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squabble, snakes’ squiggle, abundance, and trouble?
How to plug up the gold mines and pin down the fox,
how to cope with the lynx, bobolinks, streptococs!
Take dioxide: a lightweight, but mighty in deeds;
what about octopodes, what about centipedes?
I could look into prices, but don’t have the nerve:
these are products I just can’t afford, don’t deserve.
Isn’t sunset a little too much for two eyes
that, who knows, may not open to see the sun rise?
I am just passing through, it’s a five-minute stop.
I won’t catch what is distant; what’s too close, I’ll mix up.
While trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is,
I’m bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies.
What a loss when you think how much effort was spent
perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent
for the one-time appearance, which is all they’re allowed,
so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.

Interview with a Child
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The Master hasn’t been among us long.
That’s why he lies in wait in every corner.
Covers his eyes and peeks through the cracks.
Faces the wall, then suddenly turns around.
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The Master rejects outright the ridiculous thought
that a table out of sight goes on being a table nonstop,
that a chair behind our backs stays stuck in chairlike bounds
and doesn’t even try to fly the coop.
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True, it’s hard to catch the world being different.
The apple tree slips back under the window before you can blink.
Incandescent sparrows always grow dim just in time.
Little pitchers have big ears and pick up every sound.
The nighttime closet acts as dull as its daytime twin.
The drawer does its best to assure the Master
it holds only what it’s been given.
And no matter how fast you open the Brothers Grimm,
the princess always manages to take her seat again.
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“They sense I’m a stranger here,” the Master sighs,
“they won’t let a new kid play their private games.”
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Since how can it be that whatever exists
can only exist in one way,
an awful situation, for there’s no escaping yourself,
no pause, no transformation? In a humble from-here-to-here?
A fly caught in a fly? A mouse trapped in a mouse?
A dog never let off its latent chain?
A fire that can’t come up with anything better
than burning the Master’s trustful finger one more time?
Is this the definitive, actual world:
scattered wealth that can’t be gathered,
useless luxury, forbidden options?
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“No,” the Master cries, and stomps all the feet
he can muster—for such great despair
that beetle’s six legs wouldn’t be enough.

Allegro ma Non Troppo
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Life, you’re beautiful (I say),
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaley,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.
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I’m trying to court life’s favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I’m always the first to bow,
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always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.
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Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren’t conceived myself!
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Life (I say), I’ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone’s clone.
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I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order—gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.
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I just don’t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I’ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.
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I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

Autotomy
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In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
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It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward,