Years ago, my 6th-grade class and I tried to write a Harry Potter story in which nothing bad happened. It was part of a lesson on conflicts in literature, and I urged the students to be counterintuitive by spinning a story with no conflict at all. We delved into our knowledge of the Potter universe and came up with a...well, maybe not a "plot," but a series of events. Harry aced all of his classes. Ron and Hermione fell in love. Draco Malfoy refrained from bullying anyone, and Voldemort didn't impose. At the end of the term, everyone racked up awards, Dumbledore hosted a giant feast, and everyone went home beaming for summer vacation (Harry, presumably, didn't go back to stay with his awful aunt and uncle). Once our magnum opus was complete, I asked the students what they thought of it. A few faces grimaced around the room, and I asked what the story was missing. One boy finally raised his hand and uttered seven words that have bewitched me ever since: "We don't want Harry to be happy." I deemed the lesson a success, and we soon went back to reading Greek mythology, where virtually every story ends with at least one character dying a horrible death.

Authors are kind of mean that way. One of my favorite bits of Shakespeare comes from King Lear, where the Earl of Gloucester intones, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." He might just as well have said, "As characters to authors"; we create Harry (or Hamlet, or Achilles, or whomever) and then make his imaginary life miserable. Harry being happy makes an uninteresting story, at least for those seeking suspense or catharsis. On the other hand, we don't always insist on misery being part of other mediums. The Mona Lisa smiles, and we never expect anything else from her. David stands frozen with his confident gaze, always healthy and primed for Goliath. Jackie Wilson belts out "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher," and he hasn't plummeted back by the end of the song. Yes, each of these works depicts a moment in life. Yes, life is a story, with plenty of peaks and valleys. But characters in paintings, sculptures, and songs sometimes have the privilege of being eternally happy. If I hadn't invoked so many classic artworks in this paragraph, I would throw in a quote from John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" as well. Pull the poem up on Google; you'll see what I mean.

No matter. I am happy as I write these words. It is Thanksgiving, actually -- you will read this blog entry a few days later, when it goes online -- and I am sitting in a comfortable chair in the backyard. My wife is beside me, reading, of all things, a Harry Potter book. (Surely Harry is in some kind of trouble right now.) The rest of our family is playing catch or chatting in the lawn chairs. Our dog, who had a tough life as a stray before she was rescued and adopted by us, is radiating her usual Zen-like calm. I couldn't write much of a story about this moment, but I could paint it, maybe, or compose a melody. That might be more pleasant than spoiling the mood with a crisis, just for the sake of building to a climax and resolution. As one who teaches novels and short stories on a weekly basis, of course I love stories. Once in a while, though, I need a break from them.

​My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Moment," is my own contribution to the annals of mega-happy art. (I borrow that phrase from the movie Wayne's World, in which the heroes regale the audience with a series of possible resolutions before concluding with the "mega-happy ending.") Nothing bad occurs in this poem, although it features a cast of characters who, for the simple reason of being human, will encounter frustration soon enough. The setting is the track outside an old school building on a warm day. A boy runs while his father times him, presumably because he has a race coming up. A girl with a sketchpad sits nearby, thinking of her own father and brothers as she watches this moment of familial bonding. The boy and his father finally leave, arms slung around each other's shoulders as their shadows cross the dirt, "both of them titans / through a trick of the light." That's all that happens, but a moment doesn't require anything more.

Sitting here in front of my computer, I am asking myself if I have ever felt as content as the characters in that poem. The answer is, of course I have. I have been blessed with many moments. When I was younger, I felt​ like each one would last forever. Now that time has passed, I find myself more intrigued by how they end. The universe has a way of winking on us before long: cars fail to start, knees become skinned, well-intentioned words get taken the wrong way. If we pay good money to watch Harry Potter suffer, perhaps it's to remind ourselves that we're not alone. Or, if his trials are bad enough, perhaps we're simply glad that it's him instead of us. I suppose if J.K. Rowling wants him to live unbothered, she can take up grecian urns.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "The Science Fiction Author Meets with Himself," a new piece from my manuscript in progress. A few weeks ago, I noted that "Poems at the Station" was the first poem that I had written with an epigraph. This is another one. Other than that, I will let the poem speak for itself. Thanks to John Brantingham and the other editors at Radical Wonder, as always, for the recognition.

