The Not Perfect Day

The not perfect day its recipe for soup salty tears turned up to a boil then frozen convenient for the trip to the reservation where storms are brewing This time Hero will not be here to save the day with his guns slung and slinging This time will be just a lot of checking the weather seeing if there is a pulse a secret a charm a chant helping locate the door and its persistent knocking

Cyan

Hospital flowers growing along the highway Your surgery has spared my heart La Grande alleys never seemed so full of leaves As now the day a dream I had for months Do I languish here as usual or do I step Sideways into the other boxes of yes We learned the symbols and danced the dances I could not tell you the pattern of the steps Out to Imbler and then the rushing of squirrels Climbing backwards and upside down

The Vanishing

The vanishing is known above all else. The time-lapsed roses opening now and they accelerate accelerate trying to be as hardy as the small wild ones.

Dry Drunk

Missoula not caring whether I lived or died. The feeling its old stale coffee smell in a little cupboard where a paper bag served as the trash. I remember Dickinson Street and the unpaved part reaching up the flank of Mt. Jumbo where our landlord lived. Our house still there but the fence I used to sit on is gone. My white halter top borrowed from Mom is gone, our horse, Bree, gone now I look and see the trouble she got herself into that girl drunk even when dry.

White Space

We were told to look at the white space look for it and say what it is and what goes unsaid but it took too long and people could only see the other stuff that was there anyway so I want to know if this is what you've been seeing all along? Why your head hurts? I didn't walk here but it might as well be true. My knees took a knocking and I went swimming. Will all this bring me closer? Do the years add up to anything, even after surviving? Can this room contain them? Its light and shaded shadows.

Bear Canyon

So many up close turning out to be stones zipping by going against the flow or is it the stream I circled round his grave. The tree does not grow well there. The apples a little ways away taste old-fashioned. It was all for those neatly planted at about ten mile intervals. The tracks follow the water-- the murderous fencing beyond claustrophobic. Polite conversation has all but disappeared. Now everyone is free to speak like candidates and even whispering seems outdated and besides the point

Watered Down

I do not live there. How could I live in all that water with land floating trash forever. How could I ever think I am different forever? How could I live on land thinking of water? No land is forever. My life floating different. The sunken feeling that nobody is rushing to the rescue. It is me who is rescuing, who is organized into helping. I got the wrong version of Song Of Myself. Thought I had the right ISBN but no, that wasn't it. I try to understand to feel the long lines. They reach the raft. They dangle over the cliff where I wait warmed by swallows by bees. Some I can catch others are snapping and whipping in the breezes. I want them all but I only have myself, my two hands or so I am thinking, one washing the other off.