Person

Mrs. Lessing small and brown
was the lucky one who taught us grammar.
This was on a planet called Eighth Grade
where all the aliens called themselves
by the same name and everyone else
became a third other.

She stacked what we knew in a list
of pronouns and inflection.
Of course it was easy,
a logical paradigm of speakers.

Ever since, our singular and plural forms
have labored mightily to communicate with 
the middle singular and plural forms
which appear exactly the same
just as I don't change a thing
addressing who reads this alone
versus a collective audience.

Neither you nor you are listening.
I separated itself from we
and turned the rest into they.
Them, said Mrs. Lessing.
You don't understand, we said,
every conjugator but one leaving the room.

After Jupiter

All day while running errands
I kept looking for a king, his hands
festooned with thunderbolts,
but our worlds are too apart
to ever discover him again.
He rotates elsewhere
busy with brainy work
and forever trying to dispel
the huge fuzzy Spot
where he remembers me,
though I've always hated red
and prefer to be pastel,
impossible to explain away.
Jove cannot banish me.
This way we think reigns so great
that when I emerge from the hardware store
his face rises like a dozen moons
in twelve new corners of the sky.