Here are a couple of other recent noteworthy pieces in the journal:

John Yamrus, whose rough, spontaneous prose style has a way of cutting right to truths that many authors would avoid, has a genuinely poignant piece about the life of a small-press author. He has a new book out called TWENTY FOUR POEMS, and, as he writes: "all i know right now is that i got a new book out…i got a publisher who’s spent their hard earned money on putting it (and me) into print…and if i don’t tell you about it and ask you to buy one, then i’m doing me and you and them a great big fat dirty…and i’m not about to do anything even close to that." Please read his piece here, and then, if you're inclined, please look up his book on Amazon.

British flash fiction author Dave Alcock has a new piece called "Wreck," which offers a snapshot of a barroom conversation between two men. The story ends with the sentences: "Paul put his fingers to his forehead. He saw a friend’s wits sinking deep into an abyss. And he pictured Guy’s decency streaming rapidly away from him, like silver bubbles from the ruin of a ship." To find out how Paul and Guy reach that precarious moment, click here.

The hardest I have ever laughed at a poetry reading was the night I heard Brendan Constantine read "The Search Party" at the Ugly Mug in Orange. It was (or is -- I can't find it anywhere on Google, but I hope that a copy still exists somewhere) a short poem about a man who is invited to a "search party" and takes the word "party" the wrong way, dressing for the occasion and bringing a gift for the host. As he follows the other attendees in an all-night search for a tragically missing person, he maintains his optimism, even as the host mysteriously never appears. The poem's final line is "I still have my gift. It's a book." Perhaps you're smiling a bit at this description. It's funny enough to read. But my summary can't remotely equal Brendan's delivery; he projected the poem with a dogged earnestness that made imbecilic delusion sound almost admirable. I remember that he read it during the open mic and that it was the second of three poems. I have no idea what the third poem even was. I was in stitches after "The Search Party" to the point where my hearing momentarily stopped.

In a 2005 essay on Poets.org, David Groff wrote about one of the staples of poetry readings: the "mmmmm" from the audience that often follows the ending of a poem. "You’ve probably heard the sound yourself at a reading—an 'mmmmm' emanating from somewhere in the crowd, usually at the conclusion of poem with a linguistic or emotional zinger," Groff wrote. "Does that 'mmmmm' mean that listeners have been transported into the sublime? Or is the poem just cheap, the mmmmm a smug 'Amen!'?" As one who has attended scores of poetry readings over the years, I can vouch that the two most coveted reactions at such events are "mmmmm" (which typically comes after a closing line that is sad or harsh in a particularly eloquent way) or raucous laughter. Poetry readings, at their best, are performances, not simply recitations of written material, which means that short and pungent is often best. Yes, I know there are exceptions; Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl," after all, at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955, and the wine-fueled attendees who listened through the entire poem had a superhuman attention span by ordinary standards. More typical reading hosts would encourage a featured poet to consider that the audience is tired after a long day and eager to be entertained. Perhaps that doesn't result in many poems as revolutionary as "Howl," but it does result in lively Wednesday nights.

Some live poets are great actors or orators, and some are great comedians. Brendan is a great comedian, as are Jaimes Palacio, Eric Morago, Mary McIlvaine, Mindy Nettifee, Ben Trigg, Dmitry Berenson, and any number of others that I've seen over the years. I am not sure if I belong in that group myself. Yes, in the 11th grade, I was voted funniest student in my English class, an honor that I hold dear to this day. But as a poet, I've never tried hard to be funny, maybe for the simple reason that I would have to try hard to do it. If I inject humor into a poem, it tends to be dry and unforced. So it's a bit of a gamble that I submitted "The Poet's Nightmare" for publication this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. This poem is an obscure item in my catalog; it appeared in Spot Literary Magazine in 2011 and never in any books afterward. I thought about including it in Tea and Subtitles: Selected Poems 1999-2019, but opted to leave it out. As an outright attempt to write a comic poem, it might not have fit in with the other poems; then again, maybe it would have provided a nice change of pace. I don't know. In any case, you can read it in Radical Wonder this week.

What more is there to say? I hope the poem makes you smile. If it doesn't, then something else will soon enough. I'll leave you with the words of an anonymous open reader at a poetry reading years ago, who came onstage looking disheveled and, clutching a ragged sheet of paper in his hand, delivered six lines that no doubt prompted an "mmmmm" or two mixed with giggles:

     Roses are red,
     violets are blue.
     I'd suck as a horticulturalist
     if that's all I knew.
     If this poem were any worse,
     it would be a haiku.

