The Princes hoist their flags above the Capitol dome, 
fist-bumps for all the children of Ozymandias, 
they inherit the crumbling empire, sandblasted 
from sea to shining sea, limestone and lithium, 
dust in all their mouths.

The incoming tide laps the shores of an eastern seaboard
retreating inland like an ill-fed army, one giant gated fiefdom 
of chipboard and hot glue, PVC-wrapped porch columns
gone akimbo in the infernal heat, even the termites 
aren’t interested. 

We learned to build sets all summer in the theater; 
from the orchestra pit they were so convincing. 

Look now on our Potemkin Land of the Free, and despair!
Everyone is wealthy on TV. There are rifles for all but no food 
in the kitchen, surprise! A car for every parking space and 
all the tanks are empty. A wrinkled lip, a sneer of cold command: 
Close the borders! 

Never mind. 
No one’s going anywhere, anyway.

Cargo ships run aground in the land between the two Americas, 
and all the shelves at Target are empty, while high overhead
the satellites collide and veer off into orbits no one thought 
to calculate. What are we to do? I read somewhere we could 
shoot them down with lasers. 

But how then will we stream the next season 
of The Gilded Age?

I'm a just-in-time poem, sitting offshore
in a shipping container on an uneasy ocean
waiting, waiting, waiting 
for the crane to hoist me high 
and swing me to the ground, 
for the door to open and the sky to appear, 
I will fly free like the miseries 
from Pandora's box, beat my wings 
against the windows of an indifferent world, 
until I settle at last in some poor poet's soul 
and live out my days in the sweet mercy 
of endless supply and not a single demand.

The life coach wants twenty-two hundred dollars
to talk to me on Voxer, meet with me on Zoom, 
to share the keys to the internet kingdom with me,

she will unlock the secrets to a life less disaffected, 
but I will have to do the work, she says, as if it were
a choice, as if doing the work was not what I’ve done 

since putting on a uniform at sixteen years to dump
French fries into paper sleeves, disposable then as 
now, I was fired for telling what I knew was the truth

to a harried woman at the counter rooting for change 
in her coin purse, that what filled her cup was not a 
milkshake, that it contained no milk, just an oily ersatz 

that didn’t quite cross the threshold of authenticity, 
and what did you learn at work today, dear girl? 
I learned that getting fired is not the worst thing,  

that selling yourself for pence and pounds can be
a greater magnitude of worse, you called me a child 
then for learning the wrong lesson, call me failed 

and naïve even now and I agree: all I ever wanted was 
to write my stories and ride a horse through the hills 
above Attica where I could see the concrete wall 

of the prison on a clear day, we rode together, once 
upon a time when we were young and I knew the secrets 
of your heart, bound up then as now in knots, for we

told each other everything, even when we were afraid, 
I know you wanted to ride your own horses and tell your 
own stories, before they taught you otherwise, before they 

handed you a piece of paper and led you to a cubicle with 
a motivational poster in place of a window, no view of 
your own horizon, I know you wanted those things, too.

We are born of collision, objects in motion 
meeting objects at rest, 

God may not play dice with this universe, 
but he plays pool, 

marking each day on the green baize, blue 
chalk dust, cosmic cue of ash and inlay, 

he breaks us with every dawn, birds fall silent, 
the sky cracks, see how we scatter.

I came to your garden one moonlit night
a spade in my hand, and a rake and a hoe, 
we planted potatoes until the sun rose,
pink sky, bleached horizon, you made me
promise to return in the autumn with a
fork and a bowl, you said there would be 
butter enough for the two of us by then.

There’s no solace in knowing it has always been so —
the angry mob, the fist and the fury —
knowing doesn’t help at all.

Today I took an online test
to see what mathematics I might recall
from decades of long ago learning,

word problems concerning trains and speed
and distance, angles of intersecting lines
and percentages and ratios.

And I failed and was not surprised
by my failure.

I knew all that, once, how to calculate
across time and space, the train of the fist
and the rails of the fury, and knowing
helped not at all,

the train it won’t stop going,
no way to slow down.

If my imagination were not so much a part of me
I could write about places less frigid.
But I am a package deal.
Body cold. Mind cold.

Bodhichitta practice. Slow.
No striving. No reaching.

We breathe into the heart center
and find it armored.
Of course it’s armored.
We breathe anyway.

To make friends with a feral cat
we sit nearby. For a day, a week,
a month, a year.
As long as it takes.

One day we may find ourselves
sitting alongside.
Surprise!

A day is a long time.
A lifetime is no time at all.

It rained overnight.
The snow fell this morning.
Now the wind blows.

It took longer than any of us expected,
our children were older than we were
and theirs were older still.

I remember the fortune in your cookie
urging you to be like water and you said
who has that kind of time?

The soles of your boots are worn right through
at the place where the weight of the world
meets the road that carried us here

all those footsteps, all that leather,
all those people we used to be, they cling
like shadows and hide when we turn.

Did you ever think, I ask, and no, you say,
you never did, and we blink like mole people,
blinded by the light,

both of us knowing we got it all wrong,
you with your gun, me with my bowl,
you with no bullets, me with no spoon.

Snow crusted garden, last year’s coneflower
grey as old bones, q-tipped and stiff in the wind,

the neighborhood scoundrel cat passes through
the damp and molder in search of a wren to kill,

cowl mane the color of gravel and thaw,
the color of February, the color of the shadow

that followed me home, the one that still clings
to the soles of these worn out winter shoes.

