Like the Middle Ages, and: Sun Poem, and: Boss(y) Voice, and: Driving the Babysitter Home

Like the Middle Ages

Hell is being stuck in perpetua next door to genius.Like the Middle Ages, whose art and people feel like

first drafts of Renaissance greatness. To be close—but—a hair shy. To be gone before the Internet, or a drug

that could have saved your life had you made it throughone more night. Like two ships. The twenty-first century feels like  neither

the right nor wrong place at neither the right nor wrong time.You feel me? Cimabue got it right, his Madonna just sitting there

as the baby paws her face. It was a dark age, wasn’t it?And anyway, she could be imagining how hot it was

the day a regular guy walked on water, the sunscorching the crowd gathered to lick it all up.

They felt the world break open, to be sure, butmisremembered who first spoke the word m-i-r-a-c-l-e.

Sun Poem

The sunlight lies on the wooden shutters like a teenager on the beach—it doesn’t give a shit. Admire, admonish, it’s all the same.That’s how a poem I won’t finish begins. I wrote itin my mind, facedown on my parents’ couchin that space between waking and daytime sleep.It is March and it is coldbut the sun persists, sinking her lacquered yellow nailsinto the center of it all,her strength giving the impression of grace, like it’s so easyto warm up all these naked trees and mean old menand women who sleep in the afternoonwhen they should be workingwriting a poem about being young,a metaphor for how the sun’s already gone away.

Boss(y) Voice

You’re not hungry, Kay.Get some water, from the filter.That’s what you are, thirsty.It’s easy to be confused.All day long is a number of minutes.I know you did the exercises, knowyou’re keeping the schedule, clockingin, reporting, keeping up, calling back,responding and replying.  Is that tea or a train?Then you’re off, imagining EnglishBreakfast in the café car, haha,your mind’s a rich little labyrinth.You ought to say thanks.Get some more water.It’s free, like you weresome time ago.

Driving the Babysitter Home

Will it ever be less strangeto be the one asking the questionsforking over the cashdriving the girl home after 11,her dorm room dark and my carjust as—we are and we aren’teternities apart. I feel myselfslip between the coversof her twin bed even asI creak up the stairs to my own bedin a house I both do & do not own,a life I’ve wantedconsidered leavingslept right through.