To what do you celebrate
in this swimmable pliant dark?
Will it be the the lip of sun
through cloudcover,
or the monolith in the desert
unbroken by a millenia of hard weather?
In line at the buffet
I spoke to a bald man in front of me
how much I wanted dessert.
He said nothing.
Not celebrate the key lime pie?
In this country we celebrate it all
including the mud coursing down
the hillside and the invisible shadows
gathering in that still swimmable dark.
The truest question of all becomes:
to what do you bend towards?
We can't all be dandelions
preening obnoxious through
patches of green green grass
and we can't all be stones
blown off the cliffside,
free and plummeting.
On the dancefloor I tried to imitate--
and we all know what it looks like
when a man without rhythm tries to imitate
the woman
graciously bestowing footfalls on hardwood--
the stop-the-show woman.
Me stubby and trip-toed
I could not celebrate
my movement to that song.
Only her.
No advice needed after all that.
No transcendent signs
good enough for this god
to dig us from this kind of hole.
So it's to be a celebration of closeness.
At least we've got that--
being this close
some kind of good in the dark.