I'm Alone and You're a Bottle

In you, empty blue bottle on the windowsill,
people walk on a paved sky,
turn a swimming, sun-stroked periwinkle.
Birds fly backwards and upside-down,
traffic is truncated, tiny, curving into nothingness.

Sunlight filters through, and you,
open-mouthed and tinted blue, are learning
the world's so silly,
and nothing sticks around long enough.

I know, I've been at the window too,
standing there all blue, watching
the world come and go,
unable to hold on to any of it.

previously appeared in Barrow Street, Winter 2001

Midlife Crisis

Living alone in a neighborhood of strangers,
I know the name of the little girl next door
from pastel drawings on the sidewalk.
Two men live across the street—friends, brothers, lovers—
they have never said; I have never asked.

But I know far off in the Australian outback
lies the largest single piece of stone in the world.
Surrounded by hundreds of miles
of dry, rippled sand, it sits alone,
a red, craggy sprawl five miles around.
Though called the red heart of the country, it doesn’t respond
to precarious shifting underground,
doesn’t bleed molten orange,
no one has tried to make anything out of it.
Empty space surrounds all sides.

And I sit in my small house, wondering
how stable is it?.

previously appeared in Barrow Street, Winter 2001