Two Poems

BLUE HAZE, GOODNIGHT MOON

Black smoke courses along the blank hills,
There is a crack that runs the length of it.

Shouts in far-off dusk, I park. The engine ticks.
First night heat, late September. Soon the leaves

Will collapse their canopies, like so many umbrellas.
Then the summer of fire will no longer

Burn my lungs or clot my eyes, those plumes
Stretching from the west

Like vents from some volcano.
Upstairs, the kids are asleep, white noise

The shape of a running fan, night light burning
Their room gold from within,

A glistening cocoon.
Ten o’clock. I tip-toe in, listen to their sleep,

Gaze at their shadow features.
It’s like drinking cold water from a well.

# # #

ODE TO THE PACIFIERS

Let those scorn you who never
Starved in your dearth
—Robert Pinsky

Comfort elixir, sleep-dozer, quiet-plug,
O how you have saved me,
O how you have buttoned and plugged

those grumpy weary O mouths,
O how you have waved sadnesses
away and made darkness a time for dreams.

Mam, Nuk, The First Years—3317,
molded in Austria, Germany, Taiwan, Phillipines,
you are the juicy bait from which I catch

my babyfishes, pull them out of their ocean
of cry and fuss, gently drop them
into the hold in the hull of our house,

where they drift, the new cells
which I have half-made.
Your swallow-guard, hip cradles

under nose, your end a knob
that turns off the volume,
sometimes with a handle

like a purse-strap, your business end
a tan flexible light bulb, fake nipple,
idea bubble, bald man’s mini-head, dirigible,

future tooth crookener—they sometimes say,
but really? I do love you so,
I have worshipped you, genuflected to you

even though you weave dust and fibers
and momma-hair around
your saliva-slick end,

even though you always disappear,
falling and scattering like a mouse
under counters, car tires, beds,

into heating vents, garbage disposals,
et cetera, et cetera.
Though I have never French-kissed

you clean, I will never accuse you
of badness. But I do
worry, some nights when I can’t sleep,

nights they are with you: who will someday
coddle them, what will they suckle
if they end up on dark streets

with cruisers, sharks, and other bad
men, my girls gazing into locked storefronts,
their shoelaces untied,

fingernails dirt-enameled and uncut, their bodies—
skin and bone that I have so
carefully wrought—grimy and cold?

michael@lighthousewriters.org
2123 Downing Street, Denver, CO 80205