For Those Who Have Sacrificed in the Streets of Minneapolis

“Your Lifetime is a Knife”

–after Mary Oliver on Keats      

Your lifetime is a knife.
You could eat a plum,
peel the darkly sour sun;
or brandish it daily just
because you can; or hide it
each time thugs shove past;
or join them; or gaze forever
at your reflection in the blade,
trying different smiles;
or prick a beloved each time
you’re afraid; or yourself just to feel
god-made.

Your lifetime is a knife.
Do you cook food for children.
Or make origami cranes and papier-mâché.
Or shave three times a day.
Or tattoo mythical beasts by blue neon
across atmospheres of souls.
Or rust, in doubt, all alone.
Or forge a new school from bamboo.
Or open junk mail instead
of writing postcards that all end, I love you.

Your lifetime is just one knife.
You won’t get all its musical potential
twice—or its silence. My knife
greets your knife not as enemies,
but sparks over gathered branches
on a cold, dark night. Your knife
greets my knife years from now
stuck in a newly fertile field.  

Many lifetimes bound together
form not thousands of knives, but a kind
of engine. In front of a hospital,
before masked men armed with guns,
I saw an old woman in a wheelchair, her eyes
closed, holding her phone’s lens
like a knife in the air. Lightning
was a toothpick compared.

Your lifetime is a knife.
Do you hunt in zoos, feed only the fed.
Or do you wander each dawn
back through a graveyard
of dreams whose flowers
eat the dead.

–Rest in poetry Renee Good, Minneapolis

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“Civilization”

–RIP Alex Pretti

In every moment exist two doors.
One leads eventually to the sea; the other

to a deep forest. I like mountains
and have read many books about mountains.

From the peak of a great mountain
you can see the ocean is tranquil

and the forest is grand. Yet I have never
really left the city, my city, our city.

It wends on and on forever
between you and me.