Wishes

When the radio announced a tornado warning
for a nearby county, I felt a little jealous, though
I knew to be grateful. Part of me wants
to drive to work in winds that make the car
dive back and forth and make the wheels
chirp. I want to work in winds so strong
they make the building rattle till you ears hurt.
I want to sit on the dock with a cup of tea
and watch the tornado yank up trees
until we see can feel our clothes lift
like kites. Then we’d rush back inside
and look for a safe place, wonder which
one of our shelters might hold up, wonder
if any of them might hold up. Surely
there’s one place in this building
that won’t fall hard enough to kill us.
That’s the moment I’d wish to God
the tornado was gone. But I knew
about that moment the whole time.
When I stood on my porch watching
the gray sky churn and flash, I knew
I’d hate it if it came. But I still
looked with my door open and watched.

Panic and Scream and Cinnabar

My daughter, not quite four, said these three words
in the middle of a string of gibberish. I didn’t think
she knew “panic” but when she said “scream”
I guessed she must have learned it from a movie.
But cinnabar? I had to look it up: a red mineral
that yields mercury. And I thought, here in the same
dictionary where I once looked up the word
“glossolalia” is the beginning of a mystery.
My daughter is speaking in riddle-laden
tongues and somewhere in the ore of her words
is a vein of quicksilver madness, or maybe
a message carried by the wing-footed god.
But there is also the cinnabar moth. A black moth
with bold red streaks on its wings. A moth
with a kind of beauty like the butterflies
my daughter likes so much. A moth that doesn’t
live here in Kansas. A moth that just flew out
of my daughter’s mouth, maybe full of dread,
fleeing some nightmare it didn’t want to be
any part of. A moth that leaped into existence
and fled in a panic, screaming with its tiny voice.

Your Poem

I’d just noticed how many of my poems
begin my pointing to me, even this one.
The capital “I” stands like a marble column
at the entry to some crumbling Greek temple
where, once inside, a colossal, looming statue
of me gazes down on you with empty white eyes.

But this time, I want to write about you.
This is a temple I’ve built for you, and you
alone. This poem is our only liturgy.
This time I want to write the kind of poem
you like. I’ll give you metaphors because
you like them. Even this temple is a metaphor.
This temple is a row of white teeth
behind which the tongue prays.
I’ll give you narrative because when you
came here and saw this place, you went
and took bright silver fish out of the stream,
wrapped it your shirt and pushed it
back under the water, up to your wrists,
your ring scraping a smooth flat stone
on the bottom, and pulled the fish back
out still soaking wet and ran to the temple.
You held the fish over your head with both
hands and let the water drip into your hair
and run down your arms, tickling
your flesh as it ran down your sides
and soaked into the band of your pants.
You lay the fish down, and with the long
jagged knife on the altar, gave the fish
as an offering to yourself. This poem
offers itself to you too. And since
you like poems that end clearly,
this is line where you raise knife,
and this is one where you bring it down.

Couple at the Laundromat

A couple holds out
a large white
sheet between them.
They stand erect,
arms out wide
with a corner
of the sagging sheet
in each hand.
They’re looking at
each other. She moves
her mouth and both
of them close
their arms.
She shows him
how to slide his hand
down to
the crease and pull
it up. He moves
his hand, she,
her lips and they fold
again.
Now they stand
a long time holding
the long rectangle
between them, saying
one or two words
at a time.
Now they turn the sheet
up--a short, white road
between them–and wait.
She nods and they both
take two long
fast steps to each other
and clasp hands, each still
looking at the other,
like they just might
let the sheet
drop.

Change of Plans

For some reason, the coffeeshop was closed
early on a cold and misty Saturday night.

Isabel was riding her bicycle there but the chain
popped off every half block she pedaled and I
pulled and rolled the chain over the gear again
and tried to keep my oily fingers off of my pants.

She was walking beside me when we stopped
in front of the shop. I held her bike over
my back, the seat on my shoulder blade, and stared
at the door looking for a sign explaining why.

