DONKEY ON

When I am alone I make a sound

the lord does not understand.

Then he makes the sound of a helicopter receding.

Then my sound goes after his sound.

My sound sounds like an ordinary bowl of oatmeal

that can sometimes be almost liquid

and sometimes effect a crust.

His sound is small and bitter,

capable of great strength

and universal flowering,

as if the world will never stop expanding

once helicopters are gone.

Of course, I can only one sound in a year

so sometimes it sounds like

Please guess what I want to tell you

And he says

Without a mother it would be good to know English?

And I press this question into a photograph album

without a comma,

which is severely inadequate to the task of

reconstructing a life.

So I say

Perhaps I am too handmade?

And he says

It is spring, I am the peppermint king.

And then he does something generous:

he drops me a private year

wrapped in plastic with string:

the only question is how to spend it.

MIDNIGHT IVORY

From time to time a painter will pause

and put his paintbrush in his mouth,

not to moisten the brush

but to fill his mouth with fresh hopes.

I am not a painter, but I have a voucher

that allows my face to fill with water

whenever I want for the rest of my life.

Sometimes it fills slowly and sometimes

it fills quickly, the way you never can tell

how long it will take to finish anything.

For example an overamazed and sleepless night

inseparably linked with bitter detail.

It desperately needs more blue.

The bottom two-thirds should be an ocean.

And so I pause here, and put my pen in my mouth.

The way a child pauses when the ocean has

taken his shovel, and then runs into the sea

to retrieve his tool, which is only a toy,

and picks up the hang of swimming in a tag-along

way, and so has an imaginary friend

for life, someone he thinks might save him.