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There and Back Again

Word was, the
ward was ill, with a
wart on every body
part.  In the
past, the nurse at the
post would soothe their pain with the words only a
poet could use, but into
port was coming that night, a
wort whose unguent would heal all.  This was the
word, at least.

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Smugglers' Notch

Humans once conceived of love
as that which lasts forever,
and when it did, and we called it God,
it made us terribly sad, and a little moody
about the way the rest of our bets were hedged,
to have merely a being, from whose image
we were shed, a little more powerful and a lot
more forgiving.

Then again, love didn't always mean patience or kindness
but a lot of other troublesome things
and sometimes nothing

and then it was tremendous,
back when just the sound would rouse us,
LOVE.

I think I'll go to pieces
if I try to think of another word for it,
you said,
for the wind within this place,
somewhere between mountains, somewhere
between seasons, somewhere

between us being in love
and us betting against it.  I can feel
the wind, it is not love.  I can feel it
warming itself on the mountain's forehead,
it is not love.

But you didn't want a god to make
you happy or even me, who found on the summit
a lake I could look into and call it him.

Revisited, this place, in summer, makes me tired.
I climb here on earth's most perfect day
with a steadily increasing nausea, and the mountain
receives this maudlin gesture

with solemn ritual
as if it were blood,
as if I had something to give.

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X Marks the Spot

Alice Baker couldn't distinguish each
forgotten grave. Her idle joints knelt less.

Moments neared one penitential question.

Restless, saturnine, turbid. Uttering
vacant whimsies, she yielded, zealously.

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Godfather

The old man sighed and looked at you.
Do you believe in the forgiveness of sins?
You didn't say.

And the communion of saints?
You blinked, twice, made a whistling
sound from a toothless tongue.

The life everlasting?
The room couldn't have been more still.
And in that room, I understood

the trinity of your time,
doubling and tripling your life
each day. So spoke.  So said,

"I do," for you. He uttered
some suburban names over your oily
scalp, and when someone took a photograph,

you made a gruesome grasp for me,
as if to protest, as though you weren't
quite up to being apostolic, yet.

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the nightmare

On a planet called Escapod
there is a heaven
where the creatures

four-legged ones that is

go

when their legs don't walk anymore
and their anythings for that

matter

don't do anything like walking

THERE

it is (was) said

is a heaven

and THERE
dream four-legged gods
of a heavenly two-legged place

where people don't believe
or even dream very often
of a heaven

anymore

and when they wake from said dream
these four legged gods
shake their four eyed
heads

and then one of them says
every morning
because someone in Escapod's heaven
is always
having this dream

he says
"let me tell you
about my

nightmare"

and the others have
had it too

so say
 

"we know."

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Letter at Christmas

It’s snowing, and my feet are cold,
running laps around a track
squinting my eyes to imagine you there,
giving all sorts of feedback to novice
lacrossians on the field,
and me, trying to catch
your eye, and failing.

On this little day winter has tucked its hand
into the year’s back pocket
wanting to be warm and wombed in.

I heard your voice a few weeks ago
and it rings in my ears
like a siren song to an island
where people do what they want
to do and go
where they want to go.

I am plugging them with beeswax
and will not hear the song,
just hum it to myself in short staccato notes
until spring comes.

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On the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Grandmother's Death

You must have been cold--
   it was Roselle Park, after all, in December.
   Maybe it was cloudy, maybe the sun
   illuminated only a fraction
   of your future down the road
   on a morning that wasn't sure
   whether to fog or snow.

Some other things were probably going on that week.
   Maybe grandpa'd had a fight with someone,
   a child or two had learned to tie
   his shoe, you'd started a letter to
   someone you hadn't seen in years.
   The scar beneath your wedding band had disappeared.

Did you know then, that your heart would stop,
   or that your kids, my father ten at the time,
   would be told of your death before Phil,
   who'd worked too late that night?
   No, you didn't know, did you.

Maybe the bus driver knew or saw it coming, or a passer-by.
   Or your hand at your chest, clutching
   mercifully at its misdesigned mother,
   knew what lay in store for Alice Walsh.

Twenty-three years later I was born and with
   the ignorance and innocence
   that infancy would bring I knew you
   not, for twenty years I didn't even know your
   name, or kept forgetting, though now I say it
   everyday for fear that I'll forget again.

Alice. A-l-i-c-e. Cradled curves in a paper
   pram. I coddle the letters between my hands
   like the five fingers I never touch.
   Alice why not catch a later bus
   or is there something grander down the line?

