THE GOAT

Back in the day

there was a goat

who ate a few measly

grape leaves in the garden

of the gods, and boy

did those Olympians

make a fuss. So much so,

so the story goes,

that the Greeks had to kill  

the poor goat to make 

Apollo and the gang
quit all their whining.
Sacrifice became the name 
of game everytime 
the gods got offended. 
And, shazam! tragedy 
was born. No, really. 

The word tragedy comes from 

trage, which is Greek for—

yep, you guessed it—goat.

Who knew, right?

Later the Greeks wised up
after they started running low 

on goats: "We gotta find 
a better way to get the gods 
to chill…” And sure enough 
they did. They wrote plays
instead, in which heroes died

tragically but pretend-like.

That’s how they put

an end to all the killing

and scapegoating, as it were.

Boy, we humans sure take

the long way round

when it comes to saying

we’re sorry. No wonder we make

a theater of our lives.

SINKHOLE 

Had I paid attention to

the tilting and slanting,

the dips and depressions,

the buckling and the cracking,

the seepage, the settling, 

the separation—

the early warning signs

that showed up

along the way—

I could have avoided

the calamity.

But I didn’t.

I just kept operating
in autopilot.

No wonder

I’m now sitting

stuck and stalled

in a sinkhole called 
duplicity.

BOTH

They are both there,

Tolstoy and Buson,

in my mind, I mean:

the grand novelist

and the haiku master.

One is feverishly writing

one of his tomes, while the other 

is simultaneously distilling 

the very same story

and its sprawling dimensions

into Essence— wringing 

a drop of water 

from a raging 
deluge.

THE AUTHOR

We were going to

talk by phone

but she had to

finish her nails

first. So I waited,

patiently. I measured 

time in my mind

as a gloss

teased, stroke

after stroke,

slowly across

tiny cuticle screens,

where phosphors swam

to the surface

to make light. These were

the minutes I saw,

I counted. But no call

came. No message

either. Nails done,

yet? I wrote, texted, 

reaching across 
the void. Free to 

talk now? The phone was

no longer a phone,

a tablet, rather, to a false 

telepathy. Writing 

my grandfather’s
eulogy—deep in it,

she wrote back. Can’t

talk tonight. Then I

realized how prolific

she was, how

much she had

authored that evening:

a pedicure, a eulogy

and silence.

And that was why

I loved her, why

she was the light 
of my life that day.

ERASE AS YOU GO

No tracks, no trace.

Erase as you go.

Any evidence left

will suggest

you were there.

Be like the wind

that clears away

the footsteps in the sand.

SUMMER SEEDLINGS

1.
Arms of a schoolgirl,

pendulums of glee—

swinging all the way home

2.
A green garden hose, a song—

a man singing, looping

coils within coils

3.
A candy in a green wrapper

is the girl’s “hello”

to the man on the bus

4.
A man swings his nine iron on the platform,

a train approaches—

early morning commute

HANDS

When they touch what they touch the hands 

are no longer hands—sculptor becomes the sculpted.

In them they carry, like memory, baptismal waters, 

a feathered grace, kiss as healing thread. Eyes

that surprise. Praise: a surrounding sound.

They are what they are because the playa fired them 

in its kiln. Because the angels took them in 

as orphans and suffused them with a light as bright

as sun off sword—held by a knight brigadined to love.