For Mr. LaMotte

With the downy feathers of
new beginnings
a nest is filled with life.
One young bird,
small body drowning in eyes
the size of swimming pools,
has wings too soft still to leave the nest.

So the bird is taught to sing and
it’s a bit like learning to
write poetry.
Her notes jumble
like words, the pieces of a puzzle
that don’t quite know
how they fit together yet.

When finally soft down is replaced,
feathers form unique patterns
on her wings, creating the
kind of simple detail a poet tries
to emulate, tries to capture in
the properness of words.

And there are proper words to
suit the bird, suit the way she
has already learned to sing and
now, will learn to fly.

But after the bird opens her wings and
takes off for good,
she realizes that she can no longer be caught
in the confines of a newborn song, of a beginner’s poem.

Poetry, she sings, can only be taught
by one who has always known how to fly,
the type of rare bird with
wings that have long
outflown the possibility of a
proper description.

Dogs caught in a perpetual tug of war,
choking on the leash that keeps 
freedom at bay.

Bugs swarming a bright light,
reaching for 
death.

Cars clogged like toilets,
filling a space that once held 
only trees.

Old men in nursing homes,
coughing up medicine like 
blood.

This earth, our earth, 
dying 

faster than we are, suffocating in the 
smog we need to keep ourselves 
alive, 

drowning in the accident 
we’ve lost ourselves in.

We draw ourselves into circles,
spiraling onto blacktop
with thick pastel chalk.
The fine colored dust coats our
fingers and slips into
the cracks of a fingerprint
as if to say;
this is who I am,
this is how you will
remember me.

Later, when eyelids flutter shut and
we’re camped out in the circles we’ve
drawn for ourselves, I lay flat on my
back to look
at the sky.

If I look hard enough,
the stars connect like
the smudged chalk in my
fingerprints.

I squish 

the bug on my bathroom floor
without a second thought, running

away after my foot lifts
from the ground, leaving

the remains for someone else
to remove. Yet, hours later,

when I return it’s still there, on
the floor, and it’s not dead,

but dying. With dismay I
think of how we measure life,

by days and months and years,
but do we ever measure

dying? How long it takes to die,
how long the bug I fearfully

squished lies between life
and death on the bathroom

floor.

The summer before I turned 16
I looped a whistle around my neck
and learned to sit in the sun without falling 
asleep for ten hours a day.
I learned to appreciate loneliness--
fifteen minutes by myself to read,
no children running on the concrete,
no snobbish parents wondering if
I was old enough to save their
pudgy nine-year-olds from drowning.

In these short spans of quietness,
I found solace in the pool’s lack of ripples.
The empty chairs that went on for days
were too big to spread myself out on and
that was more than comfortable.

When the short spans became long ones,
(it rained too often that summer),
and the unhappy swimmers gathered up
their noodles and towels and toys,
the accusing glares they shot my way were not
enough to make me believe 
that this weather was my fault.

Beneath my thin umbrella I would stick out
my toes to taste the rain that fell from
the pool’s reflection.
In the drops that played
drums on the water, I found the
soundtrack to my summer.

The world’s eyes rise and fall
like the turning of tides.
Spinning in the deep blue of
them, life is caught in a world
that goes round and round.

A baby girl is born.
The scrubbed pink of cheeks,
the bloody mess of new life,
welcome her to a world of
beautiful entropy.
In this world, she is told,
anything is possible.

Yet with each full revolution the 
stars and moon and sun seem
to be farther away.
And with each 
rising tide, another year,
another falling out, another
heartbreak.

She wonders, where is the possibility
she was promised from birth?
Where are the calm blue waters and
perfect skies of the world she
was hoping for?

Look closely.
The world will come full circle,
it always does.
Entropy means 
beautiful mess, falling apart 
to fall back together again.
In this world of choppy waters,
the tides will always rise,
and it’s the ride from the
bottom that makes life
worthwhile.