The hospital lives behind me:
sometimes I can feel it breathing
sometimes I feel the rhythm
of the heart monitors,
I watch the lights
flip on, then off,
as someone
draws the curtains 
I hear the helicopters
landing on the roof
with only seconds to spare.

Let them come and go
as they please;
it's not your job
to open and close
doors for the dead.

Today is a different kind of gray;
you slipped into my life 
through a side door, 
as though 
you possessed a key,
as though
someone had told you my secrets
long before we met.

Sixteen thousand words
cross the vermilion border
seven billion times a day,
yet not a single one
knows exactly where it's going.

The wind is rattling my windows and me-- 
my thoughts tumble across the prairie
like restless weeds, like bored, unruly children;
the newsman says the tornadoes 
are gone, and this fierce wind
is what they left behind.

I carried too much with me
coming west--now I know
that part of moving on
is casting off--
and even though I just let go
the well-worn sofa--
the old camelback still wearing
its lovely cat-fur coat--
I plan on Sunday afternoons
lounging in the Reading Room--
the heart of Meerkerk Garden--
to cozy up in my old, grey raft--
hoping to discover some new
azalea, rhododendron, camellia,
some new species of songbird,
some new genus of light.

You can't just cobble several words together 
and call it the longest word in the English language
and yet they do. .  .
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
even has a volcano in it.

The curtain rises
different time
different place
every day.

I would like fifty people to attend my funeral. . .
I'm not dead yet--it's not one of those stories,
though they do appeal to me. . .an entire life
should produce thousands, but it almost never does. . .
fifty is a respectable showing. . .
twice that would be formidable.

A day without substitution,
no subtitle, no subtext,
buttermilk pure,
not made
with vinegar.

At the bookstore I will read David Kirby's "House on Boulevard Street"
and laugh aloud. . . I will read David Shumate's prose poems
and cry about Kafka's love life. . . I will read the new issue of "Poetry"
and not buy it because I believe they are poetry snobs:  snobs, 
I tell you. . .I will stop looking up. . . I will hum with the fluorescent lights. . .
I will smell fresh-baked cookies and have willpower. . .
my heart will begin to beat with the barista's claps on the espresso machine
and poetry will save me again, I just know it.

The house we left behind came back
online, back on the market;
the young soon-to-be-weds
who bought it--full price!
(How could they afford a home
that we'd spent half our lives
slowly working up to?)--
no longer seem to want it:
Could it be because we wouldn't
sell it to them furnished, complete
with all the things we'd carefully
arranged, all the things they wanted
us to leave behind because they craved
the look of an easy, well-made life?

The computer-generated male voice droned on
about the number of Kansas tornadoes
per year, where they were,
and how many people had perished;
the computer-generated female voice
broke in now and then
to give ominous weather warnings,
over and over the cycle repeated--
the male spoke of facts,
the female:  possibilities.  

The still at the very center?
The vertigo-inducing outer ring?
Or maybe the made-up stories
of what lies between.