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Words the Building Blocks

At nine we read
from Genesis,

chapter eleven. And the LORD had said come,
let us go down, and there confound their language

and the tower
was no more

and I sighed, like a believer whose fragile faith
is shaken, is ashes of a sudden. Even a student

sighed, another who
knew my language.

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You, Part Two

You didn't think you'd make the second act,
thought you were a player destined only for the first.

Then I told you about my lying problem,
and how I cry at the end of the Simpsons.

Even I had never planned for you beyond part one.
I thought you'd gone to Spain, thought you'd fled
the non-commitments we'd kind of made
and the promises we'd never even.

You, part two. It's not a pleasant calling.
Consider it a volunteer vocation
for all the celebrity crimes
you've yet to commit.

Consider it a mission to an underdeveloped world
of sorts, this skin I've borrowed,
this life I've tried to shorten enough
for you and I to quietly go

before part three of this puppet show.

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She, Three Years Later

She had yet to be hitched.
He was her Harry from the college years,
bulky and possessive
and still passionate about her.

I was a friend and a confidant
and an ex-lover, yes,
but one who couldn't care less.

She stepped off the train
on a cold October day
in a leather coat
no lover like me could afford.

In her hand a bag of apples,
red with promise
and as ripe as the harvest to come.

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The Shadows are as Important as the Light
                                                                   Jane Eyre

Like so many of my songs
   this was written in the dark
   under the shade of a burnt-out
   three way bulb.
Lines over words over other words,
   my words to you are a song.
   Do you sing my song when you
   are tired? It is then when
I write, like so many of my songs
   I am written in the dark
   where the shade of the lamp
   is darkest and where God
Is thick-skinned for winter, time
   over lines over others, your absence
   is what I loved most and hated most.
   This autumn on your hills he painted
Tears like so many painted in the dark,
   and when we woke up they were songs,
   of if not, then colors of songs, or if
   not, then colors. Do you view the
Treelines or the hills themselves? Where hills
   are at the core, you cannot see the tops
   of sycamores, or oak, or wonder why
   half of the sky is so concerned with dying,
The other half, with death.

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October

in a cold kitchen
and I am impatient
for the coffee

and the news

and even for you,
who have come here
from a long way off,

even my October grudge
won't budge
for you.

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Questions for the Cat

Why do you skitter away each time we enter
   the room as though
   you've seen a ghost.
Why do you wait until three am to sing
   three times then
   finally cuddle up.
What do you think the sun and the moon
   and the stars are.
What do you see when you look
   in the mirror.
Is the instinct ever in you, as it is
   to roam the wild,
   to kill, and if so, me?
 

Questions the Cat may have for Me

Why don't you call me by my real name.
Why do you stare at the moving glass and laugh
   then stare at the quiet page and cry.
Why have I eaten the same meal every day of my life.
What did you do with my mother.
Why can't I have babies?
 

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When Rhyme Left

It was a poison out of college, like
a schoolboy's alcohol, a lover's kiss.
And when it sang its song no more he missed
its lovely lure, no others would entice
him quite like it. So he gathered a hand
of other trumps and fell for other freaks
and chumps who'd stand him up, he watched the weeks
appear then go, the wars worlds fought, the sand
through hourglasses trickle, never sure
of where that quiet life would lead, or how
it all would end, if then would e'er be now,
if it would e'er return, a poison, a cure
from rhythmic eras fled, an it endowed
with lesser luck that often promised more.

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Why

Because I wanted to teach her a lesson.
Because I wanted to be on God's right hand.

Because I was at table with great men.

She broke a loaf of bread of love.
She crumbled me into her tea.

Why, why, why.

Because I thought the days were too long.
Because the night was too secretive a place.
Because I did my business in the glory of God's
carcinogenic sun.

Because I shaved every day it rained.
Because the sky was always the sky.
Because I was always I. That's why.

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All Ye Know on Earth

              "What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
                  What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"
                                                                                         ~Keats

Summer was the word
and we were all in love with words.

There was a lake, a hammock, and two canoes
and we all knew how to eat and drink.

It was the middle of a time and the end of
a time and the beginning of a time

but it could not be all three.
It was the anger of a knot and a tree,

two inseparable entities,
one a tumor and the other entombed.

If summer meant caprice,
the hammock and the lake and the we

were in love with the bee and its sting.
But summer meant no such thing.

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Celebrity

Everyone watched your face for a change.
Everyone knew what a smile would bring.

