Three Haiku

A cricket and I
danced in the bathroom today.
I bowed, and stomped him.

This moon-like street light
won't even allow the mist
any of its secrets.

A jack-o-lantern
and I sit on the cold porch
with our two faces.

Halloween Gourd

I carved a tiny face into the bulb
of a small green gourd and cut
two holes into its head for air.

I carved a candle small enough
to put in it's head and cover
with the scalp I took from it.

It was a face with almost no
detail. Two diamond eyes,
a wedge nose and bow smile.

It had a fire in its head just
breathing enough to stay
awake and out of the wind.

You held it by the neck
upside down as the fire
heated the head inside.

A smell of hot pumkin-like
flesh came furtively out
of the bright eyes and mouth.

It's serene little face
looked ancient and glazed,
like some fossil that finds you

and tells you with its dead
features, all the dreams
of the hands that carve it.

Seeking God

In a clearing formed
by dozens of converged
trails, a tent stands open.

I've come here by one
trail or another, dropped
my bag, crawled in, and slept.

By morning, the tent
is gone and I'm sitting up
at the head of countless trails.

Food and the Hands

Apple

The fist with a weapon.
Yank out the stem like a pin
on a grenade.

Peanut

The knuckles know the seam
to press and split the hull.
They work like a rhythm section.
The hands labor for the mouth.
The hands don't think about
the mouth; they work, and when
they're done, they sweep
the empty shells together
and off the edge of the table.

Banana

You hold,
tight.
I'll crack
the end.
Easy now.
One,
just so.
Two, again.
Three.
Keep holding.

Manna

They must have held it
in both palms together, lifted
above their heads with open
mouths and let it sift down
through the hour glass
of their two cupped hands.

Water

Drunk from your own hands,
it tastes a little like you. Even
your body makes a circle
from your shoulders around
to your hands and mouth.
You swallow and bring your hands
a little closer in, not like the snake
eating itself forever, but like someone
who's just discoverd something
inside themselves worth taking
and has just begun to reach
with their hands.

Not Listening

Sometimes I listen to the news on the radio without
paying attention to the stories. I listen to the voices,
how many and how loud. I hear accents and gender,
temperement and interest, but no news.
This comes from listening too much. The way
you can eat too much and taste little but feel
the chew and swallow, the heaviness in your gut
and the swelling of your belly in your clothes.
I'm full of news and words. A bag of memory
in by brain is swelling with slanted questions
and irrelevent answers. A man makes his voice
swing a fist of indignant contradiction and laughs
too hard. A woman speaks in a language and
her voice fades to another woman speaking
another language, English I think, and then
the sound of traffic and whistles and words.
When I get up and turn the radio off, I feel
like I've walked out of a room with a patient
still talking about the reasons he needs me,
and I've discovered he's hurting me and that I can't
help him. So I stand in the hall, listening
to the sound of his voice that I'm not certain
isn't just the echo in my memory.

Good Use

We're looking at rows of pupkins up on hay bales
to find the best one to carve a face into and light
from the inside out. I wonder what percentage
of pumpkins are used this way until they rot.
Are the best pumkins the ones with good round
ribs, smooth orange rind, and a thick straight stem?
Are these the ones God meant to create? Is this
the Platonic form that all pumpkins imitate?
If I were put up on the block, would someone
come along and say, "His mouth is just fine
for pinecones, and each foot could keep four
flowers wedged between the toes, just so?"

Small Pile of Pebbles

The tickle of bee feet on a smooth forearm.

The knot of breath in the neck and no "goodbye."

The thorn holding back the blood.

The lost tongue when the candy falls out.

An itch you don't scratch but brace against.

A language you love the sound of.

The sentence you won't say.

The moist weight of tired, open eyes.

Those eyes closing and just feeling
the mossy edge of sleep and opening again.

On Trying to Implement Taoism in Your Life

If I took away the stuff the walls
are made of, what would I do with the rest?
And how much larger would these rooms
be without their walls? Without walls
my rooms would be so large, there would be
more than enough room to hang all
the world's great art. Without the paint
in the painting I could send the masterpiece
to you in just the right words. Without
letters, words are too long to read
and by the time you're nearly done
with one syllable, you've thought
of something better to say. There's no
way to say it. Saying it changes it.
How is this going? Is it working?
Let me check. Um. Just keep going.

Four Identical Stanzas

The ticking clock and the dripping faucet
played percussion for me while I typed.
The clock had the beat and the water
clearly had the rhythm and I just sat
back and believed in what they were doing.

Whenever a reporter on the radio has
to whisper, I listen with my whole body.
Something in the hiss of their throats
transmits the human hum of being
and I can't help but feel akin.

