“The Cosmos” and Other Poems
THE COSMOS
It’s pure silence—like the absence of wind is an afterthought
of the pines. The hunter’s license flaps
in the coldness of shade as he works; her arms are covered
with spider bites. Whiskey stares at the stars
made of mercury. One long seam idles like a creek
sparkling, where a phantom stocking’s run, a hijacking,
flows like a contrail over her. He checks the level
of kerosene. Walking into the clearing is like playing
an out-of-tune piano. That worn, green felt. The canteen’s
tossed onto a bed of pine needles like a bruise waiting to be
imagined. The tread on the two visible
tires looks sanded down to the smoothness
of a fading horizon—two appaloosas running in circles—
a man and a woman and the absence of time. Her body
does not move. The blade of the shovel glows, touched
with summer. High in the makeshift tent, birds triangulate
the broken arcs of the other birds’ flight paths
until no one knows who’s who anymore. She’s lowered
into the earth so she’s no longer in the woods with the wind
or his voice were he to speak. Still, a meadow lark is singing.
A WHITE CITY
She was inspired by a singer/guitarist at mass. You are a fine person waiting for a niche, said the priest. And whether on an airplane or shining an apple, a smile occurred to people all around her. She sometimes sensed a greatness of purpose waiting for her in the wings, her small way of contributing to humankind. All of the black and white heads of beef she'd seen along roadways, the fall through space under a suburban gable, the lips like shining chocolate on the female singers on variety TV specials—come-ons from the periphery. She'd stand magnetically amongst the spaces a room could make between persons talking to one another and wave an olive on a toothpick or a cigarette. She practiced ignoring the extravagance of the fins on the family's brand-new Buick. In church she wore shoes that hurt her terribly. Once, long ago, after exiting a vestibule a woman with teeth missing staggered toward her and her siblings. Her mother protected the four sisters from this. She told them one should avoid sitting in a chair and thinking about show tunes. This is about post-war America (soundtrack by The Fifth Dimension). The invention of Bacon Bits, for example. Finding your place as a spokesperson for foodstuffs. Next came the husband, sporting an attempt at a mustache. He was holding an oversized acoustic guitar. Across the country men were becoming MDs and attorneys, and then that error was on its way to being corrected when women, in greater and greater numbers, started becoming MDs and attorneys, until those numbers leveled off. The man with the guitar looks how he looks due to some recently glimpsed 2" x 3" picture of John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. But then he started playing racquetball with other men who’d recently begun to don sweatbands. I’d by then discovered the beat writer Richard Brautigan, whose poem, “Our Beautiful West Coast Thing” (a poem about the Mamas & the Papas, dedicated to Jack Spicer) I first read in the early 1970s. My mother played the role of Nancy onstage in Oliver around this time. Other plays followed. Flowers rained down around her on more than one occasion. The girl was slightly abashed, empowered. The husband was jealous. I was loaded onto more than one bus to watch her perform in Chicago. In Saugatuck, she sang in a giant converted barn, with a view of Lake Michigan. Lift your voice in prayer, we were being instructed at church, but I didn’t understand what there was to celebrate or why a bearded, white man as God deserved any attention from me just for being, to quote what one of my father’s friends told me my mother had become, “a real attention-seeking piece of work.”
THE MONEY
Here we all are, at least a little closer
to the money, the possible internal bleeding.
Compare the Happy-We-All-Have-So-Much-Money
smile to the smile for its own sad sake. Blood
must exit the body somehow. Else it pools
in the feet. Else we begin a nosedive—the money
plastered to windows during loss of altitude.
Analgesic, as when the ink runs from the tips
of one’s fingers. Some of us keep waving from
from the roadside at the fallacy of no pain.
The money clutched in hands so the blood-filled feet
might be swung toward a purpose, the funnel
cloud of a potential for money; the teat
sucked in a bank vault, the cock stroked in
a rude “selfie w/money.” The meek shall no longer
appear in the vestibule mirror; the trees
in the distance that can still be possessed,
like bobcats pacing in cages, the bird that swerves
through the swaying of branches, the cloud
of no hope evaporating in winter; basking
in one’s own sweat in the summer, the bloat
of which can crowd out the squeaking proboscis
of the last human larvae—untransformed in this time
of dwindling money—minuscule arms flailing, eyes wide open.
ESTRANGEMENT
Someone said it would be like the foam of vinegar
mixing with baking soda and it was a little like that.
The ootheca blossomed like a promise I’d made. My
mother used to dream right while we were talking to her,
lizards scrambling up the side of a house. She’d
shake under the moon like a struck tuning fork. I
phoned my brother years later and my girlfriend
said, “All you guys ever talk about is the 1970s.”
It happened mid-June. Tiny, separate, autonomous robots
with spiked forelegs stood antennae to antennae
inside the jar. My mother’d sway in the out-of-focus
other-end of the room, as if slow-strobed by a lighthouse.
My recollection of childhood is one in which a kind
of salt “Rushmore” of a family suffered accelerated erosion.
Until they’re released into the wild, baby praying mantises
will begin cannibalizing each other. My mother phoned
me (at my new job), a voice squirming through a pinhole,
asking Who do you think you’re trying to impress?
I’d managed to avoid her for fifteen years at that point.
My brother’s no more. The last time I visited him
we stretched out on the beach in South Haven, let the surf
wash over us. A baby praying mantis becomes an adult,
via six molts. They eat their victims starting at the head
until nothing is left in their forelegs and then
they clean themselves up afterwards and go back
to blending in with their surroundings…
THE FACE OF THE OCEAN SUNFISH II
“Mature ocean sunfish spend most of their time on their sides, floating as though dead.”
– The Fresh & Saltwater Fishes of the World, 1987
Is that the miniature bulge of an island with one eye embedded
or a decapitated face floating along in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean?
I am fully apprized now & would like to start over. You can detect
a similar brand of reptilian flexibility—I will accept what I happen
to be—in the face of the tortoise (as if a Giacometti sculpture
just gasped). A second tortoise, fighting gravity on all fronts,
mounts his mate, dome atop dome…I think when I dream I develop
a kind of diamond eye. I’m independent, though not great with
tools.
I navigate the treacherous waters but I lose my way…Being born
is like being shot from a gun in outer space…Who knows
where the hell we’ll end up; sunk deep into the crust of the moon?
ricocheting from star to star? The large topside eye of the ocean
sunfish
remains wide open—consciousness sailing through outer space—a
planet
spinning, a meteorite, a bullet unfolding into arms or fins, picking
up speed.
David Dodd Lee is the author of twelve books of poetry, including a forthcoming volume of dictionary sonnets, Dead Zones (2025), and the full-length collections The Bay (2026) and The 574 Area Code’s Been Hit By the Blast (2026). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Guesthouse, The Nation, New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Southeast Review, Triquarterly, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary magazine The Glacier. He kayaks and makes art on Baugo Bay in Northern Indiana.