The Ambulance Talker's Confession

The last place the candle
Goes out is in my mouth.
Not everyone's last words

Are anything like words
At all. Supposedly
The billionaire who made

So much of our current
Cyborg lives possible,
A year ago, in awe,

Died gasping "Oh wow! Oh
Wow!"  I'm willing to bet
His last words were, "ow, ow!"

Still, deep in the forest
Tonight, knowing I won't
Get out of myself soon,

I'm willing to gamble
That, as the forest dies
And burns down, twig and root,

The last thing I'll manage
Will be some foolishness,
Less than prayer, more than "ow!"

Full Moon Durango September

What is this? Harvest? Hunter?
Art Walk Moon? It's warm enough
To rule out Frost, Hunger, Wolf,

Eerie enough to rule out
Weddings and Buffalo Gals.
Let's say it's the Sidewalk Moon

Old enough for the fiddler,
Long-bearded and homeless,
Who plays a reel on the corner,

Young enough for the toddler
In her plastic pushcart car
To give the fiddler a wave.

For Natasha Trethewey & Tracy K. Smith

These are the women who teach
Poetry today at the places
Where I was once proud to attend,

Women with attractive, tilted
Faces smiling from the backs
Of their Pulitzer-Prize winning

Volumes of acid-free verse,
Replete with the exquisite
Prose-verse encomia of poets

My own and my mother's
Ages who taught me ages ago
Whatever I was wasn't going

Ever to be this appealing,
This winning, this gentle,

Forgiving. Forgive me. I love this.

A God in the Dark

Supplies are running out.
They might yet be replaced.
They might not. At a stop

Over the interstate,
A silver-bearded man
In leather ten-gallon,

Ponytail down his back,
Sharp black lizard-skin boots,
Mauve shirt loose in the wind,

Stands by the pruned ruin
Of a dead cottonwood,
Leaning into black clouds.

He holds an antenna
That he points at the clouds,
Piloting a glider

That he flies in circles
And loops around his head,
A steerable halo

To tempt the lightning with.
A long way from safety,
From home, one admires him.

He twists and turns and steers.
His green t-shirt flashes
When the sunset strikes him.

Someone watching asks him
The name of his toy plane.
He says it's Caedmon's Hymn.

Someone else wants to know
What that name means. He shrugs.
I have to go home now.

Will with the Wisp

What you need night to see seems how
The tiny city and all its little lights
The great amazing metropolis and all its mighty lights

Hide in the magician's black glove
At the end of a sequined arm
Reaching out from the trunk

Of the tree for which all forests
Are hardly more than brittle whisks
Burnishing the far tip of one branching

Opposite illustrated night
Where the city dwellers
Cower in the covered fingers

Of a hand they hope resembles
Their own curled monkey paws
Trembling with knowing

That it does not
That it is something else
Entirely under lovely velvet

Concertare

Are we singing or striving?
The wood birds demand to know.

Frogs and crickets contending
Ask the same thing in reverse.

Each chorus raising its own
Ruckus harmony requires

From uncounted hungry throats,
From uncounted rasping wings,

The desperate signaling
Every intention to win

Over the undecided,
However underhanded

The means, the mode of combat
Barely distinguishable

From the possessors' duets
In the middle of their dreams.

It's a contest. It's a hymn.
It's the voice of a forest

That has no voice of its own
Except the wandering wind

Condescends to give the leaves.
At least the creatures singing,

Whatever their forever
Unknowable intentions

To them, create together
A thing that is not beyond

The things their private longings
Need. The leaves and needles

Stand the wind as the grazing
Of the unvoiced butterflies

In their uncontested youth.
Their music is nothing to them.

Are You Mad Enough to Celebrate

The funny physicality
Of lyrical poems on the page:
Ugly, skinny, scrawny musings

Scrolling down in stumbling stanzas,
So pleased with their own sound effects,
So far from music, so near prose,

So oblivious to their shapes,
The homely black-and-white letters
Straggling, zig-zag, down the blankness

Toward closing-in conclusions
Cornering clever prosodies
And daydreams of revolution

Mercilessly as leg-snap traps,
Clumsily as riot police
Catching strays under veils of gas?

No? Go away. We don't need you.
We've been cultured for culture's sake.
We're legless by design, like snakes.