Home Feeling
I woke up to rain and pain in my stomach
eagles chittering and a barge blare
staring outside at the devouring grey
bleeding the line between waves and sky
This place is a far cry from anywhere
I ever intended to be
dropped like salmon bones between
mountains and sea
There’s a garbage truck idling between
window and beach
But the rotten stink
reaching in through the cracks
isn’t our tipped bin of tin foil
laundry lint, dented plastics
bound for Oregon on a thousand mile journey
but the ocean
(whose smell I now know.)
I’m drowsily watching and sniffing the air
while just there
I think the driver is hesitating
looking out, yearning
seeing the wash of fog, tasting the salt
hearing the birds of prey cruising the fault
hunting for house cats
He sits, not smoking a cigarette
not realizing that he’s a part of a picture;
that someone has placed the rig and its man
in the same unfurling, worshipful hand
as the water
the eagles
the marine layer blur
a gloomy, wonderful, consuming wet
these feelings of surprise
of home
(and yet.)
House of Green Chairs
It became a house of green chairs very naturally
The first was a celebration
We are moving into our new home
Let’s find something special for it
The special chair and its special green
proved so vibrant that it needed balance
It needs a companion
When the third appeared nobody thought of it
It’s free
on the sidewalk
comfortable
perfect for a reading nook
Then came the fourth
a miscommunication between them
that was funny in hindsight
Have you noticed all of the green chairs, babe
Are we the green chair house now
So that when a friend needed to sell
a set of matching green chairs
there was no other possibility
We are the people who collect green chairs
and so it must always be
The two of them and their neighbors
and all of their closest friends
now see green chairs everywhere in the world
A phone chimes and on the screen
is a spotlit victorian chaise in a history museum
a storybook illustration
Someone is watching a film on a first date
and behold, a hanging lime of a chair
they gasp and chuckle, raising eyebrows
Explanations are made later
I have these friends—
Hold on, I’ll show you
That’s how things start
That’s how things catch
What Survives
What survives?
Stinging nettle plains stretching treacherous
across the suffocated asphalt
Blackberry brambles to catch what moves
and feed it; bleed it
Algae corrugating the silver and gold;
unblueing the water; crowding the beach
sprawling soft fungus like pools of vomit
where floodwaters gobbled up farms
and spat them out
At least, that’s what I hope.
English ivy will be there, if we’re lucky;
Spanish moss;
Scotch broom;
Canada thistle
The future will have some color at least
(Not so bleak as the movies, yet more so.)
Something will gasp and creak
beyond our mouths and ears
It will crack like a seed at our reckoning
and send its tendrils helixing
around everything we’ve built
dragging down our behemoths and
finding shelter under our ruin
With luck, our taxes and overpasses
Will protect a noxious weed
a skittering roach
or that bristling horsetail
through inferno or through flood
til the next age
What survives?
A little thread between, oh please
just a little, ferocious life.
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