Out of this poem (for a start) came the list-poem that follows it. Thanks for reading.
I Wonder
Why the great egrets have set aside their differences to
muster in a vortex over Turnbull Bay.
Why it didn’t occur to me that “mortared” meant blown to
pieces, not pieced back together.
What keeps the sooty tern aloft for months.
The name of every living pixel on which I stumble.
I wonder how a new heart recipient interprets the ticking
of clocks.
Why the oxygen of celebrity wears thin.
How theodicy
can sleep at night, when
after the bombs,
the shoes.
How I might have steered this ship differently.
Who built the damn ship to begin with.
How to recall how to pay out the line. (I miss the sky.)
I wonder why my generosity does know bounds.
Who that is, in the mirror,
and when she...changed.
What the handsome boy sees when he sees me.
Whether the handsome boy sees me.
Why it matters.
Where is the art from post-war
Berlin; the paintings and plays that reflect the great medicine that came of
the Great War, the technology that saved lives, freeing the maimed—not to die—but
to stumble blindly under the gate at Brandenburg?
I wonder if anyone plays tennis against the Wailing Wall
at night.
When
la fuente
de las lágrimas first opened
the floodgates.
How many girls survived the Kirov Works.
What passes for gain in the brain of the boy from Las
Fuentes,
who swims the frontera every day
to make it to night school
to study like blazes
to join the border patrol.
If one honeybee dances another by name.
For whom to wonder most fervently.
When to call it done.
Of All the Hushings
train-in-the-station
sigh of a kettle
when you
lift it from the burner;
compassion
of a ticking clock
for the
newly transplanted heart;
muted drip
of cowardice that pools
in the
small of your back;
inhalation
of a Venetian blind
at the
start of its day;
migration
of maple seeds
to the hem
of a new grave;
breeze,
which is the natural voice
of the
palmetto forest;
alpenglow
of a halogen bulb
in the
seconds before it sleeps;
torpor
of shedding things
relinquishing
their grip
Of all
the hushings,
I trust most in the percolating starlight
in us
all.
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