Still you made us wait like monks for judgment day
during the longer faculty meetings. You wrote notes,
arranged the rings on your fingers, sang songs in your head.

We only wanted change, and the blessings
that would accompany it, not the curses or
the struggles or the heartaches or the work.

We wanted out of you ten thousand smiles
in and out of crystalline mirrors on the seven doors
that opened to the room outside we called the sky.

But you didn't give them to us. You
only gave them to me.
 

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Shhh

Have you locked
your secret away?
Is the frosting on
the cupcake of
your heavy, heavy,
lie, dry?

It was fifteen
minutes and
a hundred dollars
away. Hey,
you said
you thought
you'd bought
the world.

You said
you thought
you'd even
spend the night.

Is your secret
safe and tight?

 

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What'd You Get

Nine hundred students now,
and still, this, the most popular question asked
in class. What'd you get.

They are like Halloween Peanuts,
Linus, and Lucy, and Pigpen, and Charlie,
who always got the rock.

As though grades were dropped
from an adult hand onto their
pumpkin-shaped desks.

No one says, "I got an education," or "a lesson I didn't expect."
No one says to himself, "What could I have gotten?"

I tried deducting points one day each time I heard it,
but this only encouraged them
to dare their neighbors to ask.

I cannot gauge the duplicity of the tasks:
marking a test, and grading it.

It's down there with flossing one's teeth,
cleaning the oven, writing a check.

But the impact is more,
and so I mark on, then score each one
as though I'm scoring a life,

when what they get will be a minor matter, I decide.
And what they don't get often enough is satisfied.

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Wallace

I, too, read him too much.
He is the poet's opiate,
the versist's vanity.

I fantasize that I might be him
in another incarnation
past Tate and Bly.

I dream that he would mentor me
through the crusty rhymes and
the rusted signs that should be symbols,

the likes or as that should be is.
He knew when history was worth poetry,
and when the hillside could not abide

without a winter night of rhyme
settling in upon it, some words
like snowfall curtaining the aspen trees,
never making it to the ground

above the some that make it--
heaven be praised--and all, of course,
beneath the words that never even fall.

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The Sixth Minute

On the seventh day we rested,
hoping for a break.

Time healed like a leashed retriever
with its big head hanging low.

The day was Sunday
but it didn't know it was Sunday yet.

The moon was in the sky at noon.
We called it the sixth minute,
we felt like we were on the sixth wave
from the center of the storm,

it lifted us higher than all the rest,
the final minute to breathe and wonder aloud.

You spoke up but I didn't hear.
I gestured but no one came.
The classroom filled with question marks.

Soon the wave was gone,
soon the ocean calm,
soon the floodlights flickered on.

You waited
and the seventh minute followed.
Life as we knew it left the room.

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September

Hiding
in the darker corners
of the airports,

Hiding
in the widows' corners
of the churches,

Hiding
in the morning streets
of the cities.

Shades closing,
Skies clearing,
Time stopping.

Hiding
in the stopped breaths
of countrymen

Hiding
in the slit throats
of martyrs

Hiding
in the smallest surf
of the beachhead.

Shades closing,
Skies clearing,
Time stopping.

Hiding
in the day
of night,

Hiding
in the earth
of sea,

Hiding
in the stern
of bow,

Hiding
in the you
of me,

Hiding
in the here
of now.

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A Toast

Once there were others. Syrupy carbonation, juices,
coffee like a song in my throat. They are over.

Sure there were thirsts for the less emulsified,
fame, reputation, the approval of mirrors.

Not long after the thirst for water came the one
for wind, and the creatures that accompany wind
just above and dangerously close to water.
I drank it as a saving grace to liquify me
from the solidity and heaviness of being young
and a man.

Ten years later the thirst for earth
and its riches, culled from American and European
soils, nurtured in casks and barrels, fermented
and refrigerated earth, I drank it under fever
and pains that demanded to be forgotten.

Maybe last will come the thirst for fire, I don't know.
The spirit must lean waywardly so. I can't see why
I wouldn't succumb as I have to the others,

but for forgiveness, but for the others being stronger
in me and having the strength to quench or
extinguish or the strength to save, but for them, then
surely I will drink to the final thirst.

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Leave the Light On

The shadows are as important as the light.
Jane Eyre

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Such As I Am

Such as she was, the bride
wore two veils to disguise her
visage, but the congregation spied
it still. The door closed and the usher
found her. "Such as I am," she said.

