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Letter from  the Former World


Winds crack the earth wide open.
Our mercury children grow thin and silver.

They speak in whispers: When did we live,
this thing we are, this human?

Make a list, then. Count your blessings:
We left a few trees standing.

In our lifetime, a fat pigeon dropped from the sky
 like rain. We killed a tall, fierce woodpecker

who could not live when the forests became memory
but searched for them in this world, then the next.

The slender deer we loved and overfed
into a still, gaunt winter. The buffalo

became a plain of flesh.

We made lakes where there were no lakes,
One River burned with a blue light.

We were a virus for every cell
and Earth the body we sickened.

Whoever you are, whenever you read this:
I am glad for that body we are no longer living.

Sonnet for JonBenet Ramsey

The bare bones of an Alabama winter, not snow
or ice but only skeletal trees, a glimpse
of mountains from my grandmother’s porch.
At the family gathering, my 5-year old niece tells me:
Yesterday, Barbie came to my birthday.
I love Barbie. She is so nice.

Early this year, three years before the end
of our millenium, a 6-year-old Beauty Queen
disappeared in a Colorado basement.
We whispered: the father did it, the brother
did it. The Former Beauty Queen mother
wept for the camera. Her daughter’s blond curls
shone like sunlight from the covers of magazines.
She was that beautiful.

ForPoetry