poem of address

While Standing on One Foot

I can’t call you down like a cat from a tree,

can’t capture you like wind in a jar.

Are you what we see when our eyes

adjust to the dark? Are you the dark,

and the eyes, conjuring color, play tricks?

I don’t know what to call you,

or if you’re nameless as the oceans we name,

as though all bodies were not one body?

Shared air under the tent of sky.

The mystic to the hotdog vendor:

Make me one with everything.

Are you everything?

We don’t want to know what’s in it.

Are you the nothing we come from,

return to? You’re too cool

and thin. We can’t feel you

when you lie on us. We made you up

to hold in place a sky

that is neither above nor below.

We’re surrounded. Our inverted

umbrellas in a storm, their ribs showing.

We shake you out like a slicker,

rivulets of rain, rivers tiny as tears.

Are you the child who appears sometimes

in my dreams, the one I never knew I had,

small as a plastic doll but mine to shield?

I put you in my mouth

to protect your eyes and ears from the sand

that lifts in sheets. Shall I call you

my child, my mother, my father,

shall I call you by my own name?

Shall I address you as Sir or Madam,

To Whom it May Concern,

a salutation followed by a request?

Shall I begin with Dear, end with

Sincerely?

Can I grow you in the lab?

Can I lick my plate clean of you?

Can I call you a cave of flesh,

can I bury my fist in you, fingers folded under

like one kneeling? Shall I supplicate,

shall I conjure, implore, solicit?

Shall I beg? You who turn a blind eye.

You who are blind and deaf, or merely indifferent.

You who are merely.

You might be rich but you look homeless

in your scraggly beard, your tattered robe.

You hoard your gold, walking the streets of sorrow,

giving away nothing but nickels.

You are what you are

and it is what it is

and better luck next time

and you can run but you can’t hide

and more where that came from

and you can’t take it with you.

I suck the plastic nipple of you,

the hard candy, the lozenge, the thumb.

I don’t but some do, call your name

when they come, when they cry, when they swear.

They don’t expect a reply.

Can you be chewed and swallowed, injected,

snorted, rubbed into the skin like salve?

Can your wad be shot into the body’s shallow pools?

Are you medicinal? Recreational?

Are you animal, vegetable? Are you mineral?

Does our natural casing blister with the heat of you

like a wiener, a frank?

With you we waltz in huge clown shoes,

our feet heavy as weights.

Is that your hand on our shoulder, our back,

while the ballroom spins in the dark like a planet?