What You Made

Long before the moment you sunk
your scissors into the patterned
cardboard sheet, you had left your
mark. How could you have known
you would cut out all the tiny pieces
for more than a dozen cards
but complete only three? Maybe
you did know. Maybe you left
the bottle of glue open on purpose,
to freeze the moment of creation.
Or maybe we failed to notice
it was stuck open all along, daring
the elements to decide its fate
in the absence of closure. It would
be easy to think of what you made,
precious as it is in our trembling
hands, as a sign—a discovery
from a parallel universe made real
as a tangible expression of your
love. It would be much harder,
of course, to imagine the unfinished
fragments pieced together, holding
themselves in a shape that abides,
a shearing that’s also somehow a gift.

Still Life

If memory loomed over Roethke
as large as my Buddhist friend
said, then I prefer to remember
what you remember: her earring,
his old wallet, a few nickels, a bolt,
collected in an unexpected corner.

Thief

You said all the best poets steal
and I believe you. But I can’t help
but feel like there’s an addendum
somewhere in there, a clue
left behind in one of our friend’s
sketchbooks, a doodle or a smudge
of sage lightly traced through
with a fingertip or with glitter glue
and it’s waiting to be discovered
underneath a crumpled Pizza Hut
receipt or on a flash drive or maybe
even bottled up inside a tiny bottle
of tiny rocks placed beside the altar,
which no one will ever, ever take.
Go ahead. It’s ours to borrow now.
Let’s try and find everything we can.

The Cloud

I refuse to believe
that The Cloud can be
understood. I’d like
instead to believe in
mystery, in a little bit
of magic. The answer
to why my new iPod
can’t automatically sync
with the computer
I’m looking at, or why time
insists on temporality, or
why memory fails me each
time when I try to recall
my LinkedIn password
should not be searchable
on Google. Rather,
it should be the opposite:
We forgot our smartphones
at home by accident and yet
we still managed to arrive.

Thanksgiving 2016

Today I am working on simplicity. An apple,
a banana, a handful of almonds
for breakfast. An email letter to a friend
traveling in Europe. Small cups of hot water
to soothe my aging guts. I will try not
to talk politics when my father
serves us the dead bird. I will try not
to disappoint my mother when I skip
her dry pumpkin pie. I will try not to forget
the hundreds of water protectors standing
in sub-freezing temperatures in
North Dakota, pelted with water cannons
and rubber bullets by a government
I am finding it harder and harder every day
to recognize. My brother in Alabama,
a traveler in the heart of Make America Great Again
country, texted me Happy Thanksgiving
with a bearded, animated image of himself
waving hello from inside a cornucopia.
Why not? Joy and hurt are plentiful.