two poems
Results of a Private Investigation One Winter’s Bivouac I understand what God is trying to tell me about rainbows. We can only glimpse them in the swarms of fiberglass swirling overhead, greedily inhaled by Paul Bunyan in the harsh winds high above the pines, though once they hung together in harmony on the backs of compact discs. I understand the scientist as well, the purpose of anemic sunflower isotopes hidden in other gusts of wind, and the miraculous healing role they play in their chemical dance with the fiberglass among the regenerative fingerfields of Paul’s gut biome. Please don’t laugh at me. When I was a boy, I loved Paul Bunyan, and now it seems I’m the only one who cares what’s happened to him. He just stomps around thrashing through the forest inhaling all that wind, belching it all new back into the air. His big blue ox is gone and he has nothing left to care for. I understand it all too well, and it’s why I retreat into my tent to finger the little cardboard hearts I have kept secret from everyone, moist from my tears beneath the light of a butterfly lamp. Seals as Lovers I was leaving town for good once when my love was a bewildered woman in a black and white film from the 40s and I was a seal on an errant floe of ice squinting out toward the horizon, trying to parse out the light from the fog over sea. Another time, I made a coloring book and kept the seal a gift for someone special I never found. I’ve seen them smothered also beneath a floundering whale, a few sent back through holes on the pond meant for ice fishing. Those were the lucky ones, survivors of a violence that needed some done away with, and others submerged. I wish that I could see one sweetly squealing operatic majesty in a rejoice of flung opals. I’m simply captive to what the dream delivers: Rich Uncle Pennybags draws all the crew on deck with his seal’s cheap tricks and a massive fire that sinks the ship.