Waiting quietly in line at the age of nine
Wet hair clinging to nervous skin
Remembering previous summers
Past attempts I failed to swim

To pass you must bring yourself
To the water trampoline and back to the dock
Then tread water for thirty seconds
By then arms feel like rocks

My friends wished me luck
Before into the water I leapt
Pushed my muscles through the cold
As I surfaced from the murky depths

I reached the looming yellow island
Turned around, feet on the ladder, and kicked
I used that small bit of extra momentum
To keep paddling  though lungs constrict

When I find myself back at the wooden dock
Then final countdown starts
Each cell in my body is aching
This is the last and hardest part

Fighting with the freezing lake
The test is nearly done
Just as I am about to give up
5..4..3..2..1!

My body seems to be destroyed.
Cataclysms tore the flesh.
Survival logic is broken,
I can't crack a log.

I can't use an aspen pole.
Prop up the rotting attic.
And from juniper basket
I can't build anything.

I can't use a twig bundle.
Melt the grate fireplace.
And count in French Spanish
I can't for no apparent reason.

The eternal strings play
as crows feathers
                  fall like tears.

But alas,
               these will never dry
seeding the clouds with grey.

Every melody is a line of life,
now serenading stone words.

A sunset caressing
chiselled days, years,
                       then nothingness.

Upon a wooden box,
               a crow sings tears
that form on the strings of
      yesterdays now played.

          The future is barren of you.

What are you drinking sir?
Oh, inside this wooden mug
several things exist

Stalks from the flowers of rainbow
and some molten clouds of autumn

Petals from the maize shrubbery yonder
and some drops from youth's lunacy of course

All you need
for the upcoming winter

Wooden woman waiting outside of a grocery store
in North Berkeley

Made tired by time,
chips of wood had fallen in masses from her body,
entire aspects of her anatomy had eroded away--
most of her nose, her left ear,
her right cheek, her *******, half her stomach

She had been a tree,
torn apart, reassembled
in the form of a female human being,
no sign of life in her sightless gaze

I guess she’s gone now,
after all those years

I went to look for her
and found only an antique shop
with a peculiar name
at the address where she should have been

I would have liked to have seen her
one last time, this statue
that fascinated and frightened me as a child

I’m glad she’s gone, though--
She resemble less and less a woman,
was becoming clearly merely wood
cut into tiny pieces and glued together

She resembled less and less a woman,
and I’m glad she was killed
before she ceased to be art