Out for a walk downtown, I feel drawn
to the left, like a nerual turn signal.
I turn left at each intersection until
I come back to the same place I started
and the feeling stops.

The slower I drank
the water, the better
it tasted.
I drank
water as slow
as I could.
I drank
water.

Guilt

All you have to do is listen a little closer
to the one distant bell of a guilty memory
and then the hymn plays forth, the one
they play when they try to drag
the spirit in, willing or not, just to make it
dance. But this church has instead of
an altar, a chair, and there you are,
and the hymn has your name in it
and your friend's name, too--the friend
you punched in the groin out of dumb
curiosity, and you still don't know why.
Maybe it's a reason you still have.
Maybe that's the person you are.
And there he is in the front row.
Now the hymn has her name and you
close your eyes but hear her voice
and begin to recite all of the good
things you've done since then.

At The Pied Cow in Portland

They asked you for a name, which they would shout
from the door and you would raise your hand.
Noone gave their real name and noone laughed
at any name you chose. You are Agamemnon
and that's just fine because your waitress
is Desdemona Lisa and you believe her.

When the plate of cheese and oolong tea
arrives, and you cut off the tip of the chalky
white wedge you've never tasted before,
you wonder if this is how Agamemnon eats.
Yes, it is. Of course it is.

A Broken Man Finds Respite

Here is a caterwaul of flowers
and a whisper of grass clippings.
Here is an argument of hedges
and a cacophany of climing vines.
Here I am sitting in a gripe
of a chair on a nagging porch
without a sound in my clang
of a throat, waiting for something
to happen in my tambourine brain.
Even the bees and the flies
are quiet little chimes in this
drum-roll weather where I can't
even remember what time it is
or what it would mean if I knew.

Eclipse

Once, in high school, I saw an annular eclipse.
I saw it a thousand times on the ground
like raindrops, a thousand rings of fire
cast by lenses of arboreal light. Each
like a gold coin spilled out by a long-
vanquished god who hid his blessings
in a scrambled clockwork of sun, moon,
earth, and sky to unwind long into ages
where all of his stories have unraveled
and taken other names, other nations.

I showed my friends the rings and each of us
took just what would fit in two open hands.

Watercolors

The row of watercolor cells reminds me
of the portholes in the side of an iron ship.
A couple must be making love in the first one,
and someone's playing a cello in the second.
Even from this far away, I can see the fight
happening in the orange window. The black
cell is almost empty. There's an oval of white
in its middle where the soul is escaping.
Maybe it was the first room to fill
with water on this sinking ship, the brush
having finally worn the hull through.

You and Solomon

Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twin fawns of a gazelle
grazing among the lilies.
-Song of Songs 4:5

Your breasts are like wine glasses,
two glasses of red you've poured
for me to taste with my fingertips.

Your eyes are like dimes,
the glint in the pupil like the torch
on the reverse.

Your hair is like an ounce of tea leaves
unfolding in the kettle of my lap
giving up their liquor to me.

Your shoulders are like two beaches,
one where I found a bone in the sand,
one where I found the terrier.

Your belly is like my porch,
the corner of my porch where
I sit and drink my tea.

You skin is like Kansas City,
both sides of the city
with all of their nighborhoods.

Your mouth is a lake,
a lake I swim on looking
for a fish to catch.

Your feet are metaphores,
twin metaphore with twenty
implications for my mouth.

Wreck Anniversary

The first day that felt like autumn was the second
anniversary of the wreck. The one that took my dad
and dumped him in a ditch, as boken as the bike.
I spent a lot of time on my porch not remembering,
with Isabel urging me into games with plastic rules.
I drove home from work that night in the cool
window air and felt the wheel of seasons click over
another time. This was another fall coming
when I wansn't looking; another summer I lived
and sweated through until the days waned
enough to bleed the grass pale and sallow.

But I haven't told you that my dad survived.
He's in his Eden now with Mom
building a mansion with one room and as many
windows as they could find. He sent me a picture
that day with a note that said he'd forgotten
the wreck until they started driving home.
It's a place just north of here where I doubt
anyone could think much of the past. It's a place
made of eons of future and ages of present time.

Ted Kooser Eating Cake

He sat down at a table with a small
piece of cake and started signing books.
Whenever he was left alone for a moment
he ate slowly at his cake with slow,
even clumsy, stabs. I wanted
to talk to him, about his poems,
his paintings, and art. I was armed
with relevent stories about all of these.
But something about the way he ate,
with certainty of purpose, caused me
to pause the way you would to interrupt
a person reading or a dentist drilling.
His cake was an hour-glass, when it ran out
he would stand up and ask for his ride home.
And he did. I let him take three of those
bites and went home with my book
unsigned, leaving him with nothing
to remember me by.