The Known Consequence of Living
I don’t have a list of pallbearers in some drawer. I have no desire
for a certain casket or tombstone. I won’t go happily, but I know
I will go. When God said don’t eat the apple and Eve did,
there was a list of consequences: snake hatred, pain from childbirth,
banishment, and death unlike in the garden, those sturdy lupine
and ridiculously yellow daffodils, they keep coming back.
I might bargain at the end, try to lift the label of what is forbidden,
give my silent wishes heft, the way that sweet ten-year-old-boy
in the front row could not silence himself as the actor
playing Romeo raised the fake knife to plunge in his heart.
She’s not really dead! he blurted out, his voice a little lightning.
Don’t we all want longer stories? How my son and daughter
will pour my ashes in the pond, watch a cloud expanding
into some unholy ghost before erasure or rising.
* * * * *
Defining or Defying Gravity
In the hierarchy of all I don’t know
about the world, invisible force
is in the upper echelons.
I should have leaned harder
into geology or biology
or archeology for rocks
& blood & bones to touch.
Maybe the serpent of wanting
to know what is unknowable
would have found comfort
in charts & tables & equations.
Though I did like learning
recently that the periodic table
appeared in a Russian chemist’s dream.
Another invisibility I love.
Perhaps we find the truth
in the suddenness of nothing.
The way I like to climb
a mountain tunneled in a forest
until I see a sky webbed
by the last branches
& finally to where
it’s nothing
but sky.