Empties

It’s like Forrest Gump—or his mama, rather—says

about what life is like, though I think she

had in mind the mystery of it, the serendipity,

the good (mocha truffle) with the bad (pecan

nougat). What has caught my eye, this morning,

as I take the faded yellow lid from my

Lifetime-Supply!-sized Whitman Sampler,

with its 25,000 little cardboard cubbyholes,

is how little it matters, now, what each

contained, whether I may have stuck my finger

into some of them to see what was coming,

how the dog ate one whole corner

and had to be made to vomit at the vet’s,

how I remember getting on a run of the good

stuff, once, a row with nothing but dark

chocolate over ganaches of peanut butter

and mocha and key lime, or that one winter

when just the thought of one more insipid

morsel made me cry. What I am noticing

this morning, more than the fact that every

remaining piece has lost its tempered shine,

the coating cracked and pale at the edges—

what I notice now are the long white rows,

the empty rows, straight and even as headstones

at Arlington, and how these days, when I choose

my sweet from the top left corner of the box,

where the remaining pieces huddle together

in the last, unshaken corner of the Etch-

a-Sketch, how I hold it in my mouth, let it melt

for as long as it takes, like the kid saving his last

piece of Halloween candy until Christmas day.

(first published in Arcturus, 2017)

Die-off

When I tell my future great-grandchild that I remember

a time when a lucky human might see a Sumatran rhinoceros

in the wild, she will look at me the same way my grandkids

look at me now when I tell them how we used to plagiarize

our school reports on the dodo bird from paper-and-ink

encyclopedias, and then she will google the rhino and tell me

she thinks they look a lot like a Styracosaurus and did I ever

see one of them? My own imminent personal demise aside,

I wish I could leave behind more world for her. I imagine

this sixth mass extinction will be old news, in her day,

and there will be a page in the newspaper (extinct, ca.

2027) next to the obituaries, where the daily losses are listed:

Arctic Sea Ice (“gone fishin’”); Blue-throated Macaw (“died

doing what they loved best”); Bali Tiger (“what a happy reunion

in heaven with cousins Snow Leopard and Caspian Tiger”);

Coral Reef (“after a lingering illness”). She and her friends

will adapt, of course. No one does adaptation like the humans:

virtual reality games with ninja sage-grouse fighting it out

on the lek; animatronic golden-cheeked warblers

greeting them from a simulated Ashe juniper in the yard.

And while I’m imagining and bemoaning, why not take

a hopeful turn here at the end of the poem in which my not-so-

distant great-grand will have a great-great down the line,

in some still-habitable corner of the planet, who picks through

the Anthropocene layer for  a living and comes across

the badly-postured bones of what they will believe to be

the last living poet to escape the 21^st-century purge, found

curled atop the one comfortable chair at a coffee shop,

cradling his laptop, only fragments of his last poem

recoverable, the scholars not surprised to find the words

liminal and luminous among the detritus, though the line

her smile was toothy as a Brazilian merganser sends them

scrambling to the luminescent Google Cloud, leaves them

smiling and nodding to each other like a polite audience

(extinct, ca. 2019) at a poetry reading.

(previously published in New Madrid Journal, 2017)

Lifting Weights

Over the past year or so, I have lost the weight

of a grandchild or a microwave, five bowling

balls or housecats, or a large bag of sugar.

The sugar is perhaps most apt, given that

most of the extra weight I had been carrying

around all those years could be distilled

into a (large) powdered pile of sugar and a soupçon

(or so) of rendered bacon fat. I can see your eyes

going glassy already, so let me assure you

this will not be a poetic memoir about my

struggle—some might call it heroic—to pull

myself back from the brink, wrestle that obese

monkey from my back. Nor will it be my thirty-

point plan which I will then sanctimoniously

advise you to follow if you know what’s good

for you, no sestina version of Sweatin’ to the Oldies.

People like hearing about how you lost weight

the same way they want to hear how your dreams

have become more vivid since menopause. No,

this feels like part of a more general plan—

though entirely unplanned—to pare down, un-

load, hold an estate sale before the fact, reduce

my life to its lowest common denominator.

I’m letting the books go, the CDs, taking boxes

of XXLs to Goodwill, eBaying the Pez dispenser

collection; everything must go. I’m saying no,

I’m scrivening, “I would prefer not to” on RSVPs,

I’m truant, AWOL, gone missing. This is not,

though, as far as I know, that pre-demise sloughing-

off, putting post-it notes on my cherry wood

highboy so the relations won’t squabble over it.

This is me sitting in the woods beneath

a Douglas Fir, next to a stream so clear I can see

trout leaning into the current, on the other side

of which a doe comes leading her young fawn

into a clearing, sees the stream and the tree, and,

seeing me, sees nothing that shouldn’t be there.

(published in Frontier Poetry, 2017)

Come-bye

I feel compelled, as I leave the coffee shop,

to push chairs in to their tables and straighten

newspapers into neat stacks. Easy enough.

The leaves in the stand of oak trees

in my backyard are raked into a bag almost

as soon as they fall, leaving only clean earth

between trunks. As far as compulsions go,

it seems harmless enough. At night, I sit

on the edge of my bed and tick through each

of my children and grandchildren, holding them

one at a time in my thoughts, thoroughly

scanning each one, combing through their lives

the way I comb though the long hair along

the forearms of my Australian Shepherd

after our walks, looking for stickseed and burs

that need cutting out. The dog puts his nose

through the fences surrounding the pastures

and animal pens we pass as we walk,

and I can see it twitch, see his eyes dart back

and forth as he accounts for each animal,

his legs quivering as the pull of instinct tells him

those sheep should be formed up, those free-

range chickens enjoy entirely too much

freedom, and he looks up at me as if to say,

can’t you see it? just give the order and I’ll

have things ship-shape in no time. And of course

I can see it, understand his need to herd, but these

are not ours, I tell him, and we move on,

ignoring the free-range world flickering

on the periphery, unfollowing Facebook friends,

unsubscribing from newspapers, walking

quickly around human humps and their middens

downtown, working, instead, to organize

the spice rack alphabetically, moving at a good clip

through cast and bring and cross-drive, until cardamom

sheds safely in its place next to cinnamon. 

(originally published in Frontier Poetry, 2017)