You walk into the sunlight
to make yourself happy.
This is the poem that will tell you
how to live.
It’s set in Paris, so
you’ll eat a croissant
to make yourself happy.

Here, we utter hexameters rarely.

We do confuse what is a command and what
a prayer
statement and threat, question
and answer.

Animals utter indivisible sounds so often
but Aristotle does not call any of them
a letter. Still, an
animal sound will
make yourself happy. Listen to this
kitten. We can call its noises an alphabet without confusion.

And here, you cannot be maimed by the muses.

See leaves in the gutters and salted butter that stands in a bright
rectangle of light like a small giraffe never melting in the sun which
is what you picture when your aim is
to make yourself happy

You eat a lot of things to
make yourself happy. Stick this
piece of meat in your
mouth to
make yourself happy. It’s a good one. The sounds of
sirens outside the window are
gay to the ear that tends
to hear what it needs
to make itself happy. An interesting thought
about dirt or air or water will work
to make yourself happy. Look
from where you are (inside the window) not
where you want to be (outside the window), i.e., to
make yourself happy. This is the way we’ve come
along the dusky boulevards
like eager huskies, taking big steps, eating up
the sidewalks with our big-stepping big-licking legs
making ourselves happy.
Tomorrow we’ll learn all the things to undo in the Making Ourselves
Happy school. First, the hero never moves towards death.

* Credit: This poem first appeared in Grey, and can also be heard online at One Pause Poetry, http://onepausepoetry.org/explore/poets/profile/Sikelianos

“Mamma, how many days do we have

left to live?” Or did she say,

“Mamma, how many days do we have

left before we die?”

This was in the grass in the backyard. I stood up, collecting

what to say.

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.

the future comes to me
with a horrifying screech
then it comes to me softly
like a weeping cloud
and it comes to me like
a fish, glass-eyed, flopping
and it comes to me erotically
meanly & sharp
it comes to me cashed out rolling
electronically

in my future life I was
a cowboy, killed
in a bar fight

a flamingo in the snow

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.

First we were somewhat Italian, and we sipped espressos on the plazas and watched the pigeons make loops and lunges like thoughts, then we were mostly French, eating hot chocolate with a spoon and reading Nadja, then we were more Greek, sipping Nescafés, riding boats to dry and beautiful islands. Soon we were a little bit British, though we knew nothing about it, yet said shove a bum on English couches. We were never Chinese or German but then we read Celan & Goethe & Hölderlin & we were a tiny bit Japanese and took to taking the waters in the mountains outside of small towns in Idaho or having sex with the ex-principals of public junior high schools in the suburbs of Cincinnati, or waking amidst goose poop on islands in the Detroit River, not knowing which way was Canadian nor daylight, next we were driving a Chrysler through Kansas and it was summertime, the air conditioning blown out, the long fields of high grasses.

* credit: from The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.

The snow falls, picks itself up, dusts itself off
a sparrow flying like a leaf back up to its tree
The future does a backbend toward you, it’s
what you can almost see, scrimmed
in the clouds which crowd the sky, elbowing, laughing

After that I see space and its influence in a bucket of spinning water
and two calcium atoms shoot forth, twinned photons traveling

back to back, arms unlaced, perfect
swimmers in the lit dusk

Where are they going?

First, to Holland, then
to calcium-kiss her bones

And in Holland the streets are made of water, the dolls & dogs gather
round lit picnic tables like happy rags

The body is in the root cellar

When snow falls our dead gather close to our bones
because the cold’s ghost has come back to haunt the cold & the body,
too, is a happy rag

Tree, take a photograph of her thought, you can do it
with photosynthesis: silhouettes of seals appear, a swarmed planet and its satellites, a celestial atlas that breaks when tapped (it’s glass)
Some giraffes, some elephants, a lion scatter
in the clearing; in the clearing

the leaves of the world turn toward the light as do the letters of the word
the words are beautiful not for their accuracy but for their dream:
words-are-arrows that loop between no-man’s-land and the wetlands, soft
flints flying toward their target

—words bird the zone—

when home was adopted as mother
area was given here
[a future of] all surface, no border

* credit: This poem first appeared on Poets.org/ The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Published in The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Coffee House Press, 2013.