Ode to Luck

Lacking a proper knife,

Lacking the glass, plastic, or aluminum tools to measure amounts,

Lacking a recipe, or memory thereof,

And having eked out from the grime two vegetables: one onion, one potato, and the wish for a bit
of herb,

There follows the discovery of a young dandelion sprung up clean in the northwest corner of the
prison yard.

The conditions, now miniature, are shoved to the past; in the foreground is luck.

I am given a title: Prison Yard Soup.

Mind, there was no fire. No inconspicuous location. No pot.

It was a task impossible, just as people can be —

When, for instance, they become unchangeably distant and who knows why? —

Yet, on occasion, I can come to this: that she may be armed in some fear unknown and untold;
that he may be.

I can hold that thought long, as one does the gaze of an infant.

The Span of a Driveway

September

Once, the newspaper was delivered
right to the doorstep
and early.

Then, for eighteen months,
it arrived at the end of the driveway
and late,

where it arrives to this day,
but early, so early that its landing,
light as a cardinal’s,

must be the first
in the day to occur at the seam
of our pavement and the grass.

There’s nothing landing now,
nothing sounding out
but my slippered steps at 3 A.M.

I’m startled by Venus,
straight ahead at the end of the driveway,
alone, and bright as a bullet

stuck in a black cloak.
A bit to the south
Orion is fainter, falling over, familiar,

and lately returned.
I pick up the paper, straighten
and turn back,

surprised by a doe, high and near,
winter-coated,
and watching my progress below.

We lock looks.
A little time passes. Maybe seconds.
Maybe minutes.

Two bounds east towards the street, and she
stops, glances back.
She knows everything about me now:

that I plan to leave her there.
I leave her there
on the rise of black lawn with the stars,

known to me by their constellation’s name alone,
and the others,
about which I know less,

and the planet that had to be Venus,
feeling they could go on forever,
that the eternal

clocks us on its watch, mute as that doe,
when, in actuality,
I know better.

Once, I drove cars over sand
piled inside a wooden box
in a back yard

about which I can recall
little else: some sort of hedge,
a split log fence

just beginning to gray.
We don’t have to work to remember, do we,
what stays the same.

But what does? Once,
I faced east and used language like this
to see with:

straight ahead
stuck
falling over

returned
Once, I stood ten paces away,
slippered, outside in the dark

and held for some moments a notion
more primitive, more
preliterate yet:

that my presence had been
privileged
by having been observed.

How long does it take
to cover the span of a driveway?
Long enough, Euphoria,

you poor feeling, for all of your
direct and effortless work
to come undone.

God of Immediacy (a pop-up god)

Elsewhere, in some villages, the first thing encountered in each day is the deity.
It might be a crow, come into notice—revealed—by way of its caw.
It might be an insect, meticulous in its journey up the wall,
its route like a crack in the plaster.

On the next day, naturally, God is something else entirely.

A miller, long ago, looked up from a book, astonished to be reading this.
Imagine: to be awakened each morning by a holy presence
and one morning it’s masked as a fox,

on another the sound of the rain on the thatch.
Or nearer, right there: your beloved’s or your very own snoring.

Or your very own loneliness.

I bought the book about the miller — oh, years ago now —
and, although my curiosity hadn’t flagged, read it only recently.
I can’t say why I came back to it exactly then,
not sooner, not later.

He’d lived in Italy, the miller,
in the sixteenth century, and put himself at risk repeatedly; yes,
he was careless, off-task, often unapologetic in his speaking. Still,

he might have found solace, or company, before he was put to death . . .

he might have read bits of a treatise by Michael Servetus and the words there,
presumably laid down to begin with somewhere in Scripture,
“I am a god at hand, not a god afar off,”

which would have spoken directly to the miller, I should think,
as directly to him as to anyone interested.

Stubborn

The dirt is too miserable now to feed anything else.
It’s midsummer dirt and things have been done to it
that it looks like it thinks it will never forget.
The spinach was yanked from it. Radishes. Cress.
Hard June rains slapped it and smacked it
and channeled through the beds.
Now pea vines rattle in a snarl,
roots atrophied to taut and brittle threads.
When cayenne pepper funneled down the holes,
moles only made their many ways more myriad.
Everyone wants what they want and will not be discouraged.
Everyone wants what they want and worry is the only work.
The carrots have been stripped to sticks. They wobble in their holes.
The meat of the bean has been pocked by beetles.
Okra holds on by the claw.