If I have ever written a poem that could go on forever, it is "Poems at the Station." This poem is about nothing in particular, or everything all at once, and it could be either half its current length or longer than Ulysses. All it requires is a series of random times on the clock -- the poem mentions 6:57 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 1:18 p.m., 4:03 p.m., 7:15 p.m., and 11:59 p.m. -- and some general descriptions of activity that might happen in a train station. Of course, it opens itself up for a sequel. Yes, that last time mentioned is the minute before midnight, but something must still be happening at 12 a.m., even if it's only the janitor mopping the floor.

A few years ago, author Jonathan Gottschall wrote a book called The Storytelling Animal about how humans instinctively view life in terms of narrative. That's how we make sense of the chaos of random occurrences, which are really what fill our lives until we start assigning beginnings, middles, and ends. Things only seem chaotic when we pause to realize how many stories are going on at once. True, most of them don't involve us. Imagine that you're at a train station now, waiting for your departure time. You are probably not doing much of anything; when your memory writes the story of your life, this is a moment that it will edit out. But just now, someone tossed two dollars into a collection cup for a Third World charity. (This image is taken from "Poems at the Station," as are the rest that follow below.) A football game has just reached a crucial moment on the wall-mounted television. A toddler is going out of her way to stomp on every crack on the floor. On the newspaper dispenser, an obituary headline reveals that a person has died. There are magazines on the rack, music playing over private earbuds, a shadow of a white oak outside. Meanwhile, the clock on the wall reminds you what time it is, an update -- or an anxiety -- that we constantly seek throughout the day.

You are here to catch your train; that's what this moment means to you. To the emaciated child who will receive whatever food those two dollars can buy, it may mean life itself. Possibly the quarterback on TV feels like his reputation (or future NFL contract) depends on what happens next. The toddler -- why is she stepping on each crack on purpose? In the corner of your eye, as you scan your smartphone, you may have just witnessed the moment when she learned to confront a superstitious fear. The recently deceased, who evidently was famous enough to have his death reported on the front page, might have smiled at the thought of not dying in obscurity. To sit still in a public place is to sit at the intersection of countless narratives in progress. To feel each of those stories -- feel them, rather than simply acknowledge or empathize -- would require an out-of-body experience. There are no out-of-body experiences. Whatever our sensitivity, whatever our awareness, we can never absorb the world through any perspective other than ours. Each of us will never cease to be the lead character in our own life, never cease to live off the blood in our veins and the air in our lungs. As John Horgan wrote in an article for Scientific American, which sports the striking title "How Do I Know I'm Not the Only Conscious Being in the Universe?":

     Solipsism, technically, is an extreme form of skepticism, at once utterly illogical and
     irrefutable. It holds that you are the only conscious being in existence. The cosmos
     sprang into existence when you became sentient, and it will vanish when you die. As
     crazy as this proposition seems, it rests on a brute fact: each of us is sealed in an
     impermeable prison cell of subjective awareness. Even our most intimate exchanges
     might as well be carried out via Zoom.

It is impossible to know precisely whether another person feels the atmosphere the same way we do, because we cannot trade our neurons for that person's. What we can do is watch, and rationalize, and try to help when needed. So we smile at the toddler and keep waiting for our train.

"Poems at the Station" begins the final section of my book Angels in Seven, which ends with a series of poems about travel: to San Francisco, Iceland, Los Angeles, Cape Cod, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, some unnamed destination on Alaska Airlines. I am a compulsive traveler; my current project is attending all 50 states, of which I've notched 43 so far. I am not sure what I get out of travel, although clearly it's something. Perhaps it's pure adventure, maybe a desire to see the world from new angles. Perhaps it's to speculate about what another person's life might be like, even if I can only live mine. At stations, or airports, I sometimes find myself looking at the people gathered around. What are the odds of our paths coinciding here? We don't know each other, for the most part. Few of us will ever be in the same room again. We are here because all of our stories dictated that we should be in this place at this time; whatever our destinations, this depot or terminal is the jumping-off point to all of them. Certainly, we are not all here on a lark. Last summer, while my wife, daughter and I were awaiting our flight at the Boise Airport, we watched out the window as the coffin of a U.S. soldier was brought off another plane. A group of people -- probably family members among them -- waited outside for a ceremony on the tarmac. For the rest of their lives, this airport would be embedded in memory as a place of ineffable grief. Somewhere on our side of the glass, there must have been at least one child giddily anticipating his or her first flight, a milestone that would forever have the label "Boise" applied to it. Even at a moment of extreme joy or sadness, we can recognize the opposite emotion in others. It may just currently seem impossible for us to feel.

