More Poetry

[jakebe]

Planes

You're up there
I imagine, in a blanket
and a book, reading
while all around you
there is nothing but the air.
This does not trouble you
the way it troubles me;
the plane skips on clouds
like a rock on water
but you don't notice.
What would it take?
I can feel impossibility
scratching under the fuselage,
growling at the engines,
testing the strength of the wings.
When the plane shakes it off,
as it would a fly, I'm terrified.
Is it annoyed at the persistent tug
of physics, or is this the first warning
that this great beast of a thing
is going down?



The Patron Saint of Ordinary Things

Not everyone cries at the sight of an apple,
or of the way the dog's fur lights up when it's hit by the evening sun.
Haiku is her vice of choice, though she doesn't say no
to the odd villanelle, the perfect sonnet, the free-verse poem
dripping oil through its cracks. She loves them all.
They're best, of course, when they illuminate an ordinary scene --
a woman on her porch, a man watching a baseball game, all of the memories
we keep hidden in our attics, a dinner party, the fingerprint smudge
on a wine glass, children, birds, the sun, and hair.
They're best when they elevate their subject to godhood,
when they bring gods down to where we can touch them.
This is why she brushes her golden retriever's sunlit fur so reverently
and why she eats her fruit slow enough to enjoy it,
and why she even allows herself to sit with her misery and anger:
because the sacred is everything, and it demands nothing less than
her abject, unreserved worship.



Inspiration Comes Slowly

The trash basket is full of crumpled origami
discarded because my hand couldn't make them
as elegantly as I saw them in my head.
It's the worst feeling when you imagine swans
with their graceful necks and black, mysterious eyes
but all your fingers want to do is draw
duck after duck, not even the interesting ones
with the shockingly bright feathers or disturbing penises,
just brown and placid and weak-billed
time and time again.
You just have to power through, it's said,
and take from each bad fold any lesson you can.
This one: words don't bend easily when you fold them this close.
And this one: people don't respond well to something they can't relate to.
And this last: ideas are best expressed with as few words as possible.
So forth and so on, etc. etc.
lessons on top of lessons, sliding down my mountain
of literal failure to stain the floor
with bad, stinking ideas, half-formed,
cracked before they're ready.



Bob

On the occasion of his 73rd birthday,
Bob woke up, ate his breakfast
and went out for a run.
He did this in a bright yellow shirt
with thousands of other runners
using the occasion as an excuse to celebrate
as often happens in San Francisco.
It was bright and it was warm
and he was seventy-three years old today,
and instead of another boring dinner
in an overpriced restaurant, with the embarrassing waiters
he had decided to run for nearly eight miles.
He had trained many months for this day.

It was hard work. When he slowed down or tired,
his accomplice would turn to the crowd behind him and shout
"Today is Bob's birthday!" and
"This man is 73 years old!" and the result was always the same:
wild applause, cheers, shouting --
the crowd let him know in no uncertain terms
that they were with him, that today they were celebrating him
and his foolish attempt to reclaim some of the life
that had slipped through his fingers.
What city is this, I thought, that houses
thousands of people who can barely afford the breath
to keep running, and use it to help an old man chasing his youth?
Only here, I think, as I wheeze and shout on,
only here.