Ambition

If I wanted to measure the insignificant
sequential regularity of time in identical units
I would buy a watch, the old wind up kind,
and I would wear it ostentatiously
and press it to my ear
to confirm the whispered “snicker-snicks”,
then I would surreptitiously sneak glances
at the fat and skinny arrows
by swiveling my wrist
at irregular intervals.

If I wanted to know how much
of the earth’s pull
is required to fasten my feet
firmly to this planet
I would buy a scale, the old analog kind,
then I would watch the dial twitch
between density and levity,
teeter between giddy optimism
and caloric indulgence,
and then I’d strap on a jet pack
and triumph over gravity once and for all.

If I cared to navigate my course
reliably I’d map-quest
some ultimate programmable destination
like Heaven or Disney World
or Emotional Self-fulfillment,
but I haven’t quite worked out
how to designate my departure point
from this plane without
connotatively implying self-pity.
At least I’d have to come up with something
better than “Connecticut”.

If I were going to throw a party
first I would have to get rid of
all the chairs I already have
because they look like
they don’t want anybody to sit on them.
Then I would have to make a list
off all the expiration dates on my food
to have the party on time.

If I wanted to erect my own pyramid
I would buy some naughty lingerie
so that all my slaves
would be willing love slaves
but when they abandoned me,
realizing the photo was digitally enhanced,
I would be forced to haul
all those giant stone blocks
to whatever island is next to Easter Island
and carve a bunch of female heads,
so that they and their counterparts
could scowl sourly and dourly,
at each other across the channel
through all eternity
or at least until they eroded so badly
it wouldn’t matter.

First Person Singularity

Everything that happened to me
happened in the first person, 
so I was intimately familiar
with the vastness of space. 

There was a scribble
on the wall by my bed.
To me, it depicted a see-saw
unoccupied
balanced on a fulcrum
with a wiggly horizon
below only one seat.

When familiar maternal shrieks
shattered sleep’s escape
first I placed myself
on the left-hand seat, 
then pumped my legs up and down
eventually dismounted to experience
roller-coaster hills, model trail villages,
cotton candy trees, sunflower suns.

Then, on her worst nights,
back to the beginning 
this time teeter-tottering
on the right hand seat
until I slid off
into welcome void
rich, buoyant velvet black
uncluttered by astral matter. 

I was a mobius strip
tucked inside a klein bottle,
a one dimensional artifact
contained inside
two dimensional space
infinitely swallowing itself whole
safe from my mother,
womb without end.

“For a Year and a Day”

Things always end badly -
a firey car crash,
a stuttering cardio monitor,
lethal invective.

Premonition
is uselessly deficient in detail
to ward off
natural unintentional disaster or
to suggest remedy in
unnatural intentional intervention.

No matter,
the trick is to extend the middle,
explore the exposition exponentially.

Take the back roads.
Pull off at every scenic overlook
to hold hands,
take a nap,
eat a sandwich.

This would be a good time
to walk the dog
you liberated from the shelter
for just this purpose.
The one with eczema, halitosis,
and, crucially, a thimble-sized bladder.
You don’t mind,
it delays the destination.

The storm hurls its tantrum
against the jagged coast,
the lighthouse winks out.

But you are beyond the jet stream
somewhere
becalmed,
drifting uncharted waters

in a ramshackle
pea-green boat.

Field Notes Of A Xiphosuran Voyeur

Neon moon, a tacky magnet prize
from the star arcade
sticks tight to the thrumming
refrigerator night sky, its slogan:
“Live Fast and Penetrate!”
reiterated in North Truro Bay
swollen at zenith tide.
Below the dune’s crest
a midway throng of bumper cars,
frenzied carapaces, ram and slam
with carnival abandon.
Three males buckled to each female -
appropriate odds in primordial drive
collision – collusion – cohesion.
Shells sneck like shards of pottery
tossed on the midden.
Slight-of-claw hooks glint
on lunar irradiated shoal,
snick like metal keys pounding out
a manifesto of survival.

Antediluvian orgy
of horseshoe crabs reenact
a fossilized tableau
compressed in brittle catacombs of shale
360 million years ago.
In a musky seaweed nest,
a belly dancer’s spangled girdle
shed during the passionenticed by its performance
is studded with a swarm of eggs.
Finally spent,
borborygmus of receding tide
lures the xiphosura back into its bowels.
Several, flipped by taunting waves
stab their stiletto tails
deep in the sand for leverage
accordion their segments
and tip upright to scuttle deeper.

Foam polished door knobs
blink ten compound eyes in smug retreat.

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)