This week might be the end
Of something that wasn’t good enough
Yet next week and the weeks after
it might be worse. Sand in the desert
Is usually far from water.

In the hourglass, it slips like liquid.
A word without a tongue.
Small regrets, and large failures
Yet old stories told by the fire
Warm an old heart.

Flame on the horizon—is that you?
Fire on the innocent
Stories we used to tell? Heat
Blasting every single tale?
Not yet.

Five lines are enough for five lies.
And what lies down, sits up,
Why? Here we are, future,
Waiting. A thin cold wind
Rakes branches on the window.

When Sviatoslav Richter played Bach
John Coltrane played Thelonious Monk
To the back of a bus in Russia.
When the canary sings softly, and then not
At all, who holds the empty dollar bills?

One footstep can love the earth more deeply
Than ten thousand waving arms at a stadium
Can love the movement of a body toward a line.
Yet, when a branch creaks under the weight of snow
In a deeply quiet forest, how can love compare?

Electric momentums swinging down upon shifting
Dendrites scare people like me whose vision of better
Makes more from a layer of pine needles on topsoil
Than concrete and loving asphalt. The notions of order
That themselves create chaos won’t leave town.

Even the best possible outcome is less.
Even the most subtle progress makes room
For a funeral. The dark future as the tornado bears down.
The uncertain that awaits a mere twenty minutes from now,
And twenty weeks a mystery, less what is possible.

A tale of belonging begins with exile,
And who is further from myth than story?
Even a word looks for a home.
A mirror is a cold house with no hearth.
Even a home looks for a word.

It is said that a person longs. It is not torn
That people long. But what wrong tapestry,
Woven with longing, holds yarn
The wrong way? What yarns knit
A long weave, warm in winter, storm?

Five lines are more than enough
To avoid confessing the shames of a life.
One more failure balanced by necessity.  One success less 
Than the knife’s edge of past gains.  The failure of success 
Is relentless, yet even so, this shame will not quit.  

The sound of a person’s footsteps on the asphalt
Echos down the otherwise empty road
To where I stand in a driveway
and look down at cracks in the concrete
Visible because autumn wildflowers have been scraped away.

The shortness of the years grows shorter with each year.
This is known. A small potato lurks under the kitchen sink.
I wear glasses for dinner, and change my voice
When someone visits. A napkin edges away from the others
On the kitchen table.