gentle reminder

sometimes i forget this
but sometimes i remember it:

it's not about
anything
except
being the most compassionate
most honest
most caring
you can be
with each person
that you see.

thaw

if we're quiet
we can take a sunny afternoon
and disappear into the woods behind the house
where
for some reason i don't understand
(there was a scientific explanation, and a casual mention in the local papers)
the dragonflies had expatriated
by the thousands.

i'm sure you'll study
and by the weekend you'll tell me
all about the reproductive cycles
and flight speeds
and scientific names
but not right now
because we are being quiet
lying on our backs
listening to their wings
and looking directly at the sun.

-----------------------------

we meant to read the paper
and we meant to drink the coffee
but
after a robin pulled an earthworm from the front garden
we got a little distracted.
it had been a long winter
and there was never anything interesting in the local paper.
so the coffee waited
until the early afternoon
and we drank it
sitting in the garden
with the thawing gnomes
and nightcrawlers.

lovecraft and the girl under the moon

lovecraft had a terrible time in brooklyn
his cat,
badger,
ran away
and was stepped on by a horse,
on one of the fruit streets.

lovecraft hated being
paved over
tunneled under
and otherwise pushed around.

he also did not like
being named after
a creative demon.

the shoes of his name were
too big to fill
canoe shoes
lake shoes
ocean shoes
filled with
the smokey blood
of well-written spooks.

lovecraft would have rather looked out across the pacific. more hope and more water and sharks and better surf and more beach volleyball. and fewer fucking horses. but just as many streets named after fruit. there was a girl out there too, he had met her at a shifty tent-pole convention just outside of Clear Lake, Iowa- what had been advertised as a ren fest had shifted itself into an aluminum can beer fest when a team of local frat boys dressed in cardboard armor captured the maiden fair. he was instrumental in her rescue, after fashioning a sling shot out of a y-branch and an old alternator belt. the assault was over a small rise in a meadow. he was hit in the lip with a can of a torn pabst, but was able to get off one shot, a shot he felt good about. the sound, stone on skin and then bone, was not something he was used to. he was afraid that he had killed the frat boy captain when he nailed him in the temple with an cubic-egg chunk of granite. blood was spilled, and the drunk kid didn't move. but he was only in a state of mental shock- he'd been felled by a nerd-enemy, in front of his crew-cut peers. he was down, and he stayed down. the sling shot is not a traditionally a medieval weapon, but nobody seemed to care. there she was, with her back-pocket bandanna already on his lip. he had never seen her before, and couldn't be sure whose side she was on.

"those fucking idiots. i told them it was a stupid idea-" she had come to the fields, she said, to make sure nothing got out of hand. he believed her. "mike, the tall one, the one you... hit. he can be..." her sentence faded away, and they listened to crickets and bullfrogs. her name was opal, and she was visiting from california. she was a friend of mike's sister. "i thought i might sleep with him tonight," she said, which was awkward and hurt his lip. but then she smiled and said, "thanks for shooting him. you saved me the trouble."-they walked beneath the giant moon-ball and traded secrets. they both loved hills blanketed in waist-tall grasses, and the dew-ed tangle of spiderwebs on the hills in the morning. she was a third generation heiress. he was a second generation lumber-mill planer operator. "there are lumber mills in brooklyn?" she asked. "no. i do miniature lumber now, in my basement. for miniature furniture for miniature houses." she was perplexed. "people buy that stuff?" the moon-ball laughed and a short cold breeze kept their noses awake. "it's not much different than what we're doing. an escape. we escape to this world. it's the same scale as our world, but very different. some people want a world that is just the same as the one they are in, but on a much smaller scale."
at this point, in a field of knee-high wheat, he was kissed. the scale of the kiss was, in relation to the things around them, very small. but in relation to miniature furniture in miniature houses, it was very big.

lovecraft went back to brooklyn on the train. the next evening, he stood in front of his bathroom mirror. his t-shirt was dirty, and had two small holes. he hadn't shaved in eight days. his hair looked like abe lincoln's. there he was, in the middle of the city, alone, missing his cat, and looking authentically human. he smiled, his big gap-toothed, split-lipped smile, and turned off the light.

amen

rocco, come over
and teach me to play
slide guitar.

she was afraid of the strings
but she was metal on metal
and bone on bone.

i don't know how much it cost me
he said
before asking for
her entire hand,

which she politely refused
him
and instead
placed upon his head
a cap of thorny-thorns
(he keeps it now
in his bureau desk
beneath old, old, old
news paper love letters)
and he goes home all alone.

rocco,
come over
and teach me
how to play.

his fingers bleed
playing his
rusted
barbed
wire
slide
guitar.

remember the easter quake, when he was young

She couldn’t remember where she had placed the sugar.

It wasn’t raining, but it looked like it might be in the city.

Things were not in order, and he had trouble sleeping when things were not in order. Their lives had been turned around by the quake; not broken apart but rotated backwards. They were safe, and had everything that they had before, but finding it became difficult.

Their son, the little boy, was sensitive to seismic activity. He liked it; when he was a baby, on their trips to the Midwest, he would never stop crying, fussing over the stillness of the dirt under their feet. But in California, he was always happy. He tugged at their legs before every tremor. It took them some time to make the connection. The big one, on Easter Sunday last year, he was rolling on the living room carpet like a cat. She opened the door, and he bolted out into the yard, and buried his ears in the earth. She was just about to pull him up like a carrot when the window panes began to shake. He stopped moving. She called to him, before she realized that he was in the safest place possible. She thought he was afraid, but when she got closer, and lay down next to him, she realized that he was laughing. They both let the shaking stop, and rolled onto their backs. The quake had left them behind. The neighbors streamed from their apartments like worker ants.
She tried to remember what she had been doing. Looking for the sugar. Brown sugar. She had been baking a carrot cake.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” he said, after she told him what had happened.
“You go away too much.”
“You don’t go away enough.”
How could she? The little boy who loved shaking needed her.
“He’s different.”
“Maybe he’s autistic.”
“Maybe. I don’t care, I don’t really care, but I think it’s amazing that he can do something impossible.”
“He can’t predict them. Nobody can predict them.”
“No, but he can feel them. I think he can hear them, too.”
Her husband, who traveled for work, but didn’t make much money, sighed. “How bad was it?”
“Not bad. Like the top of a roller coaster, but it stopped before we really started down.”
“You were ok?”
“He was rolling around on the grass. Like he knew. Like he knew he would be safe there. Nothing broken."
-she thought about the look on his face, being rumbled in the afternoon sun-
"But the sugar moved."