The Life After

The sense of ease,
you know the one where it feels like you are sitting
in a plush chair
and all lined up with the stars,
telling the world's greatest jokes,
and when they ask,
where'd you get that one,
you say,
it just popped into my head

exists, unfortunately,
either in the mind or
by surprise. It is morning. You are thinking
about the way the furniture and the music
will arrange your evening guests
and weave together
their sentences, their silences.
It will never happen,
this kind of knee
slapping.

Then you are actually snapping off
the ends of beans with your daughter.
You wake from the joytrack
like waking from a dream
you can't recover
no matter how hard you
dive back under covers.

Or is that fortunate, fortune itself,
the way we're primed to unmake our stumbled upon
happiness with others?

How We Were Happy

Watching the wound pass, play and pass,
is Tuesday, is the way an evening

can turn into something
like a birthday candle. No,

like a birthday candle
in an ordinary piece of cake.

Or maybe the cake itself
lit up by the candle.

This is how we were,
this is how we were happy.

All the perfect rhymes
then the additional

word, imperfecting
the perfect, letting the world,

those who are in it,
breath, blow out

candles. Forgiving, even,
the clever, the twice clever,

the habits we can't, won't
suppress. Oh our days

are ordinary and blind
and love is nothing short

of a little bread, a little wine.
What adds up, what stays

is maybe not the planned for miraculous.
Listen up, I am quietly singing

it says
in a hush.

A Great Thing that Happened

Or maybe it's still
happening, still
water. My poem, these days,
is very little more than family. It inks out
in ankles and smiles, the sometimes spilled
milk of a morning, a lark. I'm speaking less
metaphorically than I ever have, this poem.
It does that too
to the man who writes it. Once
I would have called it a metaphysics,
but that would have been a name
slapped on a thing
from a position of naivety. Slugging it
in
or on, a bad badge.

So what does this have to do
with Frank O'Hara and Wisława Szymborska
and Mary Oliver? Only that
I went out looking for people,
poets really, who try like hell
to give the right names to things.
Who don't gussy things up.
Who, sure, organize them
and spin them through poetic organs.
Whatever, and regardless, they

get me back to the -- I'm
so out of practice I don't
really know how to say it --
grace of all stuttured light

that,
in lifting me up,
made me feel like I was
falling. What a wrong,
truly wrong
way to claim
feeling. Forget
feeling, then, a feeling
I keep
coming back to:
the quality of time,
the quality of time,
oh the quality of one's time.

Whether familying or
quite alone, keep telling myself,
reach out for the forks and spoons,
the edges of bookshelves, the
tiny hands, the large hands,
and stop being so consumed
with controlling the narrative.

Try this: you are a single strand
of golden thread,
or something like that,
in the garment on which
they rest their head.

Or this: each moment is fire
and its opposite. Each moment
is unconquerable
by metaphor. Try thanking,
thanking, thanking, thanking
goodness.

Gangrene Graham Grammar Green

"I always say I'd be a good priest because stories come in one ear and go out the other. The power to forget is part of the created thing too. It comes back from the unconscious in another form. It's a difference in a way between the job of a reporter, and that of a novelist. It's yours to remember, mine to forget. In a way what one forgets becomes the unrecognised memory of the future."

Third Base Coach to the Stars

Sexy Saxman

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