Lessons from the Undergrowth

 

I’m drifting into knowing some people can’t

have you, some people won’t

want you in their lives, but they’ll take

 

what comes easy. These slides,

part of the same projection. The differences,

in the end, mostly academic. Though

 

the pain varies. Quick ax-bitten scar, or

infestation that lingers in memory’s

woodwork. I’m learning I’m no

 

gentler than the rest. This osmosis

of meadow echoes through

the mycorrhiza of what surrounds

 

and connects—these hearts, their words—

to say, even when we can no longer love

each other, I can use you,

 

you can use me—

And this is how we survive.

 

 

 

 

Against Evil Eyes

 

With a line from “As If Lit From Beneath, And Tossing,” by Carl Phillips. And indebted to the third section of his book, Double Shadow, in which that poem appears.

 

I would agree, loyalty is very like devotion,

which varies like the ability to evade precision

in the face of more personal questions—

 

Mysteries, whisper the faithful. Easier not to ask,

murmur the ones for whom faith, like a once blue,

long-used sheet, has become something paler,

 

threadbare, but still clung to— What is society

if not attempt, forever, at negotiating fault? For

nothing faultless about history

 

beyond our moving into it, its crashing, like the sea.

Clean the wound, instructs a healer’s voice;

no such thing as woundlessness now… Those of us

 

who wish, like spitting in a face, to continue, flounder

upon spars of privilege, claiming ownership over

that fast-sinking sandbar, all we imagine, lit

 

with the meager light, to which we’ve angled our eyes—

persuading ourselves it’s vision, to keep on

moving blind.