The Blue Child
Cure for the Small Things
Moving the Mountains Around
Poem for the Administration


The Blue Child

The blue child is only sleeping.

They say this about the blue child
no matter what we ask.

I couldn't see
so I climbed upon my father.

We heard about a plane crash there once,
we said.

They said the blue child is sleeping.

Fathers come and go
like hiccoughs. They say not to worry about it
as it's a form of beauty
that the blue child is only sleeping.

Like subdivisions and soap bubbles
fathers come and go. I've seen the blue child many times
in thicker and thicker waves,
coming and going.

They say the blue child is only sleeping.



Cure for the Small Things

One must defeat many things. The weather
over the playscape. The jackets that were just here
a minute ago.

Running around saying save me
or chase me, in the short afternoons of sun
in late October. Can we go?

You promised. You can always count the leaves
you've raked up. You can jump
and they explode

just like this. It's tricky, counting back
from ten. Counting up to four
and then singing.

A fair number of jackets
scattered around. One bench. Two benches.

A pretty, young woman
pushes a merry-go-round.

It's better when it goes faster. It's better all the time
and every time you promised.

Come in now. The metal
is cold to the touch.

Later, we'll dress as monsters
and do monstrous things.


Moving the Mountains Around

And there's this narrator who seems pleasant enough,
one you wouldn't mind spending the afternoon with,
even if you can't quite figure out the terms
or the importance of our awareness,
as they're still mountains after all, recognizably so,
and this little lake is still the lake
where you can imagine a trip on a boat
which is the same backward and forward. It's a movie
of your life, so there's no cause for alarm,
you know most of it already, and it's mostly featureless
and in an easy key.

The voice sounds so much like yours, I think,
standing up here looking out at you,
that I have no problem speaking it, and no problem
ignoring what I was going to say before,
because there's always a voice later
that we dream up
and every night another moon back there
behind another house
that burns from the ashes of this one, the windows open,
and figures getting off of busses
and streaming by, some of them gesturing wildly,
motioning to the woods beyond.

It all changes so quickly, and then, looking back,
we wonder how we could have missed the signs they were carrying
that read things like DANGER and
THINGS ARE ABOUT TO REALLY CHANGE,
interestingly enough, and all the useless bromides,
all the bellicose hours with autumn upon us
and our winter skin, with the things we imagined were happening,
scented with lilac
and crosshatched in the clouds.


Poem for the Administration

I write because I want to live forever.
— Reginald Shepherd


One calls to say
another is in hospice now. That everything is only something
"in relation to."

But you have other things to worry about now,
as I sit here making things up, how the dead
become these things one makes up. I have places
to be. Chessboard tables. Chessboard
delinquency. I can move the figures around.
I can name you or rename you all day.
Say something that you liked, or decide
what you liked. Someone singing out in a field. Wind.

We live in neat houses, where the doctors of the future
are not counting you among us. What was it anyway?
They always wrote imprecise prescriptions,
and saw the same otherness,
the same upside-down sunrise. They ordered out lunch
and ate from each other's plates.

One calls and there are so many problems
posed by going. All the king's puzzle pieces
posed as reply. A house full of telephones.

One evening you awaken
in an emergency room, and that play you saw
where they sang in the emergency room
is yours.

"Emergent" you said, as there was a crowd
of adjustments to make. You must remember
to ask someone to feed the cat.

You must remember there are statues all around the park
to stand around. It's all very accommodating for a while
to talk about, as it clarifies
by reducing the trees
casting once again their crisp shadows along the hill.