6 September 2018

I want to write an honest sentence and then tease it open. My doctor says her emotions are for putting in a box across the room. She didn't get poetry in her genes, she tells me, only arts and crafts. We (verb) craft or we set out to sea in our (noun) craft. The doctor makes a sound somewhere between confusion and disgust. I suggest she read a poem without that noise. What I forgot to say is that her box is a poem. The houseboat is house without tenure or the hope of tenure; there's no insurance, no pension, just one thin plank between cot and a harbor that isn't one. It's all “fake news,” because words function, rather than mean. “Be careful how you respond, sir,” Sen. Harris said, suggesting words might function in honest sentences. The nominee, flustered, says he doesn't know what she wants to hear. He's the good student, the boy in the bubble, the judge grown in a terrarium. Sangha's shrimp have made more shrimp under their bright light beside the flag on his wall. To kneel before it is an act of consumption. Either you consume the flag or your shoes. Nike's new ad is about being the very best. Let's not fool ourselves, a friend says, we're not Bodhissatvas, not even close, but we move closer with attention. The fruit of each morning's meditation is a photograph, the bright and back-lit green of a leaf with narrow threaded veins. A shower tree in front of purple clouded mountains. The sea urchin, whose spines dissolve into lava rock. My dog on the wall my children walked on. The nominee is a leaf: we see him for what he is. A good man, terrified.

--6 September 2018