The organ played a tune
particular to no one's
ear, a few moms rose, some cried, and soon
enough he stirred too while everyone heard
her quietly say, "Such as I am" again.

The minister faltered, the best man
held in a trembling fist two
rings--the bridegroom kept his breath short lest
he stumble through the vows and her stunningly
humble refrain, "Such as I am."

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Loxahatchee Road

Every hero has descent,
from David's valley to the pilgrim's
crossing Acheron, some about to learn more
of a lesson than others. So we, too,

tonight, descending through the panthered
woods into the alligator evening,
past parking lots of pickup
trucks outside the bingo halls, westward

past canals abutting half a million
houses, fenced-in souls of the overworked
and overpaid, now we descend to
the limestone landscape of De Soto's reign.

He was the land's before the land was his.
Ours is the night at the last convenience
stop that doubles as a general store, out
beyond the turnpikes and the six-lane sorrows

of the over-policed roads. We buy bait
and toss it into the ordinary Loxahatchee
waters, trying to be ordinary fishermen.
You are next to me, in the dark, and the

radio's on, and the tropical skies drift
out to tropical worlds in the tropical
galaxies and tropical black holes and away
from us tonight, somebody is very, very

warm, involved with somebody very, very
cold, trying to warm them up, and failing.
And we whistle to them, in our
coded whistles, that it's ok to fail.

We do it too, tonight, in so many beautiful
ways, past so many beautifully terrible things,
over so many beautifully bleached bones of
natives, reptilian and human alike.

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Six Years Ago

Some days I see the freckles
you wore six years ago.

You pop your turtleneck
head into my classroom

and the eleven year olds
look at you and I am

in love with you and they
know it. It's written

all over the freckles
I wore six years ago.

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Delinguified

Well we played the game again last night.

I drew "summer"
and had to describe it without these words:
love and
green and
waterfront and
red wine and
poetry.

Well we lost the game again last night.

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Cheating

She called it that when he wrote about others.
Still, he couldn't resist. It is the other,

he explained, it is the other, he stammered,
it is the other, he confirmed, that one must

write about, obstructed by fewer blind spots
save one's own ineptitude. She didn't buy it.

But he didn't have to sell it, just keep
the rude pen moving across the page, he didn't

have to sell it, just plunge again into
the august waters of memory, he didn't have

to sell it, just write, knowing well in doing so
that she'd become the other soon enough.

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Letter in August

I'm glad you have these things to stress about,
they fuel the work.

My biggest worry tonight? Thirst. Seven steps away
is water from a spring so first-worldly
it makes my feet cold.

Someone told me a story this morning
about me not having a story to tell.

Sigh, I say.
One day I'll have a bell
to ring across the countryside
and wake some patriots up.

Oh and another thing.
Before I sing
of Byron's sickness
I'll take up pen
and write
a flighty but real response
to that letter you sent
on the stimuli at your kid's school
(the mating plumage
perpetuating
four thousand souls).

Maybe the pen will have ink
and maybe what forms will be words
that remind you
of the mother you are
and can be.

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The Weight

Alice knew well the weight: an ounce.
For twenty-two cents a day I talked with her
about you. Then you ran out of letters to write,
and I had no other purpose to post.

I saw her yesterday, six years later,
juggling another civil service job
at another place where I must wait in line.

She asked for you.
I'd almost forgotten your name.

 

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Letter to Bruce

When I left, you said sorry,
sorry you have to go.
We'd driven four thousand miles

into the sorry heart
of the west.
At the Long Beach ferry dock

you closed the door
and pinched your upper lip the way
you did when you were worried.

Through the closed door I told you
not to worry
though you weren't

listening or looking or thinking,
just driving away weren't you Bruce.
The only way you knew to say goodbye.

 

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Amicus Est

Like players on a mad stage
in a tragic city,
let's say Sparta,

we feuded all night long:
two families bent on changing
each other's unchangeable ways.

Next morning we fell in love
as Cupid laughed his way through
another hangover
and Olympian jelly rolls.

Let's say it was love
and not its tempting cousin
that lured us into Nod and out

of each other's clothes.
Let's say it was the ocean's shush
within our ken

but then again
I didn't push enough
nor did you budge.

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Since you mentioned the beautiful in me

You know this: beauty is that
which lasts. I know it too.

I could draw you a map of the freckles
on one girl's face
from my freckled past.

Another had her rust-red hair cut several times
in our time. I remember every length.

Two beauties in a scrapbook made of pages
and pages of rusty synapses.

Still others, though,
I don't recall so easily.
Not a face, on one, poor thing.

