Poetry

Like the way religion gets in the way
of the spiritual, and the habit
of honesty gets in the way of truth,
I have gotten in the way of myself.

A living fossil, the delicate

ginkgo is all that remains

of an order died off. Revered

as sacred, temple tree of China ,

I have mis-carried three babies in a field of wheat,
laboring hope from my hollowed self: coleoptiles,
those budding leaves and lives in protective sheathes.

I don’t know what to buy my grandmother.
At eighty-three, she surrounds herself
with trinkets she can no longer see

I worshipped them,
my new deities;
Mr. Jack Daniels,
Uncle Smirnoff,
made an altar
with empty shot glasses

The projector’s charm is Cary Grant’s
tan. Although James says Hitchcock
was a little weird with colors.
Grant wears an antiseptic suit
in cobalt (weird) that shouts:
This is the fifties, we are mannered,
my waist is trim and strong

I ripped the carpet off my stairs
so now I’m halfway up and halfway
down, extracting staples from scarred
slabs of pumpkin pine. Destruction
beats creation in a footrace every day