poetry template

Why We Use Present Tense to Talk about Literature

Because someone we love is bound to die

in the book and the sky is blue and black

but it is. The mother in us wails – space

opens where the heart is to give the grief

a place to live. Because when things bloom

on the page, they do it in whatever color

we are holding in our mind’s eye, in yellow

and/or green and/or purple – no matter how,

words are the seeds of thought. Reading goes

into us rather than through. Everything

that happens is happening. When the character

walks, they walk into our eyes and down

our spines, make themselves known in lobes,

limbs, in the lengths of our fingers,

where the universe is and always is, both doable

and undoable. Because when the death

becomes too much, just turn back a page—

Voilà – they live again.

Bake N’ Broil Diner

Like Whitman loved the grass, you love the counter-top,

would sit there all day wondering at pies, sipping

coffee, pouring in the little plastic creamers at intervals,

watching Long Beachians come to eat hamburgers.

The air is the air of sustenance and sun, work and boiling,

your breath with the breath of all the diners, the cooks,

fillers-of-coffee cups, wipers of lemon tables. Do you

have that place where you can sit, feeling you,

where good lives well, and tips are left on every table?

You take yourself there every chance you get, lift

yourself to the warm lights, to the small dishes

of custard, to the marvel of more until it is enough.

Up and down Atlantic, everything is moving,

the light changing from fire to meadow to blossom,

and you lean into the perfect tilt of this world—

the ice in your water glass singing You,

and You, and You, drink deep its song—

I Wanted to Write a Poem

but I ended up renewing

my PTA membership, then

the dog needed a walk.

In the park, a snowy egret

waded and watched,

watched and waded.

When I got home, I looked up

What kind of egrets live

in Southern California:

snowy, great, cattle, reddish...

I had another cup of coffee.

The dog lay on the couch

and licked his paws. The poem

that I was going to write

was flying away. I felt its wings

whoosh by my head, becoming

smaller and smaller— a beam

of light in a bright, empty sky.

Dark-Inked Stars

After Carmen Maria Machado

I realized today that I will die

with thousands of books on my shelves,

and someone will do the necessary work

of choosing what to do with them

and how to do it. And after some books

are boxed, The Inferno might make its way

to a tenth-grade student, who on opening

the cover will marvel at or disregard the markings,

who might re-mark in class one day

what I have written in a margin

of Canto III, at the point where Charon

is about to ferry Dante temporarily into hell,

into fire and ice, like Frost, and having looked up,

Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,

will know I knew what Frost knew, that it doesn’t

even matter… no matter fire and ice, no matter

how we are ended, or what the weather is

when we go, eventually to that murky place

where Hamlet wondered himself into,

that conclusion to which we all get ferried

or carried. After all, death is like eating cereal

or combing your hair except sometimes

it takes longer and hurts more, that finality

of kaput, done, inoperative, but always,

some of me still left scribbled on the pages,

and breathing quietly there, in bright yellow

highlighter, in blue-penned wows, in exclamation

points, in underlines and dark-inked stars—

Dear Hamlet

Enough with your sea of troubles.

This morning the grass wept

with dew and clouds broke the sky’s wide emptiness.

You were there too, going on and on about seems

this and is that.

To be, or not to be,

what kind of question is that?

We all are,

and eventually, we all aren’t. Except

for you, who always will be—

spinning your advice, sitting in your sullen lack of action.

Instead, I’ll take a sea of cherries,

with sticky juice waves, with hidden pits, stem masts—

anything at all besides troubles.

A sea of dogs, a sea

of sentences—

Look at this full wetness,

this roiling rambunctious water cresting

then falling into its own energy.

And you, with your waves

of uncertainty. We close the cover, and you creep

out from under it, your brooding

voice in our ears, insisting on the un—

unhinged, unhappy, undone—

you pen your darkness

firmly into our days, your boots of despair, your shirt

of impossible questions.

Dear Hamlet, today I am dreaming

of your silence

that will never be. I am being by your side, turning

the pages of my life. You crook. You imposter.

You clever ghost. You—

who will outlive us all.