Dear students on a cliff about to fly

Dear students on a cliff about to fly, 

       (Commencement Speech, 2021)

 

Channel the wisdom of a gnarly-bearded god in flowy tunic:

Seek your heaven from the sky down, from your own dump site, or cry pit, or privileged cage. Do not bury your heads in your hands, confounded students, but look deep within. No, not that deep. Avoid that memory. Look beyond certain feelings. Much of who you have become is a web of ten-thousand illusions. Keep most of them.

Scan the horizons of your future. Not so far. Not that horizon. Skip certain vistas. Be completely honest with yourself and others. Except for the truth altogether. Tread water between those shores.

Delight in the moment. You only have that moment. However, struggle. Plan. Envision. Scratch at the surface of the ice as if you have fallen through and cannot breathe. Take a breath with the urgency of screaming under the surface. Adapt your game. Smile a little when you scream.

In fact, smile always. Your smiles are authentic and robust. Practice into the sky until they feel fake.

Do not bury yourself into your screen. You lean in into it like a plant at the window. Break the window, to be abundantly outside, and sculpt a crystal ball. Only bend over your crystal ball.

Don’t forget to brush. Ignore death, or, think a ton about death. There is no gnarly-bearded god. While on your precipice, know that you are the sage. Do the right thing, and be yourself. Break the rules; fuck around like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, there is no tomorrow, and yesterday is a blur. Move carefully—no, exquisitely! Whatever you do, keep moving, unfettered. Cast your bread upon the waters.

Congratulations.

Dear bones on the lake, half poking out and half frozen in

Dear Bones on the Lake,

Deer bones on the lake
Half poking out and half frozen in
Had you ambled to this barren center?
Been dragged by a wolf?
We are the deer, wondering how
We have arrived on this cold berth
 
Another day of pandemic dread
I have read the news to death
Healthy and delicious meals, check
What’s the matter with following
Birds for a raison d’etre
In their arithmetic of destination?

This sterile expanse, we call our checklist
Staves off choices until our dreams
Unmistakably point the direction
To the center of it all. We might as well
Wander out too far to be discovered
Like following birds to our terminus

When words will matter as nothing does

Some Poets' Words

 
Some poets’ words imbed in concrete
Some hewn in would, or spewed in blood
Are just cliché enough for walking over
 
No prescience from their trite run-ons
Except for thought bubbles, uttered as
We scrape and shovel them in lines
 
I could write a thousand poems more deft
And never see one typed into proud slabs
Or scribbled on banana peels, tossed in my grave
 
You could write forever in the ice, fierce
And lonely tongue, yet never see the street
Light your arrogant and beautiful remark
 
We could scrawl all night on the Great Sphinx
with hip-hop paint and CNN, and the words
would wash away; we’d post bail in gineih
 
Once you see the Jesus Christ Lizard
Dance across a rio like Fred Astaire
Its ripples dissipate quicker than you or I
 
Only then can you cure concrete envy
When all poems sweep into the sea
Or space beyond--the weight of walks
 
Their pounds will be replaced by calm
Pouring buoyant on the entrails of clocks
When words will matter as nothing does

There is something you've never noticed about a circle.

   Look Again

  There is something you’ve never noticed about a circle                                                                  Look again. Grasp the midpoint, then absolve yourself of it                                                         Circles begin nowhere/do not exist, say the mathematicians                                                                 That an infinite number of points make up a curve that                                                                 Comes around to join back to itself, ebullient and round

  Do not look at that line anymore, and avoid the center                                                                      Look inward, diving into the space between, as it expands                                                                   As the universe, roaming lost, without concern for form                                                                   Imagine a dry, fall field dusted in a zillion snow flakes                                                                   Where a little deer stares back at you, stunned yet calm

  Naturally, it saw you first. Of course, you were distracted                                                                   By peering at the center. You are making something happen                                                           You’ve had an expectation--yet another fear--and it flees                                                                    But you have missed that too. You have become one with                                                                 A humanity of pessimists:  The trash is half full

