Latest Additions

   If ever the ships come to break our clan
      And carry you away,
   Remember your first days: You had to learn
      The strength in gales,
The long work carved from the long sky in rain.

   Remember the storm season when your mind
      Grasped the words for how
   We kept tight the new ice knives, and how we turned
      Their shavings out.
We held such words that the whole clan is bound.

   Cut from your brain, cut with sharpened ice
      The hours you wept for home
   Or threatened to call lightning down from space.
      If you must go,
Teach Earth truly the two worlds are close.

In '79, in Davis, California,
I walked at evening twilight past the school
on Anderson, thoughtful, isolated
by uninterpretable traffic noise,
when another person's life brushed past mine.

The rush of cars receded like a wave.
Distracted from myself, I paused
as a girl passed by on a bicycle, crying.
The air held still for a long, articulate moment
until the traffic resumed.

The earth was bashed together from rocks,
The bunnies of dead stars' dust, stark raving sparks
Thrown when the burning universe broke.
   Time
Writes in pencil and crosses out in ink.

In my garden, I pull the maples
That come each spring. I imagine your narrow heel
Printing its old message by the pile.
   I learned
That fire spreads to the smallest scrap of fuel.

Odysseus dodged the sirens. He dared not risk
Himself; instead he roped an unregarded
Crewman to the mast. Later, caution
Seemed to have been wise. As the sailors dug
The softened beeswax from their ears, the victim
Wept for the loss of the honey from his own,
Then pressed his eyes to try, to try, to try.
He, Homer,
Thought only how to hear the song again.

The world is charged with obstruction of justice.
   We must stand trial. Though shaken as shocked quartz
   We sing out for sentencing: Let Clio's courts
Judge we are still unjust as Augustus.
Generations have conned, and glommed, and scammed,
   And all are slimed with lies, grim, grimed with lies
   That tell tall tales and sell worn wares; our eyes
Are hooded, nor can hearts hope, being damned.

Yes, to all this our nature is ever bent.
   Now, self-captured, we face the difficult
Process of law: We must self-represent,
   Self-prosecute, self-judge, and bear result
Of guilt: The Inner Child's imprisonment
   Will free chid felons to act--at last!--adult.

Sodium light is the ship's sky,
Mercury light its green thumb.
Our former address, the blue eye,
Blinks in the light of the old sun
But shelters her gaze from no one.

As time passes,
Asses rhyme:
To climb Parnassus
Surpasses crime.

My heart aches, and the blackest hellfire fiend
Rings my ears as if Titans had ball-peened
My brain for all eternity, or longer,
Unless there's a way to say it even stronger.

The ear--the plug--the fate of a churning nation--
the roar of jets--the murmur of indignation--
the editor of Acceptable Condemnation
issues a book of hierarchy and stations.