Poets Farm the City:
Poets farm the city for love.
Till the soil of a white page
dig out the brilliant colors
still flowering in our dry spirits
We’re so afraid of the dark
we lit a million sizzling torches
and we grind our teeth beneath them
all night, all night, all night.
Poets know we’re mostly darkness
that the soul remains invisible,
inside and only wondered at,
all the shut-out scenes of the body
and memory and longing
wet and glistening inside all
the lovers with their shut eyes
hoping for something that comes out bright.
I wish I could grow within you
under the heat lamp of your heart
make this machine life worthwhile,
tie this sinew of electric anguish
into a simple ballad:
the sun and the flowers,
the sun and the flowers,
the sun and the flowers.11
1
Two Houses:
Two houses.
Two bedrooms
Two closets full of clothes
Two birthdays, two Christmases
Two diaries to write in clumsy child’s hand.
Two dinner tables.
In one house, brown rice and veggies.
In another, McDonald’s once a week and coke every night.
Two prescriptions for a fever. Two ways of looking at the world.
Two ways of responding to loneliness. Two ways of making love
And two ways of destroying it I feel I should be done by now
It’s time to become the one person I’ve always dreamed of being
And lay to rest my memories of being torn in two
I don’t know what it means to come from one
Place; I don’t know, a source,
Some rooted thing inside of me,
Somewhere beneath my feet even,
Where is my seed
In the waiting earth
I’m always turning
Two solutions to the problem of madness;
Two quick hugs and a kiss on the lips
Two punishments for the one action
Two disappointments in two thwarted lives
Two guilty parents who want
To be forgiven separately;
The way you divide a bill
Two chances at one daughter.
No one anticipated
that I’d walk out of two homes
and into one life