Inside, the barista worked in the dark cafe
in a bright cell behind the bar. The tables
and chairs seemed to give a tired gray light
they'd absorbed from the well-lit business hours.

He never saw us standing there on the sidewalk.
He almost danced between the sink and the bar,
bobbing and turning with a rag in his hand.
He looked like a dream about to disappear.

I told Isabel we needed to take her bike home.
We didn't even go inside, just tossed it in.
We walked back downtown, where nothing was open,
noone was driving, and I followed my daughter wherever.

Soldier's Feet

I have a pair of camouflage pants
but I don't remember buying them.
I found them on a high closet shelf
and they fit me just right but still
I'm sure I never picked them out
for myself, or took them as a gift.
I wouldn't even buy camouflage pants.
But here they are. I'm wearing them
as I write this after work with my
boots still on, not military boots
but boots nonetheless, with big
metal eyes and sturdy laces stitching up
the leather just broken in enough
to look like they're pulled
so tight they'd crush any part
of them human body inside.

That's the part of the soldier
that looks the most like a soldier
to me. The tops of boots meeting
the cuff of the pants. Even on me,
though I've never been to war
or to anything like war, they look
skilled and purposeful. The feet
are always at attention, always
on the lookout, ready to hold
the rest steady and let the gun
shoot. If the body dies, the feet
lower it to the ground and stand
up in their black robes, praying.

Silly Poem About Existence

I cranked the bicycle pedals up to the top
of the ridge and lost balance. My feet
stuck in the toe clips, I folded over
off the side of the ridge.
As I fell in that long pause our brains
give us, maybe to extend what might be
our last moment of life, I was certain
I would injure myself. I saw the tree
that I would use to pull myself back
up on my feet if I could. I saw the rock
at the tree’s base where I would grind
my shoulder or my ear as I fell.
But when I hit the side of the hill
and slid down a little, I stood up
sore but unharmed.
It made me think that if its true
that there’s a universe for every
possibility, then maybe we feel
the branching happen. When I hit
the ground I felt myself split
like wood and stood up on the right
side of two selves, one with a leg
bent in the frame of the bike,
and one right here, sore, stunned
and grateful for his luck. If so,
call this a eulogy for the thousands
of dead selves I’ve left splintered
all over this one thin strip of existence.
They all gave their lives for each other.
Some of them believed in each other,
and even though I’m one of the ones
who doesn’t, when I climbed that hill,
I turned around and walked back
to the trail head with thousands more
imaginary, indebted lives following.

Parsley

I keep finding parsley in the fridge,
not just the flat severed fans but whole
bundles curled up in a bag and stuffed
behind the eggs. I’ve even found two,
One in the door and one with the lettuce.
You are like the parsley.
I buy the parsley for hummus or salad
and sometimes, I find I have twice
as much as I need, some I didn’t plan on.
It makes we wonder what I could make
with the rest. I want to put it in everything
just to see how it tastes. But mostly
I want to make something I could eat
with my hands, something made
with parsley and very little else, something
that would make everything aromatic
and saturated with its deep, vivid green.

While Walking Downtown with My Daughter

Across the street, a block away, a man
dressed as a clown trudges to the back
of a plain gray sedan and pops the trunk.
He pulls his yellow wig off of his nearly
bald head and packs it carefully away,
then his bright nose-ball with both hands.
then his candy red jacket with gold trim,
folded and lowered gently into the trunk.
By the time we cross the street, he’s standing
in a yellow shirt and jeans, a short man,
a little overweight. He looks nervous.
But just as we are about to pass behind
the church at the corner, he raises his round,
white painted face to us, lifts his hand
off of the trunk to wave and starts a smile,
just as we disappear behind the church,
that looked like it was going to keep spreading
off of his face and fall like some magical
crescent moon into the trunk of his car.

