Two Poems

THIS IS THAT

Let’s start with certainty:
Life is this and then that.
To reach the next thing, I’ve found,
one must reduce to the simplest

nature institutions of a flattening scope.
We hazard our own metaphors.
For instance consider the mind:
a cliff, whittled by high entropy.

Or language, behind the tongue:
a web, host to more than one spider.

And-my favorite-the heart:
the marble jittering in a vacuum hose.

With these we might continue, possibly
uninformed, to rile the truth.

AT THE WINDOW, SOMETHING WAS THERE

We looked, but it’s a gap out there,
it’s straight out black.

We saw the breath, sure-a bloom against
the panes-and chalked it up to cold.
We each of us wondered what loped,
slouching and showing its various mouths.
We heard the frame give as it did, shattering
through, the sound of an outside entering.

We put our backs to each other, slumping into
elephantine defenses and

turned in on ourselves.