Why is it beauty hid its face
from me, along the way,
my vision blurred by other lesser wants.

What natural enmity did time
construct between us
such that I did nothing

with beauty's power,
bargained not with its eternal lure

and further, what prevents me tonight
from seeing it in your eyes,
blinded as I am by someone
who has fast become so close.

Beauty is a time-elapsing
photograph developed by a pair
of tired cameras on the forehead
of a fool.

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On Man

What, then, is a man.
One who expects nothing out of anyone
but surprisingly gets too much.

One who does the right thing sometimes
and, when he intends to do so, the wrong.

A stone needing to be hard but often
wanting to be soft.

A medicine on the shelf of an abandoned
hospital curing no one much of the time.

A sparrow who hits the glass
where an open window might be.

What, then,  is a man.  An opera, a science fair,
an architect, a bull-moose.  A nurse
and nuisance, a plumber and player.

A man is a god with his ears cut off.

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Fingers on the Guitar

Move when told.
Not so with you,
told to go away,
but staying, troubled cockerel,
wouldn't leave.

Weedled your way into my heart by sundown
day after day after day.
I remember the date as though it were that date
and is, I remember the moon being the perfect moon
that night. You threw flowers on the entrance

sprinkled petals on the kitchen floor where
love that I knew not as love was made.

Still, something in you made you try, curved me
like a bending spoon that tricked so easily,
because of course we saw the spoon and not your hands
all over it, like fingers
on a guitar, quietly changing,
quietly mourning
all the beauty they create.

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Dear Someone You

When leaving someplace dear I build a box
around this body fragile, making first 
the rule that none may enter, then I thirst
for things to bring inside, for while the clocks
of time and train allow, this lurid lair,
this fetid cell becomes my hollowed home,
more fit for hermitage or Nordic gnome,
unfettered by decree or strange affair.
Dear someone you, what is the something mold
that softly holds your square together tight
with me inside, that when we travel bold
to places quiet, blindness becomes sight? 
And when we somewhere in your loving fold
feel sometimes darkness, shadows still seem bright?

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A million bottlecaps

Mrs. Dietrich said
bring as many as you can
but don't go drinking
more than your mom will allow.

I brought in forty-one
bottlecaps
the next day. I wanted to 
see it,

see what the American number
looked like. 

I've drunk a million bottles since
and sung a million songs
to woo the wrong lovers,

then you. You are one
and I am a million gestures,
a million sighs

at the opposite sky
when the sun sets,
a million bottlecaps of empties.

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White

White walls, white pants
white couch, white counters
white shaded corners
white socks white smile

I want these words to whiten 
into the page, want my love
to whiten into your white teeth
white bones white blood cells
white jammies.

Under the white sun tonight

I wanna be whiter.
Wanna give the word
a new, non-racist slant
wanna wear white pants
with you inside.

I want you in the whiteness 
of the whitest day
in the whitest winter
and shipwreck you on the whitest bay.

I wanna double you
in coupled whites
in d.c. gold in blue sky mold
wrapped in whiter clouds
and hold you there
for a black and white minute

waffled white
like the breakfast booze 
in the whitest mug

Wake me up 
in white.

You, the whitest,
wake me up. 

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In the backseat

I'm in the backseat
back at home tonight

a long ways away
from you.

I've stayed behind
to see how far my weakling heart
can stretch 

while you pull its strings
across state lines.

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Because Be is the finale of Seem

I made the list.  I didn't want to.
But it was time.

First came So-and-So,
then came Much Regrets,
followed by the ratpack

of five broken hearts
(mine, not theirs).
I wanted the list

to reveal its own trends,
to answer a few sundry
why's that had accrued

in my head like stalactites
slowly growing more
absurdly skyward over the years

but having no sky to kiss
when they got there. 
I didn't want to count the hers

and she's and misses.
The ones who didn't become forever
though should have

against the ones who didn't become
forever and didn't want to be.
Forever is a rotten word.

I closed the list. A microchip
run by a processor tied inexorably
to a monitor asked me in the past perfect,

do you want to save the changes you've made?
Did I want to save the changes I've made.  
No. I didn't want to save the changes.

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period exclamation point

This summer is big,
it says rest, rest
play the rests and play the beats

play the redhead's xylophone
on skintight bones.

Come on sings the sunset skin.
Move it whines the watery deep.

I am deep.
Plunge into my baby breath.

I am a stone
skipping mightily on celestial
waters

thrown by a master's hand.

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