Then the clock changes. We all know what it means. We speak the same language enough to know that "station" for me is "station" for you, that each of us can scan the faces in line and affix the same word -- happy, sad, hopeful -- to each of them. We have all experienced the sensations that they do, we think. Maybe it was in that spirit that I started "Poems at the Station" (which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder) with an epigraph from another poet, something that I had never done before. The lines are from Lee Mallory, the most flamboyant Orange County poetry showman in his day and a protege of Charles Bukowski, who once wrote, "there is time and hopefully / a train." In Lee's poem, those lines are the ending. In mine, they're the beginning. As train stations remind us, any moment will suffice for both.

The rock critic Paul Williams once wrote that, when you come down to it, Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is a song about exhilaration. The narrator has decided that he has nothing to live for, left his home in Georgia, roamed across the country in search of a place where he can do nothing, and now...well, in a way, he's free from all concerns. "What We're Sure Of," my poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is a paradox in a similar way. Everything in the poem deals with some kind of anxiety: the death of grandparents, confusion about the afterlife, the threat of nuclear war, the irreversible march of time, homelessness, hunger, rain. And yet, I didn't feel anxious when I wrote it, and even when I read it now, seven years later, it has a certain lightness on its feet. At heart, it's a poem about not knowing everything. Perhaps a poem about actually knowing everything would be more ponderous fare.

I'm a teacher. Before that, I was a journalist. Before that, I was a student. I know lots of things, and I pass a lot of them on to people who might someday pass them on as well. My entire life, the only thing that I have ever received any money for is telling people things. I don't wield a hammer or a saw, perform surgeries, or build houses. Certainly, I wouldn't make it as an athlete. I live and work each day under the assumption that information is valuable -- Malala Yousafzai risked her life for an education, after all. After 44 years, I know the names of every U.S. president in order (and that Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms, and is thus counted twice). I know that Australia is both a country and a continent, that a banana is technically a berry, that Episode IV of Star Wars was actually the first one made, and that Andy Warhol didn't really say that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. I know how to drive a car (though I am rusty when it comes to changing a tire) and how to fill out an income tax form. The word dachshund is actually German for "badger dog," not "wiener dog." Periods and commas should come before quotation marks. If you heat a hardboiled egg in the microwave, it's best to drizzle a little water on it so that it doesn't get rubbery.

The above list may sound like a jumble of random facts. Of course it is. I could fill an infinite series of volumes about the things I don't know, but what I store in my gray matter has kept me alive so far. Obviously, it helped me to graduate from school and get a series of jobs. It would not help me against a tidal wave or hungry bear, but I take precautions to stay away from those. In the confines of my world, I feel like I have the right toolbox to get by. I hope the same thing for my students; every so often, I remind them that the main point of English class is not to pass every vocabulary test or place every semicolon perfectly, but to realize the extraordinariness of life and to develop a certain sense of empathy and perspective. In the 7th grade right now, we're reading Avi's brilliant 1991 novel Nothing but the Truth, in which a high school student does a cruel thing to his teacher that is passed onto a news reporter and then distorted in the media, to the point where the public is in uproar over an incident that never happened and the teacher's career is seemingly ruined. Yes, there will be tests on the reading, and I hope the students pass them. But more than that, I hope that they will learn to be skeptical about gossip, to understand the concept of biased news, to remember that there are two sides to many stories. Perhaps one day, like the title character of Slumdog Millionaire, they will appear on a game show in which Nothing but the Truth is the answer to the final question. However big, however small, something good must come of the fact that we read the novel in class. That's the faith that keeps us teaching.

I know, without requiring evidence, that I will never have a student who remembers everything that I told him or her. They will probably all remember some of it, and some of them will pass parts of it on. The information that they learned from me will compete for space in their own gray matter with information that they learned from countless others. That is as it should be. All that matters is that their knowledge will help them, whatever form "help" entails. Perhaps it will give them a ticket to Harvard, or the strategic skills to avoid the next pandemic, or simply an amusing set of trivia to mull over when they have trouble falling asleep. "What We're Sure Of," which appeared in the book Angels in Seven, is a rambling three-section poem that started after I had coffee with a fellow poet who told me that his grandfather (or father -- I may have tweaked the word) had died. The poet was marveling at his (grand)father's intellect and the possibility that it might simply have ceased to exist. "Everything he knew is gone," the poet said, and I incorporated that phrase into section one. Section two is about my office space, the bookshelves filled with memorized passages and the CDs that I played incessantly as a teenager, both for the music and the history behind them. The homeless woman who appears at the end of the section serves as a reminder of the limits of book knowledge -- "our luck determines what we learn from rain." We're lucky if our survival depends on Shakespeare rather than how to scrounge for water.

