​Judgment 


Sliding down the Alleghenies,
foot shoved onto the brake
as if into the back of my enemy,
I observe the morning sun 
leaking out over some stillborn
town and imagine I am a horseman
descending. 
The radio has quit on me, 
but the chattering change 
in the cupholder drowns out 
the stuttering of the rotors, drowns out
the vibration in the roots 
of my teeth, drowns out
everything except the urge to visit
some petty mischief on those people
down there, those smiling people
waking to the scent of breakfast,
waking just now in their elfin abodes
beneath me.





Overgrowth


At my mother’s house the hostas
have turned shaggy and sullen
and their bulk obtrudes past
the border of the bed my father
laid for them. I find this distasteful,
this morbid swelling, this spilling
and slouching over prescribed boundaries, 
this blockage of veins and arteries, 
of ingress and egress.

The gnomes they have devoured,
the small stone fisherman, the sign
bearing our name: these are casualties
of a blind, intractable lust. 
Everything should grow 
like this, my mother thinks, and go on 
growing. 

I, a young man, believe in maintenance,
in discipline and ruthless pruning. My mother,
an old woman, longs to see the things
she has loved grow wild out in her yard,
consuming the scenery, obliterating limits,
filling with greedy leaves every spare inch 
of what is left of the world.





Love You Like


I love you like you
will never know,
love you like whole
galaxies and spheres
and townships and microbes
are open to me through
you. 
I love you like you
invented me, like you 
culled me from some
primordial matter,
sculpted me and combed
my hair.
I love you like you
are my final resting place,
love you like asteroids
must love the planet
where they land and break
apart, still at last, 
transformed, cooling
in the crater.