The Uses of Elves

Did I say they remind you that dance
is a possibility, that to be small
is one step closer to disappearing

and music can squeak from pipecleaner throats?
Their three-fingered hands stroke your downy arm.
Their thumbnails crease your face into puckish smiles.

Remember you have friends hugging your knees.
If at midnight it begins to rain, they will pull you
past mushrooms into hollow trees.

At first you won’t think you can sufficiently duck
or scrunch in their pitter-patter homes.
But you are smaller than you think, scarcely taller

than the one who climbs onto your patella
to offer you an acorn of mead.
After the first sip, you join their tapping.

Vicarious

One day I lost the word vicarious.
It became part of someone else’s life:
the woman impaled in Nanking,
someone in Kansas watching his house
tornadoed away. Or was that Dorothy,
or was the word serendipity. How old
do you have to be lose your vim,
to forget cara, to be part of us.
I am forever fleeing my own mind.
Words evade me, trapped in a submarine
that smells of men after the direct hit,
when the word comes back as the alarm clangs
and the water pours in, taking them down.