Speckled Stuff

appeared in Lyre, Lyre.

God likes speckled stuff, says the manly man.
He must have since he made so much. The straight
And simple are pulverized by the weight
Of odd and complex. There must be a plan,
And not a manly plan--something divine
Or outré, which means both. A freckled chick,
Violets wrapped around a mossy stick,
Villages built where earthquakes draw the line:
The quirky and the deadly and the spotted.
Whole romans fleuves have dammed themselves upon
Civilizations where the men are gone,
The dogs abducted, and the bookstores rotted.
He loves it all, the hoorah where the gleaming
Stipples on the bright stainless steel are steaming.

Second Thoughts

This is a very old poem. It's the title poem from my second collection, which was accepted, once upon a time, by a publisher who went out of business immediately thereafter and was never heard from again. It appeared in Whiskey Island.


If only I had gone to school in Boston,
flown east instead of west. If only I
had studied medicine instead of English,
dressed for the day in tie and stethoscope, 
if only I had let myself be drafted
and seen the bodies stacked up at Pleiku,
if only this, if only that, if I
had let that first pregnancy go to term,

today I should be sitting in a room
like this, my head not clear, my hand alert
to what it holds, and I should hear the cardinal
calling the late June morning to observe
that he's already up, and I'd be thinking

if only I had gone to school in Denver,
flown west instead of east, if only I
had been a novelist and not a doctor,
then I should say, hearing the sparrows chirp,

it would be all the same, even if I
had gone to school at Cambridge, learned to say
"shed-ule," and come to like my lager warm,
till, feeling a sudden numbness in my shoulder,
I'd wonder how it would have been if I
had only gone to school in California.