American Sermon**

I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the ******* the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.

large particularly rude
arsenals of words
unaffected by cardinal
rules
nor reasons,
universally chord-ed
disturbingly discordant,
carmine
corpuscular
vivid
dripping down the
necks
the body
headless
goes on kicking
unable to contain
it.

You're alone sailing
Sea shimmers
Limbs flailing
Some things never change.
You climb the walls
Of a gun range
Bullets like words
Fly at you

Like birds

Marching**

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.

Tried it
for 30 years.

Not bad,
but not
for me.

Now I agree with
Katherine Hepburn
who never married:

"I prefer
to live nearby
and visit often."

The simplest
solution so often
the most elegant.
   ~mce