All These Rooms

GOING TO SAY NOTHING
when I call him at midnight. “You know,” I say, “I’ve written a poem where you lose your job.” Nothing. “Then you look out your window and at that moment there is no one more alone.”
“Oh,” he says, “clever. I was just thinking
of calling you.”
When I was sixteen we were driving and […]

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GOING TO LOSE HIS JOB
I feel… drained. I open the blinds and close the door, look out the window at a branch waving
like one long line of people
brushes it as they walk south.
I’d forgotten there’s a certain rhythm
between the wind
and the branches.

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GOING TO WORK AT THE POWER CO.
Some people don’t need as much sleep as others. I go to bed at midnight, pray, get up at five and watch for blown fuses at the crosses of the power-poles on the way to work. I used to chat in the hall. Now my boss doesn’t live in […]

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GOING TO CHURCH
I feel a touch of current as the congregation floods around me and for a moment it seems we’re spilling through a dam and leaving a bit of energy. I’ve told people God is electricity and mostly they laugh. But electricity ripples through neurons and draws water to a cell. You know when […]

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PORTLAND
The library is well lit but a fog (here I need a word for how light is caught up in the fog and fills it, makes everything illuminated but dark) the light. The books push in. Clouds gather. Rain. Lightning but no thunder. You work through the wet but the poems words grow. You plant […]

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i live in the shade
of a maple tree
so that the clouds cannot
find me
so that the sun and it’s
dirty yellow fingers cannot
change me from light to dark to
light again
trying to break down what’s
left of my walls
and steal my buried eyes
 
if I make my home here
in the leaves of the tree
my father cut down
ten years ago
i won’t […]

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