, off
Your ground. Let’s go to bed.

She Wrote in Prose

“It goes by so fast when

I should like to see it,”

And if you see it, it’s

A poem. Just look at this.

Now, will you look at that.

The long, thin pine of shade

Wrote, This ground is a poem

If I should write on it.

The ground said, Not so fast.

You think you write the poem

When you know light writes you?

I write in prose, she laughed.

So Far As We Know

Things will change. You’ll change too,
And by the time you might
Get used to this, you’re gone.

It’s too fast and too slow
And your view is too skewed—
What you want to go won’t,

What you want to stay goes—
But that’s just you. The view
Goes, too. Jump up and down.

You can change things, it seems,
As far as we know. You
Can change things. There you go.

For Those Eyes Steeped in Verse

On the bark of a white birch
A wren flits its pale-grey shade,
Same shade as thrown by the leaves,
Some of which fall with each breeze.

This, for those eyes steeped in verse,
Must mean a poem of the fall,
That time of year when boughs shake
Poems in heaps like leaves to mulch.

The fall. Good term. Works so well,
Like a vane on an old barn
That spins so long as no one
Thinks to snap it off to sell.

Could point to the time of year.
Could point to a sin, long since,
Or to a mere stubbed-toe sprawl.
I could well die from a fall.

I’ve come close. I don’t fall well.
Winds shift and the wren lifts off.
A few more gold leaves fall off.
You want the ache. You hate it.

Think of the Girls of Cao Cao, Still on Their Way to the Tower to Sing

The way Li He thought
Of them, the eye drifts
From a bowl of wine
To a view of mists,

But if you were this,
Forced to feed a corpse,
Sing to it, bring gifts,
Your life a stone horse

As you aged, which verse
Would bring you to tears,
You, girl in the hearse
Of god, all your years?