sealed stone

My brain is a sealed stone
waiting inside a mountain.
When explorers pick it up, feel the heft of it
in their dirt-covered hands, they’ll add it
to a canvas bag with the other artifacts
and hike the switchbacks down to the lab.
The terrain is impossibly lush and precarious.
Trees heave their green into the air,
waterfalls recite their water language into the fog.
In the distance, red flashes of birds whose names no one knows.
Always, the threat of falling into some jagged below.
When the journey ends, my brain will be pulled from its bag
and set on a workbench. A smooth, dark rock. An unflinching fact.
A worker will feel a hand along the top,
searching for an equator, a guideline
before cutting deep and slow, dust whirring up and out. Little devils.
Then the surprise at the crystals alive inside.
It’s a geode—a universe of fractals and light
like teeth, like stars, like glass, like handfuls of candy,
a time capsule from a lost era.
A kind of childhood.

community

My brain is an old man in sensible shoes
who walks each morning to feed pigeons in the park.
My brain is especially in his pockets, where the crumbs are.

My brain is a snail that carries its home everywhere
and the wet trail that follows
like a shadow disappearing.

My brain remembers being a tree.
It wasn’t just the branches or the leaves,
but all the little harvesters searching and climbing.

My brain wakes up with the moon like wolves
or long-haul drivers, each tethered to a different highway.

My brain reveals its story in stages like a movie trilogy
with aliens, explosions, and underdogs, and a flashback
where the hero catches fireflies as a child and smiles.

My brain is a line cook making burger after burger.

My brain is a bramble of blackberries hidden in the underbrush.

My brain waits at the bus stop with all the other brains
for the number nine to the clinic or the market or the library.

My brain listens for the language in birds,
the wants and hungers that flutter out of them.

My brain is an ocean swallowing lost things.

My brain is a stenographer, smartly dressed, taking down everything.
At night she reads the pages back to me.
We compare notes. Our versions are never exactly the same.
Sometimes we leave our disputes for the morning.

They don’t always matter the next day.
Other times we argue for hours about what we’ve seen.
Charts and graphs are involved. Once, I brought recordings
of train whistles to prove the length of their echo across the plains.
This played well. I won that fight. My brain conceded.

My brain, after all, is a fan of that lonely sound

—a locomotive’s howl bisecting the darkness.