Walking Home

At intersections
people gather
to await the light
The pauses
are ours
and each signal
releases us
in choreography
like tides
the flow of bodies
like tides
if we could set them
to obey moons
of our own
invention.

Starting Fires

Recently, I heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak on the Bush Administration’s “cooperative” relationship with American corporations and their lobbyists. Corporations, Kennedy argues, are busy sidestepping and ignoring legislation aimed at reducing pollution and are important participants in efforts to dismantle environmental protection. A book by Kennedy with the inflammatory [...]

Haiku Sonnet 6: Channels

Clouds cover the sun,
and you’re chilled again. “Let’s go,”
you say. I follow.
We are animals
after all—uncomfortable
with the dangers of
solitude. Thinking
of our children sleeping at home,
worry flares as if
you’d turned the channel
to static, the dead broadcast
of chaos. Without each
other, the world is too cold
for imagination.
This sonnet is the sixth in a Fall Crown on [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Mislaid

A piano plays
next door, and for a moment
something intoned to
penetrate changes
what you know—sleep leaves its bed,
the shadows of dawn
thicken.  Day forgets
its walk to the horizon.
These notes follow an
alien logic
and can’t find their way back.  You
don’t have to leave now—
stand at the window to watch
the neighborhood unmade.

Laughing Gas

I heard once that levels of nitrous oxide—N2O—are rising nearly one hundred fold in the Arabian Sea. Before that instant, I thought of N2O as laughing gas, the stuff dentists use to anaesthetize patients. I didn’t know nitrous oxide existed in nature, and I soon discovered it doesn’t much. [...]

My Martian Postcard

Sometimes you wonder what aliens would make of this planet.
Take water parks.
Extraordinary resources and labor go into constructing all those slides and wave pools, all those water cannons and bubblers and fake rocks and waterfalls and cartoonish fiberglass statues. The marketplace requires a new, more imaginative feature every other [...]

Confessions of a Novelty Addict

One sleepy morning a couple of years ago, my son stood at the open refrigerator door, sighed, and said, “I have eaten all the breakfast foods.”
Of course he hadn’t. Never had he eaten baked beans or kippers or eggs flavored with shrimp shells or other morning food people eat elsewhere. But [...]