As I said above, it's not entirely a melancholy poem. Section three is where it turns brighter. That part is based on a real experience that I had years ago tutoring a Chinese girl; Cindy was her name, or at least the anglicized one that she picked as an exchange student. She was bright, inquisitive, and doing her best to comprehend Mark Twain's dialect in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, not the easiest book for an English-learner. She was determined, though, and one day, we stopped on a word in the text that reminded her of another. As the poem states:

                                                                                                   She pauses
           at sever, the cousin of severe, and I sketch a flailing hand cleaved
           from the arm where it once belonged. If you sever a hand, I say,
         you have a severe injury. She smiles, tugs a sleeve over her fingers.
         Severe, like serious?

All of that actually happened. I only tutored Cindy for another couple of weeks, so I can only speculate what she did with the knowledge I gave her. Hopefully, she ended up passing all the assessments about Huckleberry Finn. Presumably, she went back to China with plenty of stories about Americans. Perhaps she even encountered a situation where the word "sever" or "severe" came in handy. Or she may just remember them now as amusingly similar words, another quirk of the English language. Maybe that's why Otis Redding's vision is appealing to some of us. On the dock of the bay, watching the tide, we have nothing but time to think.

If I were in a coffee shop on a listless morning with the sky turning damp outside, I would probably want to hear Norah Jones' voice more than any other. Adele would be too dramatic, Fiona Apple too deadpan, Taylor Swift too mercurial. Put on "Nightingale" or "Painter Song," though, and then picture the counter dwellers in jogging suits, the steam, the rugged chairs and folded-over newspapers of a place that prides itself on imperfection. There's no voice that scores the scene better, especially at a volume just loud enough to hear. It's the voice of soft rain and lived-in shoes. Of course, in my mind, it should play in the background at Alta Coffee, the earthy neighborhood spot in Newport Beach where I attended my first poetry open mic, met the two people who helped me to co-found Moon Tide Press, even met my wife for the first time. In my very personal experience, good things happen at Alta. I'm not sure if I ever actually heard Norah Jones here, but my memory is happy to make concessions.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Coffee Shop," is about the denizens of the location mentioned in the title, but it starts and ends as an ode to Norah Jones. Really, it's an ode to her recorded voice, which plays on a portable radio while the characters go about their business. A girl with a stutter helps to wipe down the tables, even though she doesn't work there, at least for pay. A man at the counter rants about baseball. A group of people stop by from a local shelter, and the owner mutters Another lost morning to himself. A construction foreman enters feeling generous, orders coffee for everyone, and beckons the stuttering girl to dance. The poem ends with absolutely nothing being resolved, but everyone is pleased momentarily: They're alive, Norah Jones is singing, and the coffee must be at least decent. 

This isn't a terribly profound poem, unless it's profound by accident. It was a fun one to write, though (I used a semi-pantoum style that I haven't used before or since, with line endings recurring in the next stanza), and sometimes it's enough simply to capture everyday life without a grand statement attached. Evidently, the subject of hard-luck characters gathering for a smile and a drink has a lot of appeal to artists; I think of Billy Joel's song "Piano Man" ("It's nine o'clock on a Saturday / regular crowd shuffles in"), the sitcom Cheers ("Where everybody knows your name") -- maybe even Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, although we can only speculate whether his subjects hang out at the bar on a regular basis. I have been to many restaurants over the years and ordered many cups of coffee, but I have never been a "regular," with an affable group of friends always waiting at the bar to share a story and pontificate about life. I have my wife and daughter, not to mention fellow teachers, to play that role. I'm sure I could make arrangements at the local Starbucks if needed.

