Field of Snails

Wipe your feet before you enter the room
The cameraman will just be a moment
A cripple wriggles in from the window
And crawls into a maple jar
And I say we all are cripples in a maple jar
I say, take my sneakers to the power-lines
Clouds hang like the limbs of a wartime pilot
I say, I suppose this is dangerous
A sunken wrap across the people
Who look incredulously taken
A great hushed mistake
I say, behave my weeping
A dog bathed in peculiar alarm
Rises into one large nostril
And catastrophe stains the salted feet
Hundreds upon hundreds are quitting
But less and less.

On Translating a Poem Originally Written in English

Let me copy down another paragraph
of stones and a little of the the recalcitrant
hubbub I'm used to Yep! Waves look empty
as newsprint.  Girls open up like umbrellas,
and grieving passengers photograph pastures
of ocean birds, pick up a wiffle ball
and toss it like a remedy for relieving
a headache.  They puff their half-light tragedies
with a single dreamy puff.  Can I see
the missing ponytail? Sometimes I find
myself, the only one in the boat referring
to the sinking feeling one can have after
looking into an ethereal face.
But then a few, and then some, and then some more
come on-board with their life jackets on
bracing for a tidal command. I have a word for it. 

Pluto

I don't know what to call it anymore
or the unskillful  and uneasy pronunciation
of the word figment
As if that had a subject
The furniture is reflected in the window
and the window is a bad toy
for the unconscious.  Its transparent faces
broken stars and horrible collisions
with things that do not believe a solid
could be so clear.
I get that same feeling
when I look at you
but you were not suppose to be here
not now anyway.  I like it how
we now live. That this here is home.
That things bring us surprise
or anger or contemplation
I like it how you and I think
we think no matter how bad we feel
it is more or more or less
 like a distant rock of ice
whose name only recently has
been taken off the list of planets.