DOUBLES
The dream inside the dream
is my specialty.
Meaning?
*
We go back to the Mexican hotel
we found when we were young—
I remember tall adobe walls draped with bougainvillea
surrounding two pools—one just off the lobby
and another, smaller one, almost hidden, beyond
where we floated alone as the sky got dark
DOUBLES (2)
1.
For Wordsworth, children trailed
clouds of amnesiac glory.
For Virgil,
heaven was afterthought—
things from the world above
recounted
to acquaintances
under holographic trees.
2.
The hotel I revisit
decades later
in a recurring dream
is invented
as are the intervening
years
STORY TIME
1.
To ask what something is
is really to ask
what it’s like
as if
in the beginning
there were empty seats—
no, sets—
just waiting to be filled.
(Blueberries are round
and so are soccer balls.)
2.
Start again.
To ask what something is
is really to ask
what it’s like—
which doesn’t get us far,
or it does but we’re walking
in circles.
(Of course, to leave
and return home
is the work of a hero.)
3.
Instead of asking where you’ve been,
I ask how the universe began.
In the beginning,
Nothing sloshed around—
countless little crests, whitecaps,
ran “hither and yon,”
repeating themselves but
saying nothing.
This fidgeting
was intolerable.
(We agreed on that.)
4.
But I was asking for a story.
Let’s say a bit of tossing foam
looks like a “sea serpent”
WHAT I DON’T KNOW
Each day you’re a different animal.
Some days you tell us which one; some days you wait to be asked.
Or maybe you aren’t waiting.
What kind of game is that?
They’ll say you want to be known, found out.
But you are never eager, never impatient.
You keep quiet so long that we forget about it.
When someone does ask, you say, “Armadillo!”
right away
and laugh
as if—what?
THE KNOW
Light touches
a leaf
deeper than
wind can
so that,
up and down
the midrib,
it feels itself
glow.
*
What it means
to be “in the know,”
to gloss.
Horizon
three miles off
in any direction.
CHASE
1.
What suggests itself
as shape—
down, up, up, down;
up, down, down, up—
the twin who likes
to differ
and the one
who wants to mirror
her sister
in their slow-motion chase.
2.
As if to perform
notes in reverse order
was to go “backwards”
while time
proceeded on course
in incremental jolts
like water
falling down stairs.
3.
Oops!
But let’s put our heads together,
straining to see constellations,
even if Orion’s belt
is all we can make out.
OF COURSE
We come back
to the cherry trees
lit up again.
Of course,
for the pink slips
of petals there is
no such thing.
*
“Lost in a feeling,”
says an old song
now back on the air.
“Not gonna happen,” I think
as if I wasn’t already
an unwieldy bag
of feelings
thrown over time’s shoulder.
TRY ON
1.
She put an interesting
spin
on living
and dying.
That’s what we’ll
try
to recall.
2.
How the maple sapling
dipped first
on one side
then the other
like a person trying
to steady herself
while standing
on one foot—
extending her large
star-shaped hands.
