Buckeye as You Are
They walk past you
weeping
for the leaves that burnt
& fell, the wood exposed
like bone, sculpture
that suddenly emerges
from white haze.
You old fortune-teller,
you could have told them
in their vibrant grief
Buddhist New Year Song
I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves
seated in front of a fireplace, our house
made somehow more gracious, and you said
“There are stars in your hair” — it was truth I
brought down with me
to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden
make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature,
and it is truth, that we came here, I told you,
from other planets
where we were lords, we were sent here,
for some purpose
Buffalo Dusk
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone.
Buick
As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.
Bungee Jumping
Aunt Mildred tied up her petticoats with binder’ s
twine, and my great-uncle Ezekiel waxed and waxed
his moustaches into flexibility. It was the whole
family off then into the dangerous continent of air
and while the salesman with the one gold eyetooth told us
the cords at our ankles were guaranteed to stretch
to their utmost and then bring us safely back
to the fried chicken and scalloped potatoes of Sunday dinner
Bunnies
Bunnies are brown
Bunnies are white
Bunnies are always
An Easter delight.
Bunnies are cuddly
The large and the small.
But I like chocolate ones
The best of them all.
Bunny, Bunny
Bunny, white bunny
With ears so tall.
And your two pink eyes
And a mouth so small.
Wiggle goes one ear.
Wiggle goes the other.
Hop, hop, hop, hop home to your mother!
Buried
“We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer. The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families and funeral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel.”
— Ed Mazoue, New Orleans City Real Estate Administrator and Person in Charge of the City’ s Cemeteries
There’ s nothing but mud. The ground looks dry and firm,
but underneath is a stew of storm. Stout shovels, rusted,
grow gummed and heavy with what I heft and rearrange.
Progress is slow.
Buried at Springs
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
Burning Trash
At nightthe light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy sourcehe thought of death.
Her father's hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.