1. The Wallet
for Adam
As you drove,
the inventory and
implications
spun out.
Bank card. VISA card. Discover card.
Master card.
Library card. Insurance card. Gym card.
Social security
card. Voter card. Draft card.
Business card.
Gas receipt. Laundry ticket.
2 tens. 1 five. 3
ones.
Spare change.
Cookie fortune.
Laundry ticket.
Lottery ticket. Parking ticket.
Restaurant
receipt. Ticket stubs.
Coupon. Rain
check.
Magnetic. Worn
out. Outdated.
Faded. Plastic.
Scratched. Tattered.
Taped. Folded.
Torn.
But I knew you
would find your self again
in the usual
places
or by simply
retracing your steps.
2. Questions for the Gods: Sisyphus
for Claudia
Why didn’t
Sisyphus simply walk away
and climb,
unencumbered, up the smooth cleft
worn in the
undulant hillside, up and over that crest,
bright purple
with wild violets one brilliant day?
Could a man who
outsmarted death miss
this no-fuss
solution, and become eternally dumb?
With such an easy
path to blue-sky freedom,
why was he now
oblivious to the obvious?
Perhaps stupidity
was his punishment,
not the grunting
futility of eternal strain,
or mindlessly
pushing his faltering brain
up endless hills…and
the crushing descent.
No matter how
relentlessly he would chase
after answers, he
would never again keep pace.
3. Questions for the Gods: Prometheus
for Claudia
There was no use
in scanning the sky.
Besides, for now,
the air was clear.
But he knew the
eagle would reappear
when it was good
and ready.
Finally, wings
tucked, pinions flared, it descends.
Talons engage
belly and face. The disgust
of its beak, hot
and bloody, tasting its daily lust,
Prometheus
pinned, unable to raise his hands.
What pained him
most and at what cost?
The irony of
exchanging a spark for monotony?
The enraging
predictability of momentary agony?
Or that
back-breaking rock he lay across
where every day,
he faced the bittersweet
power of his self-regenerating
defeat.
4. A Kiss
like vapor
condensed
to mist
or rain
rolling
down roof
gutter
and pipe
trickling
dishonesty
drains
us.
5. Today
This is no place
for duplicity.
Today is for simplicity—
a couplet or two
without why, how,
or who.
6. Shear Force
A locomotive
without destination,
roars around us
all night long.
You hold me
and say my legs
are like iron.
My weakness is at
my knees,
in articulation
and motion.
By morning, some
had lost trees.
Out back, small
branches,
a ruin of frail
bones,
pile around the
sycamore.
7. Thread of Light
We strung strands
of bulbs on small hooks
screwed to the underside
of the pergola’s lowest joists.
After night settled in,
I flipped the switch.
Still too cold to sit outside,
we admired light from inside the
sunroom.
Was the golden light
a warm night
in a Mexican plaza
I never visited,
or Edison’s bulbs, bare
in his porch ceiling alongside the
banyan—
a wild city of trunks, roots, and
limbs
filling his Fort Meyers garden?
Since time began
we have needed to control darkness.
So little separates
tooth and claw
from the law of civilization,
dangling above the void
by the glimmer
of a single burning filament.
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