YOU CAN'T BELIEVE HOW LONG IT TOOK

Your need, Love, for spring—the season—
combined with the claimed desire
to one day be spared pain
and die peacefully in your sleep—

as if we have a say—brought up trappings,
which leaped to fur trapping. One May
I was invited—I believe I was seven—
to sight muskrat runs

in ponds, silt chutes—slick as silk—
to and from their underground hideouts,
not dens, according to my Uncle Mike.
Later that year, he took me out, so to speak,

on a winter round. Piece of cake,
the family said, like peacefully in our sleep.
And that round was peaceful, as long as
the bait, an apple, remained above ground,

perched on that stake—like yours—chained
to the steel-jaw set below the snow, the sign
of no activity; no bite. Not what we wanted,
according to Mike. Of course,

you want it nice. Last site, no apple.
A thrashed mix of scratched-up dirt
and blood-stained granular ice
circled the stake, and the tipped trap's teeth

pinned a gnawed off paw rimed by panting
turned to frost. Underfoot, I imagined the chaos
in that den. Why would you ever go home,
Mike asked, staring at the paw in his,

a piece of you now missing?
was roughly where I went,
and why, Love, I took so long—longer—
before weakly nodding agreement.

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ON THE DAY BILLY GRAHAM DIED

My word on My Word of the Day desk calendar, benthos, hung on the wall above its definition: organisms on the aqueous bottom . . .  Staring up at it while on my government job placating—my word for it—not helping (Address them as clients or patients?) with appropriate solutions. Billy Graham. Why did one life deserve more attention than another? Celebrity. Benthos. Then to be corrected, however, by my former colleague and new boss, Mathew, who overheard me. Formerly Mat: colleague hired over me, promoted because of his sudden and convenient religious leanings, who made a point to tell me, in front of his new belief-aligned posse, that this was an especially inappropriate time for me to bring up bottoms of any kind on the day Reverend Graham died. How dare I upset his significant pending burial by implying it would be anything other than stirring (Either sentiment or sediment, don't both upset or stir?) to be in the better place! Better place. Mat's rise by suddenly leaning. It's never too late, he said (just like Billy), you have a choice: remain in respectful observation of the Reverend or take the rest of the day off and don't come back. For good. Choice, as in where we put you to be saved somewhere else by someone else because you weren't savable or capable here. Speaking of Billy, I said, I'll now be on my way to that nearby Shell to get gas, sort of like passing on the miracle of celebrating one celebrity lost while ignoring the fact that so many others die unnoticed each day because of pollution. I'm sorry if you didn't get that job, Mat offered, but you really didn't have to take things this far. Me overreaching?! Maybe Mat was right, I thought, as I exited the front of the office building with my personal belongings. How had my taking things so far made any difference other than What am I going to do for work now? I drove to a mall, around and around a lot till I found the only available slot—one closest to Planet Fitness. I put my seat back, all the way, flat, quietly hid, to exercise that Old Word survival. And the word Gymnasium appeared. With its Latin i-u-m ending it offered world meaning: place to—i-you-am, so We lifted. In this world, however, when that ending was spoken, it came out eee-um. Eee-um, eee-um, eee-um, like killdeer flushed by threat to their young, so flying as if wounded, crying Hey, um, over here, um, look, we is weak, we is going down, come prey on us.

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Both poems came out of a time I focused on intended or unintended uses of language or speech and their impact.

"You Can't Believe How Long It Took" began with the childhood memory of muskrat trapping and the downplaying of a recognized traumatic scene of violence. There was a lot of Get used to it or Get over it, when I sensed wrong and confusion, and because that sentiment was unaddressed, there was a suspended loss of belief and identity, in a way, a kind of death of the person I was. This focus coupled with an interest in what really happens in time, and within people, after someone makes a common statement (like dying peacefully while asleep) and expects an immediate response, but doesn't get it. That person's response is often, Where did you just go? I became interested in where I could go (to that muskrat trapping), when first presented with someone's wish to die peacefully in their sleep.

The initial drafts of "On the Day Billy Graham Died" were freed by Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," which led to Word of the Day, which led to language play and etymology, which led to the associative structure of the poem and the elements of social commentary.