Yellow Adirondack Chair:

The halyards throttle
like a plucked harpsichord,
against the safe chest

of their mast.
Sable and milk-white
in lap dance on the shore.

And they keep at it too,
even after the wind has
stopped fueling the current

and the tree leaves cease
their autumn downpour,
the two roll through each other

like tongue & teeth.
Inside the house,
a baby is bowing

in and out of his mother's bosom,
alternating with religious precision,
between her two pink

and swollen nipples.
When the mother leaves,
the baby will sit

on the living room floor
and suckle the air for hours:
he'll learn to love this movement,

breathing.
The water that the fisherman
leave back from their morning trips,

the grasses cast their lines out
and take.
They remain for a while,

rods chapping from green to rust
in the numbing air.
People call this wilting

and raze clean entire fields
of busy fishing.
Soon, the baby learns to stand.

He walks to the rhythm
of the halyard and mast,
now tangled with each other.

He tastes salt in the air
for the first time.



In Air:

I remember how easy it is
to be swiped from the world
like an ant from a page.
Traversing the third line--
flowers are blooming everywhere--
and then falling,
like the wings of a bird in glide,
I remember
how inappropriate it can be.
But I never quite knew
what went through the ant's mind
as it was catapulting into the
frantic whiskers of grass
and I don't quite know what
will go through mine
when I'm resting in a chair
one day
and my book flips facedown
a page before the end.