I spent two winters in Provincetown, MA, at the very edge of land, 
where green blizzards and frogs sometimes fall out of baffled clouds. 
Once, the harbor froze as solid as Antarctica. The power blinked out 
at least once a week. This made the place feel more like home. 
We huddled in our blankets near the fireplace, popped corn, piled 
quilt on quilt, swapping stories, snug and warm, nowhere to go. 
 
Even here, in Southern California, a place that some say has no weather, 
we’re no strangers to extremes. Once, a flash flood caught me on my way 
back from the Zion Market. As I crossed the street. I heard the roar. 
Parked cars, dead animals came swirling past my feet as I perched 
on the traffic barrier. Onlookers on the far side of the street urged 
me to jump. Finally, a kind person in an SUV drove me to the other side. 

Weather has taught me home is only safe as contingency will let it be, 
depending on the unexpected storm, stranger in the theater with a gun, 
but somehow, fraught moments, when temblors roll through green hills, 
wild horses trying to buck us off, when fissures open up beneath our feet, 
and greedy waves claw at our foundations, when we’re stuck down in the 
basement with our rations and our radios, it’s then that Earth seems 
the dearest place, where we are most at home. 
                        

The whale shark is the world’s largest fish,
not a whale at all, though it’s a filter feeder, 
with a mouth that’s five feet wide, 300 teeth. 
Slow as a tunnel. Spending its energy on eating, 
it’s broad as a reef, studded all over with white 
sparks, like the night sky, a chapel full of candles. 
When it does move, these would-be stars seem to 
flicker in the shifting light, reconfigure with every 
flick of its gigantic fins.
                        

I want my poems to push their way into the room,
as if propelled by the revolving doors in a department store 
or four-star hotel with marble floors and louvered windows, 
as though they were a truck, crashing through a flimsy 
barricade of traffic cones. I want them to insist that they 
be heard, as I never could, afraid that I’d be trapped 
between two panes of glass, like a big moth in a killing jar. 
My poems have never had such fears. They know where 
they are going. No door could keep them out, no windows 
are locked tight enough to bar their way. They will slip 
like steam through the slim mail slot, condense into 
a mist and reassemble on the other side.