Excerpt from Lightning at Dinner

YOU ARE HUMAN

But why not be this lake instead,
icy blue, and the little white curls
of waves, its absolute refusal
to be human? Why not be a thing?

Why not be a place
you’d go to get away
from your mother’s frontal lobe eroding
as the faxed medical report has it?

Why not a lovely blue-turning green
and why not the removal of all feeling?

Maybe she’d rather you be a lake,
a way to lie still in the world,
a melted-down pool of snow,
a place to rest.

You could let yourself wash up on foreign shores.
Or be the surface across which boats might ply their trade,
taking humans from one shore in sun
to the other side in shade.

You remember humans, don’t you?
The ones who row the boat,
who act for all the world
as if they know where they are going?

LIGHTNING AT DINNER

Basta! shouts the waiter,
then laughs each time the sky
is rent, delighted.
“Such a long journey,”
my failing mother said,
her voice calm and steady,
crossing seven time zones.

Light gone,
you and I sit in the dark. Our hands
touch, finally, hours
after our argument.
This sudden warmth, palm
to palm: as when thunder stops,
the suddenness of all that silence.
Or the aftershock—deafening—
when an only son
is given to understand
his mother’s business with him
is completely done.


WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE?

Clusters of dandelion seeds.

spent and beautiful,
casting themselves without worry or fear
into the very current of air that carries them away from themselves.

I have taken a shape
that loses itself in the wind, a common weed, without parent or child.
Everywhere I land, I feather again,
again begin without regard to beauty.

What do I look like?

This lilac-scented, windblown, gauzy, cardinal-throated spring.
No one need bother tell me ever again
what’s up ahead.

As the purple lilacs feel, swollen and full, asway on their bent stems,
so I feel when someone picks me in huge handfuls,
puts me in water and keeps me for as long as I last.

From Lightning at Dinner. Copyright 2005 by Jim Moore. All rights reserved.