Cloudy, With A Chance of Unknowing

Cloudy, With A Chance Of Unknowing
12-7-13

I don’t fear the inevitable end,
the impersonal crumbling disaster
that comes with or without a weeping friend,
or the long zero that follows after.

I know the last explosion of my heart
will cause some collateral damage.
I know the high consolations of art
have never saved a low man on a ledge.

What I fear is dying dumb as a rock,
the secret still safe and the code uncracked,
the obvious key unturned in the lock,
the deer slipping into the woods, untracked.

What the mind can’t know is how not to mind
when thinking loses what thinking can’t find.

Dia de Muertos

Dia de los Muertos
11-8-13

I see my father’s face in mine--below
the look I wear when I’m not wearing one
--and under his face, fathers in a row.
Between the skull and skin my life gets done.

My mother’s eyes read sorrow like a book
(in dreams I paint my own eyes blue with ink).
A thousand thousand mothers know the look:
a window over hands inside a sink.

Speak, skulls, now you’re past all grab and shove,
and answer with a final heartless breath:
Is memory the skeleton of love,
or love’s enduring body after death?                         

And take these marigolds to wear, a wreath
to crown the bones that grew from dragon’s teeth.

Coyotes

Coyotes
10-28-13

At night they sleepwalk on city lawns,
moving slow as water
into the homes of daughters,
into the houses of sons.

They bark, and piss on nations.
They follow invisible maps
larger than their grasp,
and finer.  They are patient.

Do they enter our heads from the front or back?
What wakes when we sleep
is beside both and next to neither. 
What sleeps when we wake

are coyotes, unseen in shadow,
dreaming our lives in daylight,
restless under well-trimmed hedges.