Two poems

Relevant to the Day

    for Mr Daliri

 

After lunch, I decide I have no brothers and sisters, I am

Alone. My love is in another room.

She doesn’t know of this severance, how far I drifted

 

In the space of morning. Language no longer speaks to me.

Though I see its many bodies, I cannot be

Reached. When I return, I shudder in this God-given air

 

Praise what remains. Outside, a man has built a kookaburra

Fifteen feet tall, and put a laugh inside

Big enough for the world. I watch as the icon meets its makers

 

And they join in laughing. You can inject this moment

With whatever amount of joy

Or poison you desire. I like to think the birds are not

 

Questioning if family is real, or joking about size—instead

They make a cacophony of kinship.

In the last human hour, I start to build a poem as large and

 

Weird as love. It cannot save us and still I am rushing

To usher every spirit to live within

To join in, to laugh, sweetly, at all that has transpired.

 

To Be Loved Like This

 

I loathe being outside when it rains.

Much like family, I can’t see the beauty

when I am included. I love the subtle

distortion of water on windows, how glass

protects, separates, magnifies. It allows us

to hear the slop and splash on slopes

without rushing to be free of it, the slow

hard clasp of thirst. It reveals

the illusion of transparency. O shallow

curtain, I kiss it, mist it, get real

close to the muted crackle of droplets

meeting the world. Fields of popcorn.

What delicious entertainment, God is

saying, I am watching, I am falling,

I am touching every inch of this earth.