The Brooklyn Rail

Source Code

    1

In that cave, each reverberation
created a semblance
in which the echoes
began to hear themselves
speak.

    2

Sometimes
the rumble of a nearby lawn mower
would make her sex
give a ping.

    3

Rapid eye movement.
The menace
behind sudden motion;
for a person
the meaning.

Communal

You stop to catch your breath,
dizzy, on the crowded trail,
so tired you
let the Lord in, oops!
in the form of
a fern-like conifer
undulating slowly,
each limb
drawing its own
lazy circle
in the air
from below.
Don’t worry.
He/She/They
won’t stay.
But remember your breath’s
not your own.

Knots

“Force-posture in place.”

That’s not funny!

Small dogs yip
after an ice-cream truck
circling slowly
in the asphalt melting heat.

Sasha says,
“Let’s just pretend
to be Sasha and Renee.”

No one is someone
in a dream, yet

dreams are full
of urgency.

I say,
a paradox
is like a knot;

a knot is like
a roundelay.

Picture This

Particles, whether long or short-lived,
arise from “a permanent
traveling disturbance
in a quantum field.”

But we all know that
when a disturbance
is permanent,
it no longer disturbs.

Picture a tent city.

     *

One way to think about it
is as a kind of tension
rippling through space.

We know how tension
distributes itself
in a body, now
behind the eyelids,
now in the shoulders,

how it can be moved
but not removed

so that, when we suck
on our knuckles,
our neck muscles
can relax

briefly.

     *

Why so tense,
we might wonder.

Did God yell “Hey!”
just once

as if testing
the acoustics?

In Passing

Perfumes, teas, and wines
are ranked
on their complexity.

People appreciate
a cryptic smile
in a painting.

Midway
between knowing best
and unraveling,
you look incredulous.

     *

Now the small cloud
with the head

of a hippopotamus
has aplomb,

sitting just beneath
its shapeless gray

mother.