I’ve been thinking about the way poetry can bring light to dark times. My poem “Trajectory” was written just a few days after October 7, in reaction to that violence. Unfortunately, it turns out to be applicable to much that has happened since then. “Spring, again” was a poem looking for the kind of reliable hope. The most recent of these poems, “The Gift of Analog Time” came out of preoccupations that move away from the present chaos.
More of my recent writing appears in, or is forthcoming in “Nelle,” “Pleiades,” “About Place,” “Cutthroat,” “The Dodge,” “Plume,” “Cincinnati Review,” and “Calul.”
Trajectory
The problem set gives us: a stone, force, an angle.
Given this, predict when the stone will hit the ground.
Outside the book this problem grows more complex
even if there are no dragons to interfere with the trajectory.
Imagine a missile. No don’t. There’s no need to imagine:
haven’t you opened the paper today? Imagine a war
where children’s bodies form the location of the necessary
violence. Don’t authorities always say necessary?
Imagine or don’t the intersection between a missile
and an apartment block. The shoes, the plates,
a shelf full of exploded books. Imagine a graveyard,
damp with morning fog, petrichor rising, pollinators
slipping past the plastic flowers hungry for something real.
Imagine picking up a stone, two stones, and placing them
on a grave, where the story of nothing special here
is more important than a name, than the dates below.
Spring, again
The last of the meyer lemons ripen on the bush
in heavy clusters; or maybe they should be labelled the first
of spring, beside the wasps buzzing their way into
the purple blossoms we call ground cover.
Strange recompense this return after two years
of despair, or do I count it as nearly six.
And for those who made it (don’t count the 950,000)
we’ve reached another spring to embrace.
The Gift of Analog Time
In the time of greater losses and lesser losses
I felt driven to possess an atomic clock –
my own machine to mark molecular motion
and to allow for time outside time.
If you put all the what-ifs in a giant trash bag
say the kind that’s filled with dried leaves
it still wouldn’t be big enough to hold
the alternatives to an ordinary life –
let alone one marked by an eclectic
approach to danger and greed.
Regret makes for a terrible soup
all dried herbs and nothing to wake up the broth
All I can think about now is sleep and my hope
to wake in another station of the multiverse.