Strawberry

"And home they went as fast as they could go, over the bridge, up the road, through the meadow, and under the fence. And there, sure enough...." (The Poky Little Puppy)

I

My favorite part of The Poky Little Puppy
is where he finds a strawberry growing
on the ground and it means that someone
is making strawberry shortcake at home.
Since I first heard the story I’ve waited
through smelling the rice pudding
and hearing the chocolate custard
for that magical strawberry in the grass
that the puppy knew to sniff and all
of his brothers knew the meaning of.
What better to make a young boy look
at a woman’s shoe he finds one day
damming up the rain gutter, and smell
the impossible, god sent aroma of love
filling his whole being from the sinuses
out, with anticipation of a day he can’t
possibly brace himself for, one he’ll fall
asleep to every night for the rest of his life.

II

But I recall that it was after the strawberry
that the poky puppy learned his lesson.
He plodded back, over the bridge with it’s red
bark of curling paint and bowed wooden slats,
up the road with weeds growing between the ruts,
across the meadow full of dragonflies, and up
to the fence where the hole was now filled in.
As he stood outside, looking for a wide hole
in the fence to squeeze through, I’m sure
his head was heavy with images: the ripe
berry, numinous as a burning bush; his mother,
stern and wise, waiting for him inside; and
a new one, with no face, no name, and no place
in his heart yet–the one that keeps us up too,
wondering at the powers that put things
down in the grass for us, and the ones
that devour them before we know their meaning.

Meeting Place

My brother told me once, as he cut
the venison from the deer he’d shot
that week, that the first time
he shot one, he cried. He cried
because he’d removed something
beautiful from the world.

Yesterday, a deer swept across
the road in front of my car, my lights
on his hide making her look
like a ghost that I could drive
into like a fog and she’d burst
like swiped candle smoke.

My wife hit a deer on the highway
and came home well but trembling.
The car had a dent and deer flesh
in the grill. She felt lucky and guilty.
She felt her mortality like an ache
and worried helplessly about the deer.

I imagine the hunter crying with one
knee in the leaves, leaning on the gun
he’s holding in his gloved hand,
saying a prayer that isn’t asking forgiveness,
isn’t blessing the hot bleeding body,
but rather a prayer that comes easily

from the place where two beautiful
bodies have come together and one
of them stands, one of them falls;
one of them dies and one of them
kneels at the meeting place where
there’s one living heart still meeting.

Nine Years Old, Visiting Gene DeGruson's House

My dad needed to pick up something
he’d left at Gene’s house. An errand–
one of those little tasks adults do that means
you sit in the car or tag along feeling
that second flesh of boredom grow.

He parked the car at the curb
and showed me which way to walk.
Just over the trees I saw the tower,
with a roof that looked like a kite.
Just inside the trees, the house
was a stone monastery under
the broken prow of a fast ship.
The house was not a place for any
kind of adult that I knew. Only
a madman could live there. A recluse
in a lab coat pacing a room full
of red smoke and cobwebs of glass
vials and pipettes--maybe a whole
roomful of madmen, chained to stone
block walls, shouting manifestoes,
and clicking their foot-long fingernails.

We went inside, the door left open because
Gene was out that day, got whatever
it was Dad needed, and drove back home.
I sat in front seat, with ideas about what
it means to be adult, years of them,
drifting like broken moths’ wings
out of my head and through the open
window of that very quiet car.

Elementary School

Even if I looked like I was paying attention
I would often forget what class I was in.
The carpet was as hard as dirt road and paved
with gold squares, each containing a circle
that would fit my spread-out hand to the fingertips.

There was a square patch of carpet worn down
to the sinew where the wheeled cart stood,
with it's black rubber mats on both shelves
and its cold metal frame painted a color
precisely centered between green and blue.

On the cart was the breathing swan body
of the the projector, its brightly lit
organs visible though the fan vent,
and its two glass eyes on its bent head,
one looking out and one looking in.

The projector dumped its light out
on the roll-down screen where you could see
the shadow of the pond-ripple glass plate,
the permanent smudges, and the scratches
that stayed when the teacher pulled the transparency.

