Losing them, fixing them, forgetting to put them in
Subscribe and Save up to 45%
I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
If I were God, I would make a world just like this one, where everyone comes raw and naked and dependent into it; where everyone enters bloody between the legs or through the cut belly of a woman; where nothing is for certain and there is so much to learn.
Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face. Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.
I used my legs and heart as if I would gladly use them up for this, to touch him again in this life
Like peasants everywhere in the history / of the world ours can’t figure out why / they’re getting poorer. Their sons join / the army to get work being shot at.
In this desecrated area, the women searching for firewood must dig up the roots of the trees they have long since cut down to make space for crops.
These days I can see us clinging to each other / as we are swept along by the current
In the stillness there are forces and voices and hands and nourishment that arise, that take our breath away, but we can never know this, know this, until we rest.
Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things, / feel the future dissolve in a moment
As I strolled through a glide of water clear as air, my fisherman’s heart did a somersault when I sighted, not twenty feet away, two chinook salmon easily twenty times the size of the trout I’d been happily catching and releasing.