Triple Acrostic: Orcas

Why the pods that used to streak and shimmy

in Puget Sound's granitic light

have disappeared in recent decades: the reasons

speed like a killer Chris Craft through clouded

inland waters. Reasons subtle as a buccaneer's

logic: Goliath-girthed trunks of

Seven Ways of Looking at Toilet Paper

1. Bleached white and insubstantial as the word of an ex-lover. Rip it in squares, swab your private parts, examine the paper’s surface, toss it into the swirl. Repeat as often as necessary. The bathroom is your laboratory. Sometimes two or three squares will do, other times it takes 10 or even 12. Much depends on your solid food intake. Do the math.

The Sunday School Teacher

A great blue heron swept in, surprising me
just at sunset, landing up the beach
and standing, almost invisible

in slanting light.
Leaning over a driftwood log, the heron looked
like my father in his blue Sunday suit,

Innocence

We now learn that matter in the universe is aligned

in a grid,

that each molecule knows its mark

as if order came first,

that the stars know the moment of our birth

Playground

“Play is the highest form of research.” ~ Albert Einstein

Hooking one leg over, we pushed off the bars head-first

toward the damp asphalt.

Hair grazed the ground.

ICICLE CREEK (STILL LIFE)

Out of the shadows, among shades of green

appears a deer, cameo like, still.

Sun draped leaves, warm, impart an auburn tint.

The doe pauses and hooves gently probe the mossy basin rocks.

THE MUSIC BOX In memory of Susan Sims Coffin

There was once a magic music box. You didn't have to wind it or open its lid. If you so much as looked at it, or in its direction, it would begin to play. The song was short and rather simple, but mysterious too, because it had never been written down, and never could be.

Anthropocenic

☿ Rx at ♊13°       

May 18, 2015, 5:49 pm Pacific

Bridging physical space and social distinctions, two people communicate telepathically – Sabian symbol for the 14th ° of ♊

Love distorts things. Each noun in a house a nova of votives. The 6th glass solves an imbalance of wheels spinning, a reverse-photosynthesis promising Mea vulva mea maximawithout ever filling in what was banned from music in the Middle ages. Wound healed is spirit wound without conduit, leaving only self-taught, billion-year-old carbon, and we’ve got to get our selves back. Fire is not made to rest on grounds.

Gender

(The Box of Broken Toys)

He stretches on the rooted ground beneath a birch

and puts the box of broken toys between her knees.

A naked doll with one arm gone 

displays a plastic smile with confidence

amid a wrecker's paradise of matchbox cars....

Just yesterday, s/he finally came to visit, 

Writing Weird

Since you left I’ve been writing weird.

In my effort not to crawl back,

I starved myself to a whisker moon.

Alone in lostness, with my new Barbie body,

I teeter across the four-lane, in six-inch stilettos,

Grammar Lessons

When my students ask me how to use the future tense,

I tell them that we use “will”

for a promise or a threat.

I will always love you, for example.

And to make a plan, we use the “present continuous,”

I am divorcing him.

All Signs Are Dares

Why we decided no headlights
through Snoqualmie Valley dark

 early March after the hospital
visit to my open-heart grandfather

 I will not understand, yet
we drove into that unspoken dare

 a good thirty seconds
until we couldn’t take not seeing

Let’s just listen—  

before the spent words and the hidden nests

of sentences begin, before the musical count

of vowels and consonants, the ink

not yet slippery with wild grief

or souped-up grandeur.

IT TAKES GUTS:  FANTASY AND MEMORY

 Flying into light they want the shades down while

I need sun — seeing is breathing and who knows what

magic unscrolls inside that cloud proscenium. Years 

ago I caught the shadow of a stork out there soaring

so fast I might have missed him had it not been for the

gransdon I found snuggled in his feathers on arrival.

Night Itch 

I scratch, in the black, the inner    

aspect of my right thigh. Other                      

nights chest, back of hand, a shin, 

blame the itch on chafed or dry 

or sweat-salted skin, wrong 

detergent, ghosts of mites, tactile 

Planet of the Apes

 last night the rain fell

in heavy drops as we all stood

some friends and I and others

listening to the poets read

dark, angry musics

condemning the current

political situation

 It occurred to me that I may never be in that city again, so walked down to the river and then along its banks. The people in bars, restaurants, the music much louder than I’d ever heard it

Growing Up in America

Remember…. 

the classroom full of kids

with different colored skins

learning the difference 

between a noun and a pronoun?

Remember how innocently

everybody used to play—

together:: in the schoolyard?