Day Poems

Leaving Hoosierland

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A moving walkway is coming to an end, begin
here where passing through
is an industry. Will I speak
to strangers, you ask no one. I will
not use horizontal escalators
to get what I want, you state

plainly—rural routes
delineate a grid
unlike any you know now.
You remember how you did the leaving,
a wave from the way back window in the red
Chrysler wood-paneled station wagon

as your mother pumped the gas pedal hard
and away. East to Ohio was never enough. Farther still,

New Jersey, New York, Connecticut,
a town in Southern Portugal. An absence
for something, did you ever know, you ask. Some day you will
believe in the pedal steel
player’s sticker on an instrument he plays
that night in Indianapolis:

“Non-judgment day is near.”

Metamorphosis in Two Spheres

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A dime in the street
becomes two touching
a flatness tires can’t roll
away. Infinity sleeps outside 

before summer solstice
in the rain. With morning, it rises 

to become a figure eight
on air—hold the ice.
Keep going, dare
ascendance and serifs. By midday, 

it just might become
this ampersand above
tree canopies flirting
with young gulls and moths.

Heights (Day 2,304)

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 And I know I will 

die. It could be now. How
will I lift this foot?
And I don’t, and I do. 

Stairs to an elevated pedestrian
bridge over nine lanes
of highway. The linking flight 

between two floors
within an office, a red
ladder against that brick 

wall.  A green one
in a park that’s crumbling
faster than I can reach 

the landing—any one over
water or a creek’s dry
well. I’ll never be 

a man on a wire,
a woman ready
to run for help 

when he falls.
It’s a healthy one—this fear.

Washington Avenue South

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Before the street made sense, became a boulevard
with flower beds and urban strength
trees, she entered 

the roadhouse to seep
into wood. To be
the end. It is 

gone. She is
not. Up the long block—a lengthening
stretch of cars, do not 

honk, go fast, poets cling
to their voices under beams
compressing breath and scars.

Mount

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Glass poems collect
dust in a case
that used to hold
taxidermy fodder. 

It could be her head
(not the stuffed bird’s) this time
that flies off—this night
could be the one 

she witnesses outside first
before locking herself back in.

Green Fuse

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You buy a plant  you cannot
name, you name a flower
you have not seen. A crimson whim
drives the force 

to tether your ignorance upon your palms,
deep into your nails. 

Press the leaves that fall from portage
into the book you call your current read.
Close the book
that gives you nothing now, 

offers more pressure than impression
in its present function at hand.

A private garden in Georgia
with all of its growth labeled just for you,
is the out-of-town passerby’s exaltation
the way a public arboretum exists to preserve,

educate, enhance,
sector unbiased. You may believe 

because the park where you seek shelter
is a mountain of sod,
waiting for a landscape architect’s next set of drawings,
a city’s next referendum. A place 

you sought for safe haven,
is a scam, a sign, a curse. But you are still the one 

who does not know the name
of the plant hanging ruby rich
above your porch rail,
still the one who could knock her fists against a board, 

an inner ear to loosen a level plane,
a balance beam,
still the one from the clutches
of teeter-totter time ago.

Shape of Angels

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If convening for each age
and never laying down to die,
if merely slipping into new clothes
and never changing what they cloak,
this famous convention would have stormed
the Take No Heroes Hotel, 

would be resting in its suites by now. No,
there are nights
when the fullest moon will not offer
even the dimmest halo,
when the double-jointed,
alone crowd the light. 

And with the sky so near,
your ear pressed to the wall,
you will hear the din—
a convention of devilish nymphs scratch high
in the mountains. Never-extinct, they
crunch other suns between their teeth.

EGO (Day 2,272)

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“How describe the world seen without a self?”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves 

Enter this garden
of obsession. Edge growth
out to fill beds 

with worry
stones. Ease your way
from grimaces to oval 

reflection pools. Exit
through this iron gate
to a new order where 

you might begin to see how
there could be a world 

without the self.