above the tree line

Plants here have roots as deep as I am tall
with less than a pinkie’s length of shrubby leaves
and tiny flowers to show for it.

And you’d think it would be snow
that keeps you away in winter –
but really it’s the wind.
Even gentle snowflakes scour the ground bare.

The snow that stays here remembers a time
before men first filled the air with coal dust, and
oh, it could tell you stories –
but it guards its silence in curved shadows,
sullen and unmelting.

Even in spring the colors breathe autumn.
Orange lichens and fast-moving shadows
brush their fingers over land you would swear,
from post cards,
was soft as velveteen.

Here the spirit yearns to rush over the exposed rocks
with their round rainwater mirrors,
longs to glide down the soft-edged hills
toward the jagged peaks far below.

But you can’t run ten yards without gasping.

The air conceals its thinness with a mendacious clarity.
The doors of distance are unlocked, every direction thrown wide open.

Everything is sharp as crystal here, everything is clear as glass –
here it’s all as unreachable as a reflection.

... break your mother's back

when I was an angry little girl
filled with the pressing, helpless rage particular to children
I would look for fissures in the sidewalk to step on
and stamp my small foot hard
secure, even at that age, in the falseness of the superstition

but this morning my mother, shrunk now to human size
lay down on the surgeon's table to bare her spine to the knife.

cutting first from the back and then from the front
for nine hours the doctors fought
to put what was wrong right again

in a far off city, I went to work as usual
almost as old now as she was then
but filled once more with the same orphaned powerlessness

all the way from 15th Street to 54th and back
I did not step on a single crack.

bubble

When dreams have shattered or illusions have been broken,
we say the bubble has popped.

But watch one do it in slow motion:
first it bends to accept the pinpoint thrust,
then unpeels from that spot like an opening eyelid.

A herd of droplets gallop away along the retreating edge
like a wave cresting in reverse.

The beauty of a bubble is not
its symmetrical balance of complementary and opposing forces.
It's this inevitable moment.

When a bubble bursts I don't see abandoned hope.
I see a prisoner set free at last; a captive breath
released into the waiting arms of the open air.

Fate

If I were sinking to the bottom
I would be a flat stone, like for skipping.
I would tip from side to side in invisible currents
wobbling my way down to the silt.

Even in this extremity
even in the face of the absolute final outcome
I would be ambivalent.

“Shall I strike with this side or with that
before coming to my predetermined rest
in a puff of sand?”

In my petrified mind this would matter
intensely.

I would tilt back and forth, wildly indecisive
knowing all along that the angle of my future repose
was already determined by the slant of the sand.

We can’t choose our fate –
only the manner of our going to it.
Do we struggle and equivocate
or seek the swiftest, surest path to the end?

a poem for the new president

Not Atlas

Don't ask him to be the suffering giant,
bearing the weight of the world on his back.
Don't ask him to support us, carry us,
be our cradle and anchor, the seat of the earth.

He is not Atlas: don't ask him to hold up the sky.

It's easy to mistake the man for the future he points to,
but he isn't the Titan. He is only

an atlas, a book of maps,
showing us as best he can where we are,
the geography of where we must go.