Selected poems
Release
1.
To be on,
for it to be one of your better days,
for it to culminate
in knowing, beyond a doubt,
that placing your hands in the air
just at the right moment,
so that you can bring them together
and softly palm
the trapped sparrow flying around
the bookstore café
is to experience a moment
of the remarkable, then to step
outside to open your hands
to release the bird
and to watch it fly up
over the languishing blossoms
of the hanging cherry tree,
is to also release that
wilderness within yourself
back into the open air.
2.
Seeing whatever it was
that had darted in front of your eyes
out of the barnyard at dusk
reminds you of the bat
in the auditorium at the book signing
that flew up above the heads
of the onlookers during a break,
then dodged coffee urns
and fruit Danish while
knocking over stacks of paper coffee cups
before you could pull off a tablecloth
from a free table,
and corner the bat, urging it through
a series of hallway that lead to a storeroom,
where you threw the red cloth into
the air, and the bat flew into it,
as it landed onto the checkered
linoleum floor. Kneeling down
to bunch the cloth loosely about
the bat, you could feel the nervous
twitching of its wings
beneath the fiber of the cotton
weave, and walked it outside,
where you tossed the tablecloth up
to release the bat
in the falling rain, upon which
it chose to attach itself
to the crenellated concrete
of the outside wall of the building,
blinking its eyes in the freedom
of a new day, adjusting
its sight to everything, all of which
appeared to be nothing less than remarkable.
The wake
A child approaches the casket,
reaches within to try to lift
my folded hands, to make sure,
as she tells her mother later,
that I am not just sleeping.
Only a few attend the wake,
since, as a former supervisor,
who rather crudely expressed in
an annual employee review,
that I lived alone, didn't have
a family, and never owned,
or watched, a television.
Although there were those
I considered friends whom
I never met, but kept up with
by email, not many in the sparse
crowd sitting in the folding
chairs would even know what
local literati meant, since not
unlike Walt Whitman,
I tended friendships with those
whom I made felicitous contact
with at the grocery store,
the gas station, the post office;
and in keeping with this,
ah, there is my friend Mohammad,
the coffee shop owner, whom
anyone would call quite a splendid
man, whom I spoke with
nearly daily on my walk at
the mall, laying a rose beside me,
his double shot of kindness
still echoing into the next world,
Good morning, good morning,
as my spirit hovers nearby.
Cattilianthe
What greets you in the greenhouse
is what is