YELLOW LEAVES


Outside, heavy machinery grinds at the street surface,
scoring the pavement for re-sheathing
in shiny new macadam.
The rumbles began this morning before seven,
grind on like time and the endless questions
about the meaning of existence.
 
You are at the doctor, limping after an audible
anatomical snap, a mere year after shoulder surgery.
Who might I be with you infirm
is a different question than
who I might be with you gone.
Your aging makes me lonely on this fall
afternoon, in which trees shed leaves like skin,
and the road surface is worn down to its soul.

​
 


FORCES


It’s about how that vastness,
the apparent nothingness that is space,
which really isn’t nothing at all,
can change us from one something
into another something.
 
We become in response
to forces we haven’t recognized,
and so become unrecognizable
to ourselves.
 
All the forces of the universe--
our expended energy, the energy
passing through bone and cell
as if we were paper--
creating irreparable damage
we are incapable of feeling,
all the while us believing we are not
as sky and cloud: inseparable.



 
 
FOUR


Foursquare in junior high was blood sport.
Getting chosen, being in the box—or out--
determined your fate for the year.
You thought you would outgrow it.
Become more eight-sided or even round.
But that never happened,
except to Eddie who dropped out at sixteen
(divide by four, four squared)
because he was too fuckin’ smart for high school,
with his long, greasy, black locks,
and frayed plaid shirt that wobbled around his slender frame.
He lived on my bus route, climbing up a dirt driveway alone 
to whatever was in that house.
Google can’t find him. Imagine that.
He refuses, even now,
to be boxed into my screen.