When the seed
of envy grows
into a big tree,
the fruit is bitter,
and the tea
from the bark
stains your soul
and your poetry.

If you think of me in the spring,
think of dogwood petals
in my hair, greener grass
and new beginnings.

If the summer solstice
finds you walking alone
in the garden of the moon,
remember that I'm somewhere
walking alone, too.

If you sing of me,
sing in the fall
in blue flannel and jeans
like the saddest song of all.

And if I pretend to die,
and you pretend to weep,
I promise to do it in the winter
when there are no flowers
to send in your pretended grief.

I spit the moon, a fingernail,
in the black eye of night.

Stardust was born
from the dirt of a lifetime.

I had the universe at my fingertips,
and blew it away like a kiss.

The world is a better place for my loss.

If I look long enough I'll see
mammoth bones with butcher marks,
a broken flint blade between the ribs
- an empty crib, Madonna's face, a swan
on a snake with two heads - instead
of lightly stained pine grains
on the back of a dusty shelf half-
full of myself, old books and odd things
with lost words waiting in the wings.

Listen, it's a beautiful thing
when distilled to its essence;
reduced to its purest form.
A paradox and a paradigm;
a paragon of perfection.
Epic in its arythmetic
progression; poetic.
Like Chinese arithmetic,
so hard it hurts. Yet soft
and exquisite, like a bubble
of love caught in a beating heart.
That place where poetry starts.

Before my brother died
I trusted man and medicine,
science and doctors,
maybe even God.
But now that he's gone,
I can't even trust myself
to write words that mean
a thing at the end of the day.

I thirst in my search
for words
that came first

in verse and in song
what's been here all along

since Peking (wo)Man
singing in the womb
at Zhoukoudian

when the first moon climbed
above branches frozen in time -

our rhythm and rhyme -
a memory of a memory
of the history

of how a poem came to be.