Actually, I would more likely pick Alta -- or the Ugly Mug, another marvelously rustic coffeehouse in Orange that became the indirect subject of a poetry anthology in 2011. That year, Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez celebrated their tenth anniversary of running the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry weekly reading series, and Tebot Bach published an anthology that featured "Coffee Shop" and a slew of other works by poets who commonly appeared there on Wednesday nights. OK, so I have been a regular somewhere, kind of. The anthology's title, Don't Blame the Ugly Mug, came from the words that Trigg said every night in his introduction to the crowd: "Don't blame the Ugly Mug. We're the idiots running the reading." Well, I never heard anyone blame anybody. It was a warm, spontaneous, and nurturing atmosphere (Trigg, who did emcee duty while Ramirez operated the sound system, called for a special round of applause for any first-time open reader), and I'm pleased to say that it's not a thing of the past; the series recently celebrated 22 years, which is literally twice as long as the run of Cheers.

The appeal of that kind of show (or song, or painting, or whatever) is that it features a group of characters from different walks of life who might never meet if not for this particular venue. That's the poetry world in a nutshell. None of us made a living off of the tip jar or the few books that we sold; we came in after a long day of being nurses, accountants, stay-at-home parents, landscapers, financial consultants, or whatever else paid the mortgage. We bonded over our love of a craft, and the camaraderie took care of itself. Sitting at this keyboard right now, I can rattle off a list of names and faces: Ricki, Lee, Jaimes, Eric, Kate, Brendan, Murray, Mindy, probably two or three people named John. Thursday morning would come with demands, but we made a beautiful Wednesday night. I'm sure Norah Jones played in the background at least once.

It may say a lot about me -- or about our culture -- that I never developed a fear of flying after 9/11. On that day in 2001, I was shocked and bewildered, like so many others. I watched the image time and again of the planes sailing into the twin towers. Even after that, I never felt anxious about boarding a plane -- not even on Sept. 12, 2002, when I boarded an 11-hour flight to begin graduate school in England. Some people winced when I told them that date of departure; I guess 9/12 was close enough to 9/11. But I had the same assurance as I always had: My seatbelt would fasten, the flight attendants would go over the guidelines for what to do in case of an emergency, and then an emergency probably wouldn't happen. I knew, of course, that the TSA agents would thoroughly examine everyone's pockets for box cutters. I spent those 11 hours on the plane reading, watching in-flight movies, and otherwise distracting myself from a journey that the average human would have found thrilling and terrifying a century ago. The flight landed in London on schedule.

It was not that trip but another (another of many; I honestly can't remember where I was headed) that inspired "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX," my poem featured this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. If the particulars of that flight have slipped my memory, then that perhaps proves the point. We spend much of our lives traveling at superhuman speed, and we do it to the extent that it no longer feels superhuman. Perhaps it's a form of reverse survival; the amygdala protects our body by sending panic signals to the brain, and indifference protects our sanity by desensitizing us to panic. The next time you're on a plane, think about the circumstances: You're barreling at a phenomenal speed at an impossible height, on a vessel equipped with enough fuel to cause a massive explosion if it ran into anything. Any person alive before Kitty Hawk would call you the greatest daredevil in history. But on board, the windows block out the sound of air pounding outside, the clouds drift agreeably by, and the ticket that you booked online states that you will land in a certain city at a precise hour and minute. If this moment really stood a chance of ending your life, then the stewardess wouldn't be smiling and offering you ginger ale.

Perhaps you traveled by air not long before reading this. Perhaps you drove a car -- something that is statistically far more dangerous than taking a plane. What compelled you was most likely not recklessness but trust. We trust machines, and pilots, and drivers, and above all statistics. In the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman's autistic character rattles off the history of crashes by airlines that he refuses to take. Audiences typically laugh at that scene; we're more inclined to think of the millions of flights that land without incident. "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX" is the final poem of Angels in Seven, a book about the onset of middle age, and its companion piece is the collection's opener, "The Chicago Window Washer Lets His Soap Paintings Stay," about a man who dangles on a cable over the sides of skyscrapers to clean windows for the well-to-do. Both poems are about being suspended in air. Both poems feature characters who face the possibility of death but more or less accept it. When I wrote both poems, as a spring chicken of 36, I imagined that that was what middle age felt like. Eight years later, I can't correct myself much.

