When You Return from the Dead

You will, I see it clearly,
stroll in through the back,
letting the screen door slam
and sit at my kitchen table.
You will train your hazel eyes on me 
and I will not ask a hundred 
questions about the afterlife. 
I will only want to feed you.
I will make a pot of lentil soup
because doing it right will take
a couple of hours at least.
I will bake bread too,
and you will have to wait sweetheart
as the dough rises.
My second favorite part:
how you’ll say, "Because
you're the only chicken-legged 
poet I know," supplying
the answer before I ask, 
"Do you remember why you loved me?"
My favorite part: just watching 
while you eat, slurping,
maybe spilling on your blouse,
for a moment almost human.

-first appeared in Floorboard Review



Gathering Myself


I am trying to gather myself.
My self has other ideas.
I track it down in a diner
somewhere in Nebraska,
sipping trucker coffee,
unmarried and unemployed,
blissfully watching strangers
gathering themselves,
whether they know it or not.
Moments before, I found
my self on a bench outside
the Safeway in Seward, Alaska,
where with welfare mothers
and fishermen I smoked,
clipped my words and gazed
like a panting salmon
on the steaming shore.
Before, my self was watching,
from a respectful distance,
my daughter eulogize
at her father’s funeral.
I dragged my self away
to ponder how the Buddha
gathered himself. I know:
he sat until he melted
into the Indian jungles.
Speaking of jungles, my self
is now in my ex’s kitchen,
where after grilling me
in her Puerto Ricanese
for being an hour late,
she grills a steak and serves it
with the knife plunged in
upright. This gathering
is not like herding cats
but wrestling giant squids.
Some creatures are at ease
with multiplicity.
Ask Cousteau, they never
go down without a fight.


-first appeared in Marathon Literary Review