Food of Love
If the vamp and rub of planets,
moon, and sun be the music
the ancients surmised,
creating harmonies beyond
human earshot, except, perhaps,
what Moses heard on Mount Sinai,
or what we hear when released
from lunar tidal rhythms
taken for granted until they fade—
then it’s not far-fetched to believe
Aristophanes’ myth that long ago
our male, female, androgynous selves
descended from heavenly bodies,
flaunting twin heads and double pairs
of hands and legs to spin and cartwheel
like stars, until jealous gods sliced us
in two, sentencing us to spend our lives
in search of our missing halves,
a lucky few reuniting in time,
endowed with the power to hear
celestial overtones in calls of swans.
Thing-in-Itself
Make it upbeat, my mother asks,
though she’s dead—another Covid body count—
but I didn’t tell you that.
Don’t bother with wildfires, attacks
by barb or downstroked heart.
Make it upbeat, mother asks.
Don’t quote Kant, no jazz,
and for heaven’s sake no Grieg, my father’s last request.
But no, I didn’t tell you that,
nor how her footloose pooch never came back,
unlike the hosta, my dad’s prized transplant—
an upbeat metaphor, hands down. My mother asks
me to turn her into a lotus plant—
reborn, pristine, despite rooting in silt.
I could tell you that.
She asks if, immortal, my cancer
will rouse like a lotus seed, ancient.
I can’t tell you that.
I’ll make it upbeat because she asked.