Everything in "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX" is nonfiction. I wrote it to pass the time while waiting for the plane to land, and all the details -- American Hustle on the in-flight movie, the mountains reflecting light outside -- were what I saw around me. The opening lines of the poem reference 9/11, but more out of bemusement than fear. When those planes took off on that horrific day, how mundane did they seem? What crossword puzzles were being worked on, what magazines leafed through? It's doubtful that anyone on board was thinking about the awesome power of the plane itself, other than, sadly, the hijackers. To murder is to take away the gift of life. To give the gift of life is to allow the privilege of being bored by it. Any time we touch a tarmac safely, we are more likely to begin scrolling through texts than we are to fall down and kiss the ground. We have been spared a devastating fate in the sky, and so we begin looking for distractions on land.

That doesn't mean we're fearless. It just means that we have odd criteria for safety. Earlier this year, my family and I went to Honolulu on vacation, and we were given a hotel room many floors up with a remarkable view of the ocean. It also had a remarkable view of the street hundreds of feet below, and after nodding once at the beauty of the horizon, I gingerly moved away from the guardrail. What if it had a screw loose, some small defect that would give way if I leaned against it? I have no fear of flying, but I will admit to being skittish with heights, and if I could articulate the reason for those two facts, then I might hit on some grand truth about how we navigate life. Perhaps if I had made countless trips onto that balcony, thrusting my head forward to catch the breeze, then I would have learned to feel invincible. Perhaps I just needed a stewardess nearby, reciting the instructions for a parachute that I probably wouldn't have to open.

          Flying back to the shore
          I think that none of us are free
          bound as we are

          by promises outliving us all,
          the grasping at things
          pulling us in and out of worlds.

So writes Kate Buckley in "A Poem of Strong Wishes," which appears in her 2008 book A Wild Region. I have never heard any poet or philosopher state it better. Buckley's poem is about the narrator flying home to Kentucky to care for her grandmother. You may exchange that scenario for one of your choice. The overriding truth is the same: We spend our lives mired in work that we will leave unfinished. The promises will outlive us, and someone will take our place to keep them for a short while longer. Years ago, during a Sunday service at the Self-Realization Fellowship, I heard one of the monks say, "No one is indispensable." Since we are all dispensed with eventually, that realization takes on a form of relief.

But, as Buckley says, we are not free. All the rationalization that we can muster about the shortness of life or our tininess in the cosmos cannot erase the significance that we attach to our work. It is our work, after all, and we are the central character in our own life story. Perhaps we're paid for our efforts, and perhaps not. Perhaps they even appear to others as play or hobbies. It doesn't matter; at some point, we all take on responsibilities that we tell ourselves cannot be mishandled. Pilots promise to land passengers safely; firefighters promise to protect buildings; doctors promise to cure the sick. To make it through a lifetime without denting a single plane, letting a single building burn down, or losing a single patient must be some sort of vindication. The promises outlive us, true, but we can at least say that we kept them while we were here.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "The Pool Coach Sings Hallelujah," is about a man who has promises to keep. (Yes, I am thinking of Robert Frost as I write those words.) He is aware not only that they will outlive him, but also that they outlived the person who came before him. He also suspects that that person did a better job. Think back on the pool coach at your own high school; probably, you can think of at least one time when he barked at the students or paced exasperatedly on the deck. Swimming pools have a way of bringing out immaturity in teenagers, and a coach may resort to a martinet level of discipline to maintain his authority. No doubt Mister Rogers could have talked a rowdy freshman team gently into compliance, but he wasn't a pool coach. The lead character in "The Pool Coach Sings Hallelujah" knows the expectations put on him -- his predecessor was taller, and evidently had a deeper voice -- and he even has dreams in which the outlines of a coach walk around the pool deck and commands the team. He is the person now assigned to fill those outlines, and he's not sure if his colors fill the space.

It's a tough job for a romantic, but he is one. In the predawn hours -- before he encounters the pregnant sophomore again, before he's reminded of the drive-by a mile away from school -- he fires up his car and goes in search of the sublime. On the car radio, Aretha Franklin and the Sensational Nightingales trill; the constellations glisten above; the buildings and churches loom in silhouette. It adds up to a daily affirmation: Things can be done correctly, and they can look majestic when they are. At our best, we may look majestic, too. Sometimes, we feel that that's our duty; our promises to others can still involve plenty of ego on our part. Pool coaches want to appear formidable to the team, and if the team succeeds, then they may credit that to their powers of influence. The trick is harnessing those powers, and that can lead to anxious dreams. Failure, as the saying goes, is not an option for many of us.

