Nine poems from “Archipelago IV”: A Gathering of 18 Meditations

Self-Defense

I bought a knife to have a knife. People
kept telling me
you must always have a knife.

They said: you can get one with a handle

carved with rubies
or the rarest pearls—your choice.

Understory

All day I have been thinking of a tree
that yesterday
on a bank by the river

held one of its own branches in its arms.

Like a mother
I write—and then erase it.

Meditation

Sixteen sugar packets. Yes, I counted.
I am alone
only one lifetime each day.

Yesterday was three earth-bruised tomatoes

the day before
twenty-seven cubes of ice.

Pause

You could be a Buddhist on a stalled train
surrounded by
stench and impatience, air close

as the last mouth you kissed, which was nowhere

near a subway
which was not, in fact, a mouth.

Harvest

Today I have not eaten. Tomorrow
I will visit
a friend’s for dinner. Shall I

bring something? The meal, he says. And a box

or two of blue
ever-bearing hydrangeas.

Leaf

Something in you pushes past the others
crowded in this
shrub (like a boy taking leave

of a schoolyard of boys for some unknown

elsewhere) to be
studied—and possibly torn.

Kinsale

And so you shall remain my might-have-been:
an if-only:
closed door in a hall of doors

mostly closed:     story hinted in the shroud

Penelope
wove each day to unravel…

Miracle

Not the vagrant limping into traffic 
dodging every
honk and swerve, but the woman

who watches, bites her bottom lip and waits

then draws him up
from the curb when he gets there.

Sadist Says

Have you heard about the itinerant
masochist? He
was into vagabondage.

Once, wandering through the desert, he saw

an oasis
and hoped it was a mirage.  

Three Pebbles

Side-by-side an old gypsy places them
on her table
before me: “The black one helps

to remember. The white one to forget.

This gray one is
useless. Carry it always.”

[All excerpts were previous published in Mediation Archipelago, Tiger Bark Press, 2018.]