
Life won’t get simple until
our mind does. Embrace
the great emptiness.

This morning
I felt strong and jaunty in my
mail order Israeli commando trousers.
Up at Hard Luck Ranch I spoke to the ravens
in baritone, fed the cats with manly gestures.
Acacia thorns can’t penetrate these mighty pants,
then out by the corral the infant pup began
to weep, abandoned. In an instant
I became another of the
Earth’s billion sad
mothers.

It certainly wasn’t
fish who discovered water or
birds the air. Men built houses in part
out of embarrassment by the stars and raised
their children on trivialities because they had butchered
the god within themselves. The politician standing on
the church steps thrives within the grandeur
of this stupidity, a burnt out lamp
who never imagined
the sun.

natalia jakubek
I have studied
and become intimate with
the speed of darkness. It’s so fast it’s
always here. When the light withdraws
the dark comes from no place. It always lives
with us. Your heart and brain are black.
They never see the true light except in violence
or autopsy. Of course the brain can cast
its own blinding light that we wait for in a poem,
at least blinding to us. In our trances the loves
of long ago enter the room unescorted, silent
perhaps from the black bottom of the ocean
where we all die in perfect darkness, a sense
of whirling that recedes back to the time
the ocean swallowed the smallest stars
then heated us into our early life.
Darkness is always there,
it only stands
revealed.

We
drove her aqua
Ford convertible into the country
with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect day
with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves into
the future together seizing the day. Fifty years later we hold each
other looking out the windows at birds, making dinner, a life
to live day after day, a life of dogs and children and the
far wide country out by rivers, rumpled by
mountains. So far the days keep
coming. Seize the day gently
as if you loved
her.