Go Giants: Poems

unison is

queried repeatedly with descant:

Home is only one depiction of reality

and there are others, yes, but this is mine.

swirling vast accreting gas giants,

all that spinning immaterial matter

like whether i

conjecture I don’t think I’m exactly lost

but I couldn’t, at this juncture, point due north,

or tell you if the ground below the paving

underneath my dealer boots is clay or sand

He had to act fast and thought it out that night:

the shopping list, extant, reads: sheet glass,

an organ pipe, slippers for the boy, chickpeas,

slept with an unsheathed sword by his side

and drank too much, and remembered, and attended

to matters with great pride and a little shame,

drafting letters home, complaining and battling with

get all of their retaliation in first.)

If you’re interested, a neat routine

for experiencing a fair selection

of the atoms of the known universe

is just to breathe in, and wait a bit,

and then breathe out, and as I do this,

I’m listening to Miserere mei, Deus

on repeat, and sitting back in bed

in Rome, in my fourth-floor walk-up

five minutes’ stroll from that unlighted

and very cool interior with a Caravaggio,

above the basement room they brought Galileo to

if you felt nothing more walking down

cannot alight on it, can’t print an image

on the retina but is repeatedly flung

off and forced by motion into motion.

The stars are hard and deaf and cold;

the river unconcerned about our presence