Souvenir America
You remember that year
they gave you history to eat,
you smoked and drank politics with Dad
all night in the kitchen; and Mom wept in her sleep and you
woke naked on the playground,
surrounded by policemen. That year
they showed you nothing but reruns of pre-school suicides
and bloody footprints in the streets. They said
there was going to be a war all your life
and gave you absentee parenting and Sundays in the mall--
you said you wanted a real job and a senior year book
with no assassination visuals or remastered
genocides; and they gave you a graduation ceremony
complete with delicate ivory carvings
of vanishing species, and the latest scientific breakthrough
proving life has no meaning. Surely
you remember, that year, what a relief it was
when they said it was all over, go home,
they said, keep your nose clean, buy a gun.
As We Speak
A girl in a blue pickup truck at the Sunoco station
sings along with a radio song, contrails fade
pink above the severed horizon, the gas pump's
black digits dance. Her boyfriend hard-fingers
the trigger grip; she sings of rare nightbirds,
throat-cut, thrown down from heaven, sings
to herself from apparitional billboards and to me
from a country farther away than death,
forgotten, where her face etched in profile
shines on a coin lost beneath the sea. Her song
rises like an eddy of blue neon, like twilight
overwhelming rush hour traffic, or spring water
beneath this oil stained tarmac, seeping into
Sioux pony hoofprints left minutes ago
in the tall, oat-eared grass along a stream,
where sparrows peck seeds from buffalo dung,
and a child waving a well-chewed bone, turning away
just now from her play to stare at the sun,
hears the growl of lawn mowers.
Weeping in front of the Dog: Suffering and Culture
One could pretend in the shower at home
to some variety of sad song, but here
in the empty park each sob is only what it is,
naked pain, mine. And the dog, smooth muzzle
laid out on his shaggy black paws, makes
no sign of caring or not, but lies alert
for any note of anger or call to action. He knows
all his vigilance could not ward off
this merciless intruder, and he waits
patient as the leafless oaks along the street
for the watery wailing to move on into
the smooth buckle of the past. Sorrow,
melancholy, grief: these are words. My
pain is like the black spikes of yarrow
by the fence, because I have not yet seen
the dog's questioning glance, and this poem
has not been written.