Renewal
I’ve got nothing better to do
than wait for the recycle truck
so I can reclaim my barrel –– blue,
taller than a first grader, full.
30% of the plastic’s reused.
The rest is virtue-signaling.
Neighbors in the community garden
hammer fence posts in the worst heat,
shovel yards of loam into beds
the size of a Playskool sandbox ––
$5 per tomato, I estimate,
$10 for a bunch of kale.
The Ring Nebula’s glamor shot
rolls like a raw emerald in a violet saucer ––
the remains of a sun-like star
dressed up by a cosmic undertaker.
Is the universe gorgeous or what?
Facebook friends give 3.7K likes.
Is the universe gorgeous or not?
A physicist charts an infinity of them,
every bounce of a quanta bounding
both ways –– or all ways, ad infinitum,
through space-time. Flip me
to a when where I live again, please!
* * * * *
Bouquet
after Wallace Stevens’ “The Poems of Our Climate”
Muck-water in a dull mug. Slimy flowers.
Dark meadow, a collection of dead stalks
where snow inclines to mud. A false spring,
less than meets the eye, but nothing
simplified. Absence makes the heart.
You’d float peonies in a crystal bowl
I’d rinsed, careful to shake off any ants
still gorging on the sugar of first bloom,
a holiday for breakfast. Then we bustled
to work; we couldn’t live on petal salad
dressed in a dish of light. Summer scudded,
seasons drummed –– without you I forget how
many, or where; what fingers are for, what rains.