This morning you looked down
and your coffee cup was a cave.

Last night I looked up--
everywhere, masks of owls.

It was beneath a bath of cold stars
that you told me about doom.

You said,

It feels like a pit.

Jacob hated the film.

He found it oddly depressing,
like a slideshow at a funeral.

The film gave the history of the valley.

It laid out the last hundred years of the land like dominoes.

The director had obviously tried to paint
death as something

inevitable and beautiful.

You know, like a life cycle.

The video was a gravestone.

But the worst part, really, was the narrator,

the way her sad soothing voice smoothed the whole thing out,

again and again, every fifteen minutes,

as if everything, everywhere, were okay.

Bags are everywhere
snagged in the fingers of dead trees
signs of last nights weather--
strong winds,

high water.

And so it is with life.

The breeze picks up

and we soar (the
thing about veins and roots is)

until we snag.

Flap like a husk
gutted

on a fencepost.

Its the cold time--

February, so we make
a holiday

for “love”.

It snows everywhere
but here.

The cat sleeps all day.

Which is sad,
because he should be humming.

For me,

flying is a bit like faith,

a willful suspension of disbelief.

I’m not afraid, but as I arch over the continent,

thirty thousand feet up, traveling at five hundred miles per hour,

encased in two hundred tons of metal,  I know that what I’m doing is impossible

Check the details.

Next time you see a tree
look only at the edges

of the leaves.

I never was good
at those magic eye pictures,

you know,

you’re supposed to unfocus
your eyes,

whatever that means,

and then bam, dolphins,
floating in the air,

inches from your face.

Anyways,

this Devil thing,

it’s a lot like that.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper*
                                                   -T.S. Eliot

October
The sun stuck--
hung in the pines all night.
It turned out--
forever was a field at dusk, frozen golden--
and the end is endless evening--
final fall.

November
Snow fell too soon.

The edges of  life grew round,
golden, padded in ice.

December
The children hummed,
sat in circles, stacked the bones
of birds like sticks.

Their fathers built fires,
sat in circles, screamed
at the faces in the flames.

January
The ones with wild eyes slid
from their bodies, flared into foxes,
flickered like rubies  in the ferns.

Only then did we notice
the shadows---

Long blue ghosts

slanting off our bodies
at angles,
                  angels

                            pul­ling us Eastward.