poem in which a person wakes with nervous optimism

Waking

notice how from on the dusty mattress

you can see the divots flying

through blinds open lopsidedly

below the air conditioning unit

wedged weirdly above the flaking sill?

a body lying where it has no wish to lie

is a universe of tells – observing dynamism

can energise as often as it withers

can intimidate but also buoy that body

can be the very observation of that body

by that body, a vision, a fore-glow, a flash

can be the observation within and beyond that body

and pretending not to notice is still to notice –

notice how the wire screen door sweeps open

to the frenzied mating call of a million cicadas

and a nature strip arrayed with ruined mattresses

and a road that gleams with radiant heat

like the black ice on deadly Michigan Highways?

it’s good to think of how a body imbibes sunlight

instead of being just another drywall within space –

sudden sunlight especially, which as with sudden

cold or fear or joy or the shock of tragedy

or the shock of the new morning, shock enough

to make the body shiver with ecstasy

can nourish the body and stimulate its sex – sunlight alone!

and pretending not to notice is still to notice –

notice how those laughing sand wedge users

are the first benediction of this, your only day

sunlit dampness of the grass they stand on

the second, the third the way the divots soar, then fall

and you’ve only taken twelve steps off your porch?