When the teacher walked past, the screen
would breathe. If the door opened or closed,
it would jump and the words on it would
bend like leather over your elbow and slip
about the screen like a sonnet on the water.

Even if I looked like I was paying attention
I would often forget I was in the music room.
Now the lights come on, the projector's heart
cools to a stop. The teacher says to find
our places. Everyone but me moves.

Each has place they know is theirs, the place
just shown to them on the bright screen
in the dark room with the shining windows.
Each has something to do in their place.
I look at the circles again and wait.

Missing Words

I wanted to write you a letter
telling you about youself, or at least
about myself when it comes to you.
But just after I wrote, "you have a
magical way of erasing my memories,"
I found a hole in the language.
There is no noun meaning,
"a nostalgia for the heartbreaks
of the past," not even close.
So I tried to write my way
around it but then I found no word
for the memory of the skin,
which can almost put your hand
back on mine. Even my thesauras
was no help. So I gave up.
What I need to say to you, I need
a whole new language to say.
That is way I would always look
at the unfolded letter of your eyes
and say everything but what
I meant to say and why, I think,
I read a sentence in your eyes
that ended in a long, trailing elipsis.

Many Ways

I boil water on a gas stove everyday.
I've boiled it with my breath and a small
tent of burning sticks in a rock box.
I've boiled it in a microwave
and with the focused sunlight
reflected off of the crecent mirror.
I've boiled it with electricity
and with the marriage of two cold
chemicals that surge together and scald.
Every time, the pot boils and steams.
Each time, I make my tea.

Dead Bird

I feel a well-captured urge to pick him up
and pull his wings out wide, even
if the joints groan, look him
in his opaque eye and feel his death
on him like an oily patina.

He's a little black spindle fat with thread.
He's the very glyph of a dead bird.
I want to look at his belly and find
the cat's teeth marks, the scar
of a power line that breathed fire.

Held out like this in my hands, his head
slung low, he looks like a man-made symbol--
the way we always span the wings out.
But I'd bet the birds put their ghost in the claw
or the throat, and wear their wings like a shroud.

Overhead, dozens of the same bird, alive
and loud, bounce along the power lines.
I've left the dead one untouched and started
walking home. Some flap their wings in place,
some perch like Reapers, still and watchful.

Tribute

Here's to the poem I'll never read
aloud to all my friends and make
unconqurable memories of.
Here's to the poet who wrote the poem,
who'll have to settle for someone
less manicly empassioned by his work,
someone less fit to be his biggest fan.
Here's to the religion I won't convert to
after the conversation with the stranger
I'll never meet, who'd have asked me
the most important question I'd ever heard,
and given me a hint that would have
had me searching for the rest of my long,
wandering, stark, and diaphanous life.
Here's to the strange pleasure I might
have discovered in the hands of a man
and his black box full of pills I'd have kept
chasing, and chasing with money from
the freshly-cashed checks that kept me
screwed down tight to a job I hated.
Here's to however many women who would
have said yes if I'd ever asked.
Here's to the thousands of towns
I'll never move to and rent
a small house in close to downtown
where the owner of the coffeehouse I love
most knows me like a brother and has
effervescent debates with me about it all
over hot tea she won't let me pay for.
Here's to all of my son's and daughter's
whose souls will stay in the ether.
Here's to every person who does
any one of these things in my place
and to each and every thing they
might have done but left it to me.

Awakening

A few times, I've fallen asleep in the middle of the day
and woken up with the sky colored dark blue and had
no idea what time it was. I've looked at the clock:
around six, but which six and what would it mean
if it were either one? I've stood up and walked outside
with a wet sheet of sleep wadded up in my head
and stood on the porch, listening to the sounds
of sparse traffic, wind, my door closing, and four
different kinds of birds chirping blocks away.
I've stood knowing I would quickly shed this body
for the one that was late for work or up too early
and anxious to get back to sleep, but this one,
the one with nothing to do but accept existence
and sense all the things around it, would stay
here until the last possible moment passed.