Eventide at the Lake House That Used to Be My Father’s

Patrolling, two green darners stitch the air.
I shouldn’t be here, but he loved this dock:
as blackbirds trill, a water strider drifts
beneath, then scrabbles toward coins of light
let slip by willows. Bubbles flute up in threes;
I peer but cannot pierce the glassy tint.
A turtle, perhaps, feasting on what’s fallen.
Again the strider basks, pushed by the current—
Dad warned me about those, how tidal jets
have swept strong swimmers deep, like when I turned
our fish-tank pump on golden shiners mouthing
at the schedule feeder, Drop a nugget!
Come 6 p.m., some other current ruffles
my phone: Work. I remain. The sky goes dark.

in Rust & Moth, Winter 2024 (November 1, 2024)

The Ghost of Li Bai on Mont Ventoux

[Li Bai] is said to have been drowned by leaning over the gunwale of a boat in a drunken effort to embrace the reflection of the moon.

—Herbert Allen Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature: Verse

Petrarch, you’ve dreamed of seeing to the edge
of Spain: must you hate each step up the ridge?
Cursing the briars, you pass the poppies by.
Cursing the rocks, you snub the saxifrage.
Three times, your flesh veers off like melted snow,
and thrice, your spirit forces it to trudge
back up. At last: the limestone crest. You turn,
not to the Pyrenees but to a page
of Augustine’s Confessions. Put it down!
You seek your soul the way I sought the moon.
Feel the mistral sigh through firs and beeches;
watch the sun droop beneath the Rhône;
sip Syrah and pour some out for me:
I never let a poet drink alone.

in The Pierian 2, no. 6 (June 1, 2024)

The Curse of Curiosity

after WALL-E

Curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills.

—Deepak Pathak et al., “Curiosity-Driven Exploration by Self-Supervised Prediction”

Long ago the richest men left Earth
a dusty dump. Each day, I gather trash,
compact it into cubes, and stack them high.
The other robots all broke down, in storms.
I mustn’t fix them, so I hoard their tracks,
their shovel hands, their eyes; though by myself
I’ll rust before the fig trees grow. Perhaps
these DVDs with fruit juice stains will guide me.

Great Scott! Am I alive? I cannot be
both Frankenstein and monster—that’s absurd.
But call me Adam: I must find the time
machine and drive it back to when I’ll fall
for the first lass to blast me with a ray
of sunshine. Y’all. The straights are not OK.

in JAKE (April 13, 2024)

Running the Show

Used to be I could just smite a guy, boom, lightning bolt. But when those bozos got wise to me, I had to branch out—fire, flood, famine, Romans, whatever I could think of.

These days, half the planet’s looking for continuity errors like I’m making a sequel to Game of Thrones or some shit. Don’t get me started on the physicists—“The God Particle”? Fuck outta here! It takes a me-damn intergalactic game of pool to do anything now. Even my eternal self ain’t got time for that.

Man, they used to fear me. At least I have more followers than Kim.

in Pere Ube (February 12, 2024)

Autumn in Toronto

A wasp hangs from my balcony rail, wriggling
against a ruined web. I spot the fly
she meant to feed her sisters—they feed her
their sweet secretions. Soon, they will decamp
from spit-and-wood-pulp hexes she helped build.
Below, the highway is a cocktail straw
where lines of weary cars are bubbling home.
TVs flick on in glass towers. She stops.
Should I have done something? At Sunday brunch,
I shooed a wasp from my hot toddy; her,
perhaps; but that was of no consequence—
workers always perish in the frost.
And anyway, the asters will provide.
When I look back from my TV, she’s gone.

in The Pierian 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2024)