The Muse as Dreamer

All of this is a continuation of the lie, but if I am consistent in it, approximates the truth in its effect.

—Franz Kafka, diary entry, May 11, 1916

Here’s a dream from high school: knowing beyond doubt my strategy for running cross country races was all wrong, I hit upon [...]

At the Museum

 
The exhibit before the exhibits
looks like a bowl but is a funnel—
Drop a penny into a track along the rim,
the coin rolls in, circles the bowl,
and, like a roller derby star, skates
around the wall and sometimes—maybe
it’s my imagination—parades higher
before its circles shrink,
the penny rattles its last circuits,
and a black hole swallows Lincoln up.
I’ve been trained [...]

The Invisible Landscape

It being spring in Chicago—and not snowing, raining, gale-ing, freezing or otherwise being crappy—everyone is out.
Like the ants who kept their annual date in my former suburban kitchen, pedestrians have returned, suddenly visible after a long absence. Some carry coats and umbrellas in anticipation of a sudden downturn, but they’ve ventured out. [...]

Haiku Sonnet: When Ventriloquists Visit the Convention Center

In a dead-end hall
a small knot of adherents
bunches, speaking from
under turtlenecks,
into cuffs, or behind big
signs. Dummies guide them—
they slurp water, and
fountains spout between grins. Not
a word is clear. Don’t
try joining them. You
can’t pry secrets from truth
or transparency.
They’ll speak in that tongue until
silence becomes them.

Famous on Radio

A friend once asked me whether I’d ever want to be famous, and I answered as most people would, “Famous for what?”
Famous for being famous, like Nicole Ritchie? No, decidedly no.
Famous for doing something important, like discovering a clean and renewable energy source to power automobiles? Maybe, but I wouldn’t want the [...]

Haiku Sonnet: A Chicago Parrot

A green feather drops
onto a gardener’s spade
from a boy’s window.
The bird who lost it
cries its color—a new leaf
of the banana.
The boy loves the bird,
but imagines rainbows of
feathers beneath wings—
an accordion
of fruited notes when the wind
ruffles the jungle,
goads the bird to fly, and
tugs a feather loose.

Gliese 581c and Odysseus

I felt odd hope when I learned yesterday that Swiss astronomers believe a planet outside our solar system might be ripe for life.
Growing up, I drew controls on the undersides of every table in the house. My G. I. Joe wore fatigues I’d painted silver, and he orbited the living room [...]

The Translation

Ramiro Cantu’s grandfather knew
exactly where they landed
on the moon, what field
in Arizona,
what highway
where sky is black, and white
glares back midday sun.
Ramiro translated: over-
inflated suits,
strings unseen, bounced voices
pressed through filters
to seem
high falootin’.  All
to impress Reds.  Us,
they could fool
as long as we
believed
and never looked.
In the burnt-oil
clad kitchen,
by a power plant’s
buzzing fence,
the old man’s tongue—
offered over
and over—
hypnotized me
like [...]

Purgatory Mates

Many years ago, at lunchtime, in a workplace I’ve long since left, a colleague proposed we play “Purgatory Mates.”
All year his efforts to avoid “work talk” led me through thought games—”Celebrity Death Watch,” where each of us tried to come up with a celebrity the other would think must be dead and wasn’t (think [...]

Haiku Sonnet: The Old Couple

I started to say
he sees her wholly, the way,
in orbit, mountains
river, the way land,
borderless and uncut, seems
shaped to please the eye.
But truth is always
different—here on earth we can’t
see how beaches shift.
The white sand borne and
abandoned by wind lays down
today’s new profile.
And they’ve read change past tense—they
love what has become.