  When you go to bed without desire to, a fire goes out                                                                     Before the day is gone. Shed your skin without blinking                                                                      As a salamander, squandering time slinking the planet                                                                        The mosses, stoned riverbeds on your belly, crawling                                                                     Puzzles of hot rocks, avoiding edges, forgetting count

  Amongst the Navajo, the skinwalkers, roaming witches                                                                    Yee naaldlooshii, which means, ‘He goes on all fours’                                                                        To disguise as, and become a beast, calm or growling                                                                       Be unaware. Forget the number of limits of the brain                                                                     Multiply by months, add choices for a nation of chimps

  Divide by desire. Slither past all sunburnt recollections                                                               Wandering living thing, through the burden of long swaths                                                            Collecting abundant streams of time. Let’s acknowledge                                                                     How hard it has become--a vortex, narrowing, accelerating                                                                 With options, and the excruciating screen

  Lay your head on my lap by the candle flicker. I’ll retract                                                               My claws to trace your lips, stroke your eyes closed, run                                                              Through your hair like a forest without a center. Go on                                                                       All fours, naked-unaware in the best way, ignoring reigns                                                                Summoning the round limitlessness of blowing out

Addendum to a Woman Wearing Orange on the Franklin Avenue Bridge

Addendum 

(to a Woman Wearing Orange on the Franklin Avenue Bridge) 

Three months later where the homeless sat
I wonder about you, out over the Mississippi
From the northeast bank

You might not have ventured out on such a day
Of ice and wind: Grim counterpoint to your sunshine
Haunting the river

There have been others since, I imagine
From bridges this high, and like most events months later
It’s inconsequential

You remind me of things broken, however
The dishes of our lives, drown in landfills
And running out of gas

What a lofty way you went out, searching
For you in the news, hoping. Nowhere to be found
In the cloud

A little secret in journalism for the sake of others
Not publishing suicides. Or did you find your way
Back over?

I have not seen anyone in orange since
Your strange and lovely day, when you chose to contemplate
It all away

Rembrandt posed his models with candlelight
Muted warm with austere darks, considering the crux
Of their lives

Likewise, you hang onto the bridge in my memory
In a dark hallway, modeling the others
From your parapet

All the cheesecake, YouTube videos, bright orange
And yet, you slumped somehow, and it all made sense
That afternoon

Not enough dopamine, a breakup maybe, bad parenting
Trauma, or a lost mind. We all lose that at times, go blind
For no good reason

Here on the bench, overlooking you, being thankful
For the sticks, the slush with dog piss, for a bench
Cold as memory

Thankful for you, good woman, for not leaping, perhaps
And the precarious arch that spans past to present
And maybe beyond

The poetics of madness

 

Not a Grave Poem

 

Keep from me the livid quiver of uncertain poems, the poetics of madness

   their bridgewalking words

 

Not a grave poem, or set of thoughts on struggle

   with another metaphor of death

 

I cannot channel one more sad line, mine others’ pain

   whose eyes sink low on the head

 

Nor can I gouge out my own pain, summoning illusions of equanimity

   in the crying room of childhood

 

Not dismay, disgust, depression or doom, nor any other D word

   scrawled into the history of gall

Spare me, screen, from the livid quiver of uncertain poems, the poetics of madness

   their bridgewalking words

 

Mark my word. A thin slice of now--limitedly aware of itself--tunnels

   straight to its scarce root

Dear woman on the bridge

Dear Woman Wearing Orange on the Franklin Avenue Bridge

Today, we could not cross back over

The Franklin Avenue Bridge, the flashing lights

Suggested an accident

It’s about four seconds down to the Mississippi

Could a car have blown through the rail?

Ask a young Somali guy watching from a bench

He points it out, and all you see

Where the perfect arc of strength thins at the apex

Is her orange blouse

A homeless man’s arms flail up to the heavens

Such things on a Sunday afternoon seem inconsequential

Until you see her form

And you pedal southeast to the Lake Street Bridge

Averting your eyes as you cross

The mighty river

Dear woman wearing orange,

Look around you, see us on the banks, rooting

And climb back over