​The corner of Michelle Obama’s Becoming pokes out of my charcoal suede book-bag, collapsed on the wooden bench of a downtown cafe. It’s not quite 11 a.m. and sweat is forming on my upper lip like dew on a morning leaf. A fan laboriously circulates the hot air so that a wisp of hair stays plastered to my cheek. I’ve come to write, inspired by the latest chapter in Obama’s autobiography. She’s just shared how she met Barack; how, at age twenty-five, her geometric philosophy of

The speed at which things pass is robbery. Poems flash like strobes of light below trees and then are gone. For instance, on my way to St. Helena a cluster of Clydesdales stood grazing in a spring-green pasture. Beloved red bodies, glistening in the sun, slightly smaller than adults but larger than babies--teenage draft horses, drafted into a motherless roaming. I wanted to slow time and see them approaching as a fly sees a hand or a horse’s tail. I wanted to do more than eye

Be quick with the details. They run fast like small children. Seize them by the sleeve, hook their hood, grip a hand. Grab hold of what you can, just firm enough to keep that wriggling body from slipping into the deep. Else they’ll shrink from their clothes and leave you a limp phrase, flapping in the wind of what you lived but cannot say However you can, pause the parade of tiny feet that pitter-patter, perpetually, across the day. Make them stand for the camera, and give yo

I wanted to uncurl into the new day like a cat or a wave. But waking up today felt like swatting away spider webs—Obstacles that you can’t see but feel in all directions, spun by a night-spider in the archway of morning. No matter which way I turned--towards the kettle for coffee, downwards to the yoga mat on the living room floor-- I kept finding myself stuck, in what I slowly realized was the material of a dream. The stuckness was in the fact that I couldn’t decide which wa