BECAUSE SHE WANTED
Because he wrote bad poetry, she loved him.
Because he sometimes laughed, she loved him.
Because he was imperfect in a perfect kind of way,
She loved him.
In the lacking of addition, she added.
Everything a silence and a motion,
A leaning into and a bending away,
A because she would always love him,
And she did.
Material
The flannel in life the fabric of love,
Warm as sunshade across lighted lakes,
A halo around stardust, a soul around souls.
There is pleasure in a ripened peach,
The scent of a flowering prairie,
The coolness creating angels in the snow.
The fabric of love the flannel in life,
A happiness beyond seashells,
Beyond beaches, beyond a kiss.
MOLECULES AND THE SHAPE OF THINGS
My father was a short man,
five five, five six, five seven
thick with a heavy gray weight,
context, cocoa and nonconformity,
Every substance a different weight.
Every step another substance.
RHYMES
Some inspire to beauty, poetic rhyme;
others, decay and odor.
Wonder comes with word and action,
depression and destruction:
the path of broken skylines.
JACK FROST SLEEPS WITH GOLDILOCKS
Cold sleeps in the room with Beauty
rearranging itself into frost giants and lumberjacks.
Snow White is still in development,
and Loki—well, he’s already a myth.
This I know: Beauty sleeps under twenty blankets
and always feels the pinch of the pea; grows her hair
long enough to cut, and cuts it; carries fresh meat pies
through the forest to lure wolves to their death
and skins them; and when she falls asleep in her brass bed,
the cold remains, unremitting, like a poisoned apple,
like a hundred year sleep, like a broken glass slipper
Humpty Dumptied into so many pieces
no prince in love can glue it back together again.
