The Meaning of Life
by P.R.

I don’t much believe in anything anymore.
Justice divine. I don’t.
Nature. It’s indifferent.
Praying to god like god’s a hokey little wishing well
in the muddy backyard of a cheesy ranch house,
a genie in a banged up bottle on the tarry beach.
Grant me this.
Grant me that.
Me me me!
Wah wah wah!
And what about they
who are washed away in some crazy wave
come up from the ocean while everyone is just,
you know, chillin’ -
cooking, walking, sipping a drink
on a hotel patio.
Or how about the ones we blow up? We, they, whoever -
Squash to pulp by the first in the convoy.
And the perpetrators who
finally tell the story after it’s been shredding their insides
like razor wire for sixty years,
to some well-meaning stranger
sitting in a multi-purpose room
made a little homier by the cockatiel occasionally screeching
behind them in a cage.
We do ourselves and get done such damage.
Only the fools survive unscathed.
And really, it makes you wonder what the point is?
What is the point?
Love? Are you sure that there is no place it will go better
than Earth?
Yeah, it’s pretty and all that.
Snow on a tree. Fingernail moon.
But by whose definition?
Really, nothing is lasting, sacred, or particularly meaningful.
Yet still, you know, I can’t stop liking birds --
the way they just keeping doing their thing:
mating call, courting dance, battle for territory, nesting, feeding
and then throwing those fledglings out
into this, of all worlds.

Cat’s Eye
by P.R.

My cat lies
on the garden walk
at sundown.
Eyes closed,
paws curled
he listens –
to the wing-whistle
of birds that slip diagonal,
across this little patch of open
the train
and the silver needle
of the intercontinental flight
at the predetermined altitude
of 30,000 feet.
He could stir
if he wanted,
but he has no want,
is like the sickle surface
of his own green eye
that shows the world to the world
without one desire for difference;
only opens
and makes a tiny shift
in aperture
when dark begins
beneath the lilacs.

Far North
by P.R.

It didn’t take much
to kill you.
Just a plumber,
tired
after a day of
fitting pipes in a cheap
tract with no trees around it
to speak of.
Just dirt, poking bare
through a skim of
windblown snow
pressed low by cold.
What a change,
this place you lived,
from that nearby big mill city.
But you had discovered nature
and the stars for the very first time
and must have seen them
much more clearly from
way up there.
But I say, they are just stars, and
I don’t know where you are
nor why it had to be
that the plumber, right then,
decided to reach for something --
Cigarettes? A cell phone?
The radio.
A little music, he thought,
to brighten up this bleak ride home.

It Was Enough
by P.R.

I didn’t need
the white satin lining
nor the cushion for my head.
And pine would certainly have done
for polished rosewood.
I didn’t need anything – really.
For I had laid so many things
in shallow holes
dug with my rusty garden trowel;
mice and moles and birds
with soft necks and tiny crooked limbs.
It was enough for them
and for me –
the cool, the dirt, the dark,
the feast of insects.

Plea
by P.R.

Make it so nothing
breaks the capillaries
that feed the surface
of my skin,
where down fills
the cotton
of every place I rest,
where nothing
is like the morning,
or a windshield,
or the thing I’ll never find
to make into my heart.