Poem-A-Day #308 : Prayer-curse For A New Year

Prayer-curse For A New Year

Coyote's bowed head in the flashlight
and the thickness of frost out across the field
is a sign of something in the New Year

A hunted thing - silence in the crook of a tree
mistaken for meaning and darkness

You could crawl in that space - live out a life
unexamined - the hermit - a cowl and staff ready
if only you could open your drawn-on mouth

On the drive home you cannot escape yellow eyes
the sign of possession in every movie ever made

The trickster god opens his mouth and fills
the world with flies and sparking lanterns
polyhedral dice fall in clatters on the tin roof

The sound of grass shattering is a year-is-over sound
a year-is-starting promise that could -

Poem-A-Day #46 : The 46th Day

The 46th Day

A meteor explodes over Russia
& the USS Maine explodes
                                             sinking to the bottom of Havana Harbour
                                   & the United States goes to war with Spain

                         & it is
                               the largest object to invade the planet
                    since the last meteor that exploded over Russia

In Milwaukee
Jeffery Dahmer goes to prison for life
                              & he does die there his body pulped by a 20 inch pipe

& somewhere Galileo & Chris Farley are born & Owen Willans Richardson dies
                    his theory transmits the heat from static shock
                              to meteor
                                   to the Maine's decks

To the center of your eye
umbilical

to this small dark room in Santa Fe

          where you tell me you are leaving us

                    where there is stop in the spin of the earth

                              where the coyotes wait outside the gates to scrap