Believe this:  that they set their course by the Big Dipper’s rim, skirting its tin lip, the salt broth it ladles out.  That they sight along the ramrod back of Cepheus’ throne, down the rhinestone folds of Cassiopeia’s gown.                    Allow that they might navigate the headwaters of Draco’s crocodile tears, these good night sailors, reckoning                                   by their star compass.                        Watch, how Indigo Buntings—each its own feather-covered patch of daylight sky—turned loose under the planetarium’s false night, pass the test of the constellations.

Iridescence Just when I’m most certain, an opposite intrudes. Walk with me. Here over the strand tracks confirm a presence until tidal sweep inundates impressions or scurries of sand abrade— ghosting our glyphs. A theorem, a belief: the in-between matters. Gapped by menace—cliff-fall, sea-surge—to devoutly fix an iridescent cloud, its droplets half-formed, prismed, or listen among the dunes where wind-hum resists bracketings of silence.

Air-Breathing Life Sleeping beside you is like sharing the sheets with a fish reeled up on the boat deck the hook rooted firm in your angry, sweet mouth you twist and twist circles, spirals, your tail flaps and beats, slap, slap, slapping on the wooden planks I dodge your sharp scaly sides and wonder are you remembering a time when salt was your world and you didn’t want change, but gasped some strange new element.

from "The Seam Rovers"

Editor’s Note: This poem originally appeared in The Animal Eye, a small, independent magazine of literature and political commentary published in Cincinnati in the 1990s. It is archived online at http://animaleye.info/issue13/issue13page17.htm.