An Abundance of Caution 

Suddenly the flight attendants were in their parkas. 
They put the accentless pilot on the PA to inform us of the emergency. 
When we landed the ladder trucks were there to greet us.

The fleet of ambulances shuttled back 
to their hangars with silent flashing lights 
that were impossible not to read as disappointed.

I took the airtrain to work in the city and stopped to watch a woman 
pet the plate glass of the flower shop window. The cat behind the glass 
arched against her hand. The boxwood smell was a voice

no one else in the children’s park could hear. I must become comfortable,
I shouted into the telephone, with what I do not understand in order to live. 
Like the wolf tree, I was after a piece of the sky. 

When I was a child I warded off disaster by remembering 
I am not special. Who, I asked myself when the dark quilt 
of prairie erupted with the blue lamps of windows TVs and parking lots,

do you think you are? I dislike my job, I often have nothing to do.
Not even the sweetbitter of envelope gum to keep company with,
not even a transom window. The spell no longer functions, 

the spell functions in reverse. Who do you think you are to be immune? 
Under the condemned bridge they have hung a mesh barrier. 
It protects the river and the men on it from lost hammers or loose stones. 

I said I love you and held both your hands in both my hands while the plane 
descended, rapidly. No one else seemed frightened, they continued 
to watch the news. Remember the gorilla behind her plexiglass at the zoo,

curled on her side, sleeping with her back to us?
Stroking her shoulder with her hand, comforting herself, her fingernails 
so tidy I could imagine her hand was my own. In the office kitchenette 

no one wants to hear  about the emergency landing. The safety mesh 
full of hammers full of stones like a t-shirt hem lifted to carry wild strawberries.
I admit it, I wish to be understood. I spin like the microwave’s grooved glass plate.

I hum, like the microwave’s bright box, the dreaming gorilla, I hum.

Nameless Ridge

I peel my last orange under the sugar 
locusts plush with thorns, press 

to the high-tension line’s false summit. 
Thumb into the fruit’s luxurious clutch 

of bruises. It is easier to walk a mountain with a name,
even a mountain named Nameless. I left a smear 

where I passed. The oft-palmed sapling 
at the switchback’s elbow and the switchback’s nonsense 

script itself, the branch I snapped when I followed
foxfire, mistaking it for my language. 

I am certain flying is as tiring as walking. 
Still, I’m jealous of the songbirds who thread

the buckthorns’ glossy snarl with precise imagination.
Where their bodies begin and end, nothing more. 

I have tired of description, carrying 
both myself and what I observe. The desire 

to describe become the unwanted wedding guest 
in a gaudy dress and the gaudy dress itself, cumbersome 

with riotous light. The berries on their thorny vine, their endless
plucked and gimlet eyes. I stumbled as I climbed

because my self was everywhere on the mountain. 
Like perfume my feelings walked 

ahead of me and behind. With the self and her desires 
came the knowledge of the end of the world 

and the end of beauty as I have known and named it. 
The lake of pines the pruning fingertip 

of the tarn in the coming storm. Because I was there, 
my mind was, I dropped impossibility’s barbed seeds

all over the earth. Oh mama, 
I do not want to live in the sky anymore.