If you have a piece of paper handy, grab it and jot down what you are working toward in life right now. In a small sense, each of your projects will likely be completed. In a large sense, none of them ever will be. The other day, my 8th-grade class and I talked about the persistence of to-do lists. We all spend our days checking them off, and the grind can be maddening at times. But what if the students stopped submitting their homework? What if I stopped planning lessons? The moment we began shirking our promises, we would realize how many people we made those promises to: parents, colleagues, administrators, everyone else who contributes to making St. Cyril of Jerusalem School a stable and functioning community. The school stands because we work to make it stand. We will pass the baton one day, but St. Cyril will loom without us. Before dawn, when the stars twinkle over the roof of the church, it might even fill a passerby with wonder.

I may never have written a sadder poem than “Thief After Dark,” the piece that appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. I am not talking about subject matter – no one dies in this poem, or even gets hurt – but simply about tone and consistency. Scanning over this poem, more than 20 years after I wrote it, I am struck by the sheer number of negative words: “didn’t,” “only,” “no one,” “without,” “never,” “not even,” “nothing.” Then there are the sensory images in between: “thief,” “silent,” “shadows,” “darkest figure,” “alarm,” “back turned,” “steal.” Morning does make an appearance in the poem, but only to emphasize the lines under a despondent woman's eyes.

I'm not sure if I would write a poem like this today. Would, not could. When I wrote "Thief After Dark" (and the 2002 chapbook from FarStarFire Press that bears its name), I was into grand statements as a writer -- not atypical of an undergraduate, I'm sure. I went for operatic touches, heightened emotions, characters who lived to be anxious or fatalistic. In the years since, I've sought a kind of equilibrium, a forum for the kind of emotions that don't easily fit under a label. Looking back at the last few poems that have appeared in Radical Wonder, I'm not sure if any of them can be labeled simply as "happy" or "sad"; they occupy a rubbery space in between. In "Woman Next Door," a comfortable couple watches a heated domestic dispute through window glass; in "Grandfather," an old man who has fled turmoil in Asia coexists in an American home with rambunctious children and their toys. "Ghost Town Pantoum," which portrays a romantic couple roaming through abandoned streets, contains the line "We kiss in the shade of the jail." It took years for me to understand the possibilities of that kiss. In poems like "Thief After Dark," we get only the jail.

But then, as the old saying goes, we should be moderate in all things, including moderation. Every poem can't balance the light and the dark; sometimes, we need to lurch into one extreme or the other. When I jotted down "Thief After Dark" as a student at UCI, I must have felt the need for catharsis of some kind. As I have noted before, many of my poems during those years were spontaneous, nocturnal pieces; I would wake in the middle of the night with an idea, scribble it in the notepad by my bed, then flop back on the mattress. "Thief After Dark" came about that way. I don't recall having felt like the narrator in the poem, but perhaps I was imagining the life of an older, richer person (he and his partner must have done well, at least superficially, to live in "a silent house along the coast") whose wealth couldn't shield him from despair.

I was a serious writer then, maybe to a fault. Years later, I would watch Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez hosting Two Idiots Peddling Poetry at the Ugly Mug and recognize the value of lightening up. Before then, I operated under the dubious premise that sober was best. Not long after I wrote "Thief After Dark," I got an invitation to give my first poetry reading at Alta Coffee, a gloriously ramshackle venue tucked on a side street in Newport Beach. The reading series was hosted by Lee Mallory, then Orange County's great poetry impresario; I had made his acquaintance by publishing listings for his shows in the Los Angeles Times and decided to chance the open mic there one night. Once invited back, I rehearsed my reading painstakingly, to the point where my co-feature took me aside a few minutes before showtime, gestured toward the people sitting at the dim, mismatched tables, and dryly intoned, "Michael -- these are your friends." As I recall, "Thief After Dark" was among the poems that I read that night. I probably did a good job of reading it, even if the show as a whole lacked a certain lightness of being.

Now, more than 20 years have passed, and that performance that once felt like a herculean trial has receded into memory -- mine, if no one else's. At some point in life, we take inventory of what has survived and what hasn't. Most of what I described above falls into the latter category: FarStarFire Press has gone out of business, Mallory has moved out of California and retired his readings, and the Times no longer runs Orange County poetry listings. What remains is "Thief After Dark," which I like to this day and which, to my knowledge, has never been pirated or plagiarized. I made certain of that; before I gave the reading at Alta, I registered all of the poems in my notebook with the Library of Congress to ensure that no one would steal them. Back then, I understood poetry as a business, even if it only paid in tip jars.