DIFFERENT STATES

1.
A widow was proclaimed legally sane yesterday, when
there was no sky, no sun, no moon. Only smoke.
Also on that day her home could not, despite
all its efforts and with every drawer open,
show her proof she was ever born.

2.
A chair, yellow and faded, ancestral, holds space
for heartbreak, collapse, recovery—all the cycles
of life—making the present nostalgic and
nostalgia the here and now. Tomorrow, this seat
will move from one home to another and continue
to be for its owner what it has always been.
A shelter. A sanctuary.

3.
A walk along the bay. If you look, you’ll see it.
Something’s in the water. An otter, a seal, a rock.
It’s there, then gone. Did it go under?
Did the sea rise? There is always
the surface and what’s underneath.

4.
A friend in the desert, bundled, trudging
through snow made of lightning and thunder,
readies his artist studio—a prefab trailer—for winter,
as he hears that his new home, just a few states away,
in a place called Talent, almost burned. Was spared.
And somewhere between where he is and isn't,
between fire and ice, is Love, safe, newly forged,
where he also resides, belongs.

5.
"You hit bottom," I read somewhere, "when
you stop digging." For me, I must let go entirely
of the concept of shovel, of grasping and pushing.
Only then will Ox, an ancient power, shoulder
my burden, and carry me and my thinking—

the greatest weight of all—home.