Two Poems

Children's Center



I remember the feeling of rice at the rice table

The fine white dust

I was never satisfied

Maybe a bottomless table would have been enough

The better to plunge my hands

One worries about children drowning

I have heard stories of accidents in silos

People like to use silos to say we are alone

Some children would grab your arm and in a dead voice say 

     why are you hitting yourself

They were tuned into a station

I wanted the rice to not stick to my hands

I wanted to be the sound of the rice falling down

It was an old sound

You could find a red plastic word like positivity buried in the rice

It was the wrong shape

The right shape was hands but the problem was sweat

They asked me why I had not gone outside with the others

I could not find the words to explain


____


SKELLIG MICHAEL


is an island you can take a boat to but where you cannot ever spend the night

Something must be like this other than the island, some mossy sensation

An island where therefore rarely does a human sleep other than a visiting baby

A baby strapped to the body of a visitor climbing the ancient stairs

How does an island run on so little sleep

Is not sleep what keeps the island from falling into the sea

The sleep of a thousand puffins knits the island into place

At home in New Hampshire the man's face fell off the mountain

They tried to strap it on, they didn't know about the sleep

How many monks when monks lived on the island fell from the stairs into the sea

The island we are thinking of had a whole history before Luke Skywalker moved in

He's not allowed to sleep there, he's not like some moss

I tried to find the island and it autocompleted star wars is ruined

No one has told the puffins, the puffins don't care

From above they are dark like the sea, from below bright like the sky

When a puffin wants to make a joke it pretends to be a Jedi climbing the stairs

The moss has not stopped laughing for one thousand years