I'm not going anywhere!

My Letter to Posterity (Though I Still Live)

Something: is fundamentally wrong with the world.
I have always felt this.
There are things that still belong.
Love, family, friends, nature,
music, love the least among these
and at once the greatest. Our
mothers and fathers are our sweetest
reminders of where we are from
a place where elkhorns weren't put
on the wall for show, or as some
capitulation to excess, they weren't
worn as a trophy of "what-i-killed,"
they were there because
they didn't need to be, because we are
all alive, after all, just across the field
is a bighorn sheep
and in the attic
is our imagination,
bordering on the riparian.

What I see in visions is electric
like God's face being shaved or
a minstrel microwaving popcorn
for the first time. Please just us,

just this once, she urged us,
legs up on the shore, toiling
as only a mermaid can: at once
sad and happy, part of the earth,
a piece of a chapel, say: not
earthly but swimmingly, you
know, marine... that's the word,

flash!...straight out of the sunbelt
some love like the sun melts,
and all around, everything's extraordinary
in its ability to be profoundly powerless
or at once it's bright opposite: a revision.
A big apple with (too many) seeds of excess.

In Love, of the River

Have I
been through
the fire
enough times
that still
it rings
my ears
hints of a bell
chords of mountains
chiming their death away
mountains unto mountains into
a bleaker beginning, itself fried
these down-low curmudgeons
can't help retreating
looking in the mirror
reacting, saying, "More, should
have done,
more!" Or something similar
slices of throats and lozenges
culls of enamored bridesmaids aloft
"Look mother! An Owl!" & so on
the kid cameras clacking on, chirping,
chiming, clicking. Everybody's alive now,
after all, half of time's ancestors,
piled about, spitting in boxes
careening down alleyways disaster on the dial
motives unscented like a scene from a movie
on breakaway, in love, of the river.