Making Nothing
suppose i make nothing
and have nothing
to show for it
like a healer, like a lover
The Good Worker
He stands at the arrival gate with his black raincoat
too short and his shoe soles too thick and white
flakes on his collar, holding high the sign "Mrs. Danby",
whom he has not met before, who is flying in from Rio,
and his arms must be tired, must ache, yet he does not
lower them, though who would blame him, a good worker --
like the poor women in Brazil, who live in cardboard huts
and work all day cleaning and cleaning with old rags and sand
the bottom of their one aluminum pot, in which they cook,
over a sooty fire, the squirrels and rats the men catch, and
those pots shine and illuminate the impassable gulf
between luck and effort.
Shavasana (Final Surrender)
These days I am lying very still
with my eyes softly staring
like a new corpse. I am refusing
the crumbs of food that fall into my mouth.
I am learning every garment is a shroud
and longing to be naked.
I am selling my possessions, one by one,
even the birthmark on my good hip.
My first language is almost forgotten
though I dream of its infinite harmonies.
I am surfing the ebb and flow of my breath
to the endless country of its origin --
homeless drifter, homesick immigrant.
Empty
Empty as a fractured goblet, a newborn's pocket, the silver eyelash
of the crescent moon, empty as the place where a hummingbird glittered
moments ago, as a deer's gut at the end of a drought, the setting before
the gem is chosen, the motel closet after the guest has gone, the burst
balloon, the robbed grave -- substance of fulfillment having gone out so
thoroughly that even the slight vibration of the last molecule's final Brownian
motion has come to stillness, stillness like the stillness of dusk when the land
pauses between breaths, or the moment after the high note departs the dark
air of the theater. Seeping into this space: sunlight, the flutter of wings.