In the news about deportations to countries less worthy
I heard a chance remark

keywords: poverty, extreme

a rhetorical question of how one might fare if given the boot
after living so long in the Promised Land

to go from so much to so very little

Yes, yes, it’s true: newsroom pencils break along fault lines
like pencils everywhere, those in my desk drawer
are not immune, the disinclination to connect all the dots,
it’s a tool of survival, yours, mine, and theirs.

First rule of dysfunction: don’t see the dysfunction.

And yet, and yet, how hard you must work to not see.

All along the back roads of eastern Kentucky, through Tennessee
hollers, past the shorn mountaintops of West Virginia, north
to the future of rust belt ghostwalks, these inglorious ruins
of hollowed-out empire

Keywords: poverty, extreme

Drive at your own risk, fill your tank at the Quik-Mart,
grab a donut like a local, walk the boarded up Main Street,
sugar-fueled, past the queue of shabby coats and unshaven faces
waiting outside the door of the plasma center,

random dots, haphazard humans,

your pocketed notepad, your unsharpened pencil,
the rule of the unseeing eye.

The snow started falling yesterday morning.
It came down in fat motes, curtains blowing sideways.
Sleet at midday, popcorn against the windows.
The cats slept.

Drifts accrued in doorways, domes of white arose
on backyard patio tables, wedding cakes for winter brides,
Birds tracked in a day drained of color,
crossing rabbit divots.

Midway through sweeping out the carport, I look up
to see the black dog across the way, shaggy
and nose deep in sparkle, he sniffs and sneezes,
comes up flocked.

I closed the door on you.
This is not a metaphor. You were snoring.  I couldn’t abide.

I need a quiet house. That’s not your fault.

You disorder me. You are a distraction,
a leaking faucet: dripping, dripping.

Reminding me
(I do not need your reminder)
of all I’ve left undone.

Maintenance foregone. Weatherstripping. Yard work.
The front porch needs painting.

Winter will be here before we know it.

My writing process is circuitous. It winds along rivers and wanders through woodland and ends up in back yards, usually my own. I seldom know where I’m going until I get there, and even then it takes time to realize this is the place.

My new collection of poems is available now. Wander with me, if you like.

Who knew it was all so fragile?
The ship of state a houseboat of cards
pontoon shantytown heaving
in the hot humid bluster of a grown
man’s tantrum. Sad!

Pretend I’m crazy.
It’s how we get things done.

In school they taught us how a bill
becomes law, powers held separate,
checks against power to keep it all
in balance yet here we are, keeling and
aroil and taking on water.

Pretend I’m the king.
Tell me that you love me.

We vacuum the oceans for treasures
to sell at auction, fake fortunes, fever heat
from a spray-on sun, peeling gilt,
lower the lifeboats, our iceberg cometh,
and lo! The devil cannot row.

When the snow comes we stay in the house
with mugs of strong tea and honey,
fleece and flannel, buffalo plaid and log-cabin quilts,

The fire burns steady, kettle set to simmer,
it mists the air like hot breath against a pane of glass
jackfrosted opaque.

We press our fingers to the frozen edge, co-mingle
our heat with the last light of the day.

In the quiet golden corner El Tio sits before his ledgers,
turning a pale green page to scan the names
of all who asked for one last solstice,

one last feast of Epiphany, scheduling payment,
sending invoices, tallying his bottom line by candlelight,
he calculates the weight of souls and payroll

for the psychopomp, holding out his cup to us
that we might fill it from the kettle one more time.

Here is the part both hard and easy:
When you see what’s missing and it’s
all that you (simply) stopped doing

while you went about earning your keep,
all the choices you made in favor of a
full wallet, which isn’t ever so full, is it?

Not nearly so full as what isn’t there,
what was (simply) left out, all the songs
left unwritten all the pages unfilled

all the soul that stopped pouring
from your pen. So hard, I know, to see them
not there but not there they are,

and the easy, and the hard: what you pick up,
and what you put down. Simple as that.
Hard, hard as that, too.

I.

It’s the water that carries us, after all,
like mermaids astride the glistening shell
of the giant sea turtle, we are slippery wet,
slick as newborns.

We are filled with the oceans, we are alive.

All my friends are anemones, supple, pliable,
bendy beneath the waves,
the salt and the sea that softens the flesh
and even the hardest of feelings.

All my friends are fluid.

II.

When John was twelve he came upon his father
golden in the early morning light, hanging
by a noose from a rafter in the barn.

When Tim was twelve he followed his mother
to the Belgium Bridge and watched as she threw
what remained of herself into the Seneca River.

When Mark was twelve he watched his father
give himself up to the tumors that stole the hard,
dry breath from his lungs.

III.

We did not kiss or hold each other close
one last time, we did not wish each other well.

IV.

When the edges get ragged, you can turn
a new seam. Again and again, you turn,
until the garment that once covered you
is a collar buttoned at your throat, a bib to catch
what crumbs may fall.

But this is not the edge.
This is the center, this is the heart,
where the rend is new
and the soft fray has only just begun,
there is still time to lay a patch,
still time to stitch things
back together.
If only I had a needle.
If only I could find some thread.

V.

All along the shores of Lake Ontario
I gather the pieces of beach glass,
frosted blue and green, bits of vessels once
whole and transparent, now fractured into
fragments, small and opaque as moonstone,
buffed and lustrous, the product of time
spent tumbling, of turbulence, of friction,
of abrasion, bruised like knees for years and years.
I fill my pockets to overflow with the beautiful
battered bits and carry them all back home.