Relativity Is Child’s Play

A Chinese finger puzzle defines
the quality that makes
distance bearable,
the balance at which
the novelty is stretched
into numbness of sameness,
the proximate wideness of space
between the constriction
of coarse woven fibers
and pain.

Separation is a small flesh colored
rubber ball bounced in marked time
for each day’s spiky jack
snatched into a tender palm,
aggregate and metal cold
in the squeezed fist.

My ball will seem to bounce slower
because you are watching me
move further away,
and playing dominoes instead.
Mass and energy are equivalent
and transmutable,
though I will appear as
nesting dolls infinitely approaching
largeness and smallness
in brightly colored folk costumes.

One slender straight truth
teased deftly from the
tangled pile of sticks
proves the theory -
there are separate pieces,
to pick up, but
there is no apart.

It will be harder to return to you
because the universe is expanding
but I will bend light.

“The Cooling Perspective of the Impersonal”

Your poem is your child
and you make her sit
on a bench at the edge
of the playground.

You are the hypochondriacal mother
who prevents her contact
with fevered passion.
She develops instead
an allergy to emotion
antiseptic pale and sickly sentiment
at a safe remove.

By your imposition of the third person
smug and self-congratulatory,
she is trapped in layers of perspective
like a party dress
starched and precious.

Her white gloved fingernails
itch to feel, first hand, the caked dirt of
slapped mud pie assembly.

They rest instead
above layers of crinoline,
on stiff immobile knees
unblooded and unscarred from
pavement gouging tumbles
off the jungle gym.

She never swings her own punch,
rinses her own black eye
at the water fountain,
She watches someone else’s lips
steal her first playground kiss.

She can describe with precise
prim observational detachment
the swooping swoosh of the swing
the spine jarring jounce of the see-saw
the too fast vertigo of the slide’s descent
but it is all happening to someone else.

Your poem is your child
but you don’t let her play.

(Response to quote by poet laureate Kay Ryan who shuns the first person)

Summer Solstice Haiku

brave daddy long legs

part stilt walker part giraffe

hikes my ankle path

 

green striped heart shaped leaves

ladies kick off their slippers

elusive orchid

 

water crosses trail

lush ferns thin out near the bridge

poison ivy lurks!

 

roadside market stop

strawberries and tomatoes

vitamin C feast

 

sensing my advance

frightened crabs streak toward dark holes

Perseids in mud

 

radiant red sky

sunset over the green marsh

camera left home

 

pink blush pentagons

laurel blossoms dapple trail

confetti parade

 

reticulated

foam accrues on brook surface

floating leopard skin 

 

dragonflies swarming

honeysuckle scent pervades

egret spears marsh lunch