Seasons change
and daylight burns
and shadows move
across the world,

and if you yourself
don't move as well,
those shadows may
pass over you.

If you yourself
don't move as well,
those shadows may
pass over you.

Whales were,
above all else,
deliberate

about the pace
with which they
moved through the world,
conscientious,
perhaps to a fault,
about the economy of movement
required to propel
such incredible mass over such
enormous, empty spans
of open ocean.

Here is a humpback whale
resting, face-down
staring into the cerulean
abyss, alone
but singing, perhaps for
enjoyment, perhaps out of
boredom, or perhaps due to
loneliness and longing.

She twists
and turns a single eye up toward
the surface, her iris catching  
sunbeams and contracting,
as she gauges
the gargantuan effort she must exert
in order to gain her next breath.
In this case, she concludes that, yes,
the effort will be worth it.

But what you must know about
whales is that
on rare occasion,
they would cast these concerns
of intentionality and efficiency aside,
and choose to
activate the entirety of their being,
from the sinews to the soul,
and propel themselves,
heedlessly and at top speed
toward, through, and past the surface of the ocean,
as though they were attempting to
fully take flight,
to escape, with finality,
the cold confines of their known existence,
the omnipresent, furrowed gaze of the void below.

But invariably,
and in spite of their best efforts,
the whales would be pulled
back downward,
by forces they could not
fully comprehend,
sure as the tides would fall shortly after
the moon passed overhead.

Yes, the physical impact of colliding
with the surface of the ocean
would be painful for the whales,
but what hurt
so much more than that
was having to return
to the stark, lonely calculus
of whether or not
to keep going.

What else is there to say
but
I like how the sunlight
hits your eyes
late in the afternoon
in May
as we sit on a park bench
talking

I check the weather
several times every day,

type the same URL
several times every day,

and click on the
Ten-Day Forecast several times

every day,
but nothing ever changes.

Fifty degrees and sunny,
all throughout January

and into February
and March after that.

There was a time
when I was a child

when snow fell from the sky
as though heaven’s railroad workers

were laboring day and night
to shovel it over their shoulders

and down through the clouds it would cascade,
its flakes as big and light as down feathers,

falling onto my tongue
and melting into a spot of singular cold.

But anymore,
the weather never changes.

The muted sunlight
simply cuts through the sky

in a flaccid, dull gesture
that mingles with car exhaust

and factory fumes
in a bizarre ritual

that burns my eyes
and singes my lungs.

Somewhere deep
between my navel and my sternum,

I understand that those old days
will never return,

and that those railroad workers,
their skins caked with dirt and moisture,

have long since slung their shovels
over their shoulders,

and wiped the sweat
from their foreheads,

and boarded that train

as it slowly, steadily,
mercilessly chugs

toward some destination
where I am not allowed to be.

You and me, sweetheart,
we need to stop thinking of ourselves
as *****-ups,

and I need to stop thinking
that writing poems for a loved one
is for *****-ups.

I need to smell your hair
in the morning,
to press against you

in the cold of the night
and not have that anvil of guilt,
that Herculean weight in the room,

crushing me, crushing you,
cracking the foundations
of what we are, and have become, and will become.

Atlas may have carried
the weight of the world

on his shoulders,
but Atlas wanted no part in it.

Let us set the weight of the world down.
Let us seek folly where we may,
and live.

Let us find
our golden apples.

Let us find them
together.

Let us find them where we may.

Words are like sharks’ teeth—
rows upon rows of them
sitting like pews in an empty cathedral—
the light playing through the stained-glass windows of the gill slits—
glinting through the busy, flitting motes
of plankton dust.

Words are like sharks’ teeth—
endlessly guarded,
but easily discarded,
flipping like coins in an Italian fountain—
sinking into the cerulean abyss
of the Adriatic Sea.

Words are like sharks’ teeth—
a fatal phalanx
oft dismembered,
seldom remembered
except as but an evolutionary assemblage—
a prehistoric assembly line.

O, but
words are like sharks’ teeth!

The edge takes,
the point drives home—
the carnal hunger of the gums
resonates throughout the jaw,
compelling the incisors
to test their power
against the defenseless tautness
of the prey’s flesh.

The eyes roll back,
the neck jerks.
The water fills with a crimson miasma—
a hemoglobin ecstasy—

a feeling of God
flowing through the machine.

Words are like sharks’ teeth.

That morning,
I smelled something cooking
so I stumbled down the stairs.

My mother
stood in the kitchen, apron adorned,
frosting a chocolate cake in the sunlight.

Her hands
were stained with dyes,
the frosting was yellow.

Her daughter
loved yellow.  My mother had decided
to plant marigolds by her grave.

She looked
over in my direction.
"I figured we could still celebrate this year."

My head
shook without me thinking about it.
It took a second, but soon she was bawling.

The counter
only supported her grief
for so long.

Soon enough,
she was on the floor,
her unanswered questions

had spilled
all over the kitchen.
I did my best to clean them up.

We sat
at the table, the third chair empty,
my mother's mistake in front of us.

It said,
"Happy Birthday, Love Always,"
she took out two plates,

and my mother and I sat there,
silent in the yellow sunlight.

When you were eleven
and shy and shuffled your feet

from classroom to classroom
in that middle school, eyes downcast,

avoiding bullies like a midge fly
zipping away from the hungry maws of

rainbow trout lurking in
a mountain stream,

your father sat you down
at the dinner table on a cold Monday

night, over a steaming plate
of meatloaf and a baked

potato and some type of microwaved
canned vegetable

(the same meal that he served
every Monday night),

and he lectured you about the
importance of direct eye contact,

always making
direct eye contact,

while he held the fork in his left hand
and pointed it at you,

its tines coated
in starches and ketchup,

like he was jamming
his index finger straight into your forehead.

“Never look away when someone is
staring at you,” he said. “It

shows that you are afraid. It
shows that you are weaker than they are.”

Then, to make his point, he held his
eye contact—an aggressive, primal stare—

with you, an introverted child,
for as long as he could,

knowing that it would hurt you,
that it would make you wince and cringe,

but hoping that it would strengthen you,
solidify some resolve deep

within you, foster the germination
of some thorny plant there

beneath your sternum, which
over time would grow into

a gnarled cuirass designed to
protect you against the world

and make you into a Man—a true Man’s Man,
the kind of Man who uses his hairy

knuckles to smash his problems—the kind
of Man who eats red meat and drives

a truck, and never backs down
from a ******* contest, even with

an introverted eleven-year-old boy,
and so on, and so forth. Of course,

no such hardness ever germinated
within you, and whatever bond it was

that existed between you
and your father there beneath

your sternum simply frayed
in that moment—a sacred rope

spanning generations
suddenly transmuted into dust.

And of course
you looked away ashamed,

and your father was ashamed, too,
not for his own abhorrent behavior,

but because you were his child.
But he was also proud of himself

in that moment for showing
what a Man he was now,

for finally having proved his own father,
your grandfather,

wrong,
even after all of those years had passed.