In Praise of What Is Missing
When a tooth is extracted,
some side of the holy wheel is unnotched,
And twists, unlike Ixion's, in the wind and weather,
And one slips into wanting nothing more
from the human world,
And leans back, a drifting cloud,
Toward what becomes vacant and is nameless and is blue,
As days once were, and will be again.
Sestets
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
from Poetry Daily
***
Happy Birthday, be. :)
Dusting
These things moving in wind,
we have names for them: feather, dust,
bird. That which, now and then, urges leaves
to nudge the movable branches. Sometimes,
we may even see their quiet collisions,
flecks of sudden and minute life
as this afternoon, sitting on the porch
and watching my wife dusting off blankets,
the sunlight gathering around her lithe body,
our children running under the swayed trees
and the startled birds, the dust swirling joyously
everywhere, celebrating their release. And I am held
in awe of the things that move in the world,
or are moved, and of the privacy of the living,
all the many rising objects revealed only by refraction,
and why I just sit here, straining.
For April
* first appeared in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine
Renga # 14
A wife is a funny thing
to have under a steady microscope.
Some change subjects
others, lenses.
How often does she tell you
not to smear her rouge,
the myriad shadows on her lids?
How often does she complain
you never look
too long?
The many pains of inspecting
a wife, a funny thing.
keith, sasha
