Sisyphus Poets can't get enough of the boulder. Camus, who may as well have been a poet, said he loved that man in the frozen multiverse can choose to assert private meaning & justify the absurdity of existence, laughing back at the deathless gods, a savory bit of payback. My students call him Syphilis. Stop. I say, You're ruining the mood. Back to the rock: Gluck’s icy, but she rolls it easily. Homer’s is for Ajax to hurl, a ton weight. A millstone only Apollo can save Hector from, for now. I draw mine in dry erase on the wall by the window. Erudite vandalism? More small crimes for daily inspiration! Thinking less of Camus than reading D’aulaires, laughing when I read the husband/wife team wrote of the wily king on his return to the beloved, Fooled him again! Anything to be alive! To bask in the climb like Alex Honnold on the staggering face of El Capitan, smiling, granite-minded, all long handed limberness. Utterly prepared for the fab
9 / 12 After the sky fell on the City, swelling its canyons, the talus slopes of smoke and carnage, the names of missing spoken as pleas into camcorders that swish pan to passing sirens, in the quiet towns and muted cities, tv screens blink images against our staring eyes. At Fort Stewart we clean weapons and watch CNN, fingertip smell of gun oil as hand reaches up, rubbing chin in thought, looking into this widescreen scry glass, any news of who did this to the staggering city predicting our future. "100 percent accountability" releasing us, I pass the parade field, sunset making a shadow over ground where a grove of crape myrtles, each named for a soldier, will soon grow, knowing safety can be counted, the months of it limited by news we will receive, that it's finite like grains in a bullet. Across the world, a desert moon none of us has seen yet rises over Sadr City....Now, years and all of our deaths later, I can look up, see it, feel it, its beau