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These poems were written before the current headlines that involve so much
sickness and hate and death, yet those evils seem to be always with us somehow,
to some extent. The poems now seem to me to express a longing for a democratic
world, one where no one is expected to sacrifice their individuality, yet
people see how we are all connected and related. What we do to, or for, others
and the natural world comes back to us.
I resist categories
so when asked
to check a box
and thus identify
myself
I draw beside
the line that says
this space left
intentionally blank
a circle or
triangle
or when ambitious
an irregular
trapezoid
of which Picasso
might have been
proud
and I mark that
because if I must
be
reduced to geometry
I will at least
determine
my own dimensions
Food is democracy:
everybody eats.
Round people eat.
Anorexics eat.
People on diets
eat. Construction
workers eat. Dogs
eat. Cats eat.
Politicians eat.
English teachers
eat. Readers eat.
Poets eat. Men eat.
Women eat. Persons
who reject
gender
classifications
eat. Babies
eat. Novelists eat.
Children eat.
Older people eat.
Goldfish eat.
Microbes eat. The
dead eat
even if no one
any longer sets for
them a place.
There's something
in the woods
the same thing that
hides
in the closet
under the bed
in shadows behind
old houses
among weeds and
empty bottles
in abandoned city
lots
The thing that will
not tell
its name
hides on the edge
of the mind
just behind the
memory
of late October
on the smell of
burning leaves
ashes in cold
fireplaces
dead yellow flowers
just before summer
begins its reign of
terror
It feeds on
forgetfulness
and grows
by what falls
from the turning
grindstone of time
