a nod and a smile
devise and construct, to wit:
number and a name.

Some days it really does pay.


Apacatastasis

On the corner of 4th and Pike,
the man in green silk suit swings
into his litany again.
"The air is moving as if alive,
the air is moving as if alive,"
he sings, swaying slightly, his weeping
eyes fixed so that our legs pass through
the narrow shafts connecting him
to whatever world he sees.
"The air is moving
as if alive," he changes cadence,
pleading that we turn from our inconstancy,
that this blindness to essential light
must mean an end
to the casual heaven we suppose
we're dancing in. Of course
we ignore him, jostling to pass
out of range, almost running
as the Israelites ran from Jeremiah's
hysterical announcement: "Behold
I give this city into the hands
of the Chaldeans
and into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar,
King of Babylon, and he shall take it."
He did not say the air was moving,
though it may have been. And the blare
of traffic and bright riches
whirled about him and the sun beat down
like time.

At five o'clock the man in green
boards a bus to White Center
and sits quiet among the workers
going home. When he comes to his four-
room walk-up over the sagging hardware
store, his wife helps him off
with his coat and shoes and hands him lemonade.
All text and utterance then, even the living
air, reclines in the Realms of Rest and he says,
"What a day!
so long and swift with the air's design
I've come back almost before I left
and then
come back again, which goes to prove
that God is not a bus."

And kissing him she says, "Yes, the air is moving,
as all things, back to Him. But you, my perfect
surprise, are already there."
Then they lean into their contentment,
holding hands. Outside, a yellow traffic light
blinks SLOW DOWN above the rubble
choked streets.

-- Christopher Howell

X is to Y as...

This analogy never showed up on my SATs.

"It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife."

-- Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), advocating a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in a speech Thursday to the Heritage Foundation.

from the Washington Post

And to think I'd been a supporter of The Big Gay Agenda. Before John pointed it out, I hadn't realized how similar bestiality and homosexuality really are. For clarification: in such a relationship, who's the turtle?


Hearings

Autumn, and the trees decide again they don't
need leaves.

Mothers add more blankets to the bed.
Yellow lights in windows of the junior high
mean that nightschool is back in session,
tired grownups sitting in the plastic desks
learning to bisect the hypotenuse,
how to say spreadsheet in Japanese.

This week on the televised hearings,
we get to watch our congressmen
nervously pronounce the word homosexual
in public; the committee trying to determine
whether queers are good enough
to pull the triggers
on machines designed to foreclose lives
contrary to the national well-being.

But the Congressman can't
pull the trigger on his own tongue
to fire out the word without
tripping over it, fumbling, stumbling
into the ditch between home and sexual.

You might say his defense industry is troubled,
as if he had a subterranean suspicion
that to say it might mean, just a little, to become it-
which might be right,

since language uses us
the way that birds use sky,
the way that seeds and viruses
knit themselves into a mammal's fur
and hitchhike towards the future.

When you say a word,
you enter its vocabulary,
its got your home address, your phone number, and weight-
it won't forget,

-the way the parents who finally bring themselves to say lesbian
enter, through that checkpoint,
the country where their daughter lives.

Tonight, all over Washington, senators in mirrors
will practice
until they are as fluent saying homosexual
as they already are at saying Mr. President
and first strike option.

Sometimes we think the truth
is the worst thing that could happen
but the truth is not the worst thing that could happen.

Now it is autumn and in stores
the turquoise wading pools
spangled with starfish and shells
are stacked against the wall, on sale,

implying what was costly yesterday
is cheap today, and may be free tomorrow-
All our yearnings and our fears:
so many seahorses,
galloping through bubbles.

-- Tony Hoagland

Anule, formosae digitum vincture puellae,
in quo censendum nil nisi dantis amor,
munus eas gratum! te laeta mente receptum
protinus articulis induat illa suis;
tam bene convenias, quam mecum convenit illi,
et digitum iusto commodus orbe teras!
Felix, a domina tractaberis, anule, nostra;
invideo donis iam miser ipse meis.
o utinam fieri subito mea munera possem
artibus Aeaeae Carpathiive senis!
tunc ego, cum cupiam dominae tetigisse papillas
et laevam tunicis inseruisse manum,
elabar digito quamvis angustus et haerens,
inque sinum mira laxus ab arte cadam.
idem ego, ut arcanas possim signare tabellas,
neve tenax ceram siccaque gemma trahat,
umida formosae tangam prius ora puellae --
tantum ne signem scripta dolenda mihi.
si dabor ut condar loculis, exire negabo,
adstringens digitos orbe minore tuos.
non ego dedecori tibi sum, mea vita, futurus,
quodve tener digitus ferre recuset, onus.
me gere, cum calidis perfundes imbribus artus,
damnaque sub gemmam fer pereuntis aquae --
sed, puto, te nuda mea membra libidine surgent,
et peragam partes anulus ille viri.
Inrita quid voveo? parvum proficiscere munus;
illa datam tecum sentiat esse fidem!

-- Ovid, Amores, Liber II

Our Other Sister
For Ellen

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who'd gone away.
What my motives were I can't recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she'd stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I'd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.

-- Jeffrey Harrison