God

He’s like an old woman who’s lived
on this block for more years than anyone
here has lived. Her house was there
before the town and she has the tallest
tree in the county in her front yard.
Someone keeps the lawn up, paints
the fence, and collects the mail but
no one’s ever seen her outside.
An old uncle says his dad used
to visit her and play on her piano.
Since then, everyone has a piano
in their house and someone’s always
playing one. Sometimes the sound
comes from the direction of her house.
Every once in awhile, someone shows
a card they got from her for a holiday.
The cards are always unsigned.
Everyone has something to say about her
and all of the kids tell stories
that can’t all possibly be true.

"The House"

I’ve been to a few of them: houses
that someone has left behind
for the living to empty out year
by year, whether it’s the one
they loved the most, the one
who remembered the first time
he looked at the house and thought
of the job ahead of him, even
while the mother, the father, the friend
was lying in the next room
needing water and waiting to say hi.

At the moment the house becomes
his, there is no moment of silence.
Outside, two teenagers holding Cokes
and cell phones complain loudly that they
wouldn’t have to walk if they had a car,
while he waits for the ambulance.

Now the house is holding its breath,
growing gray and losing windows.
What does he say when someone asks,
“Is the house empty?”
“All of her stuff is still there,” I suppose.

He leaves it there, not waiting, just living
his life with a bleak task for him to do.
And the house sits on the familiar lot,
waiting for a ghost that never comes.

Chutes and Ladders

I bought Isabel Chutes and Ladders for Christmas.
It’s a game that you rarely finish–no winner, no
second place, no loser, just two to four players
pacing back and forth making illusory progress
up the grid, climbing the hopeful ladders, sliding
down the sobering chutes. It’s an endless game.
When you stop tracing the slides and just pick up
your piece, its face frozen in eternal anticipation,
and drop it down on the numbered square, then
you’ve realized something. It’s a life lesson,
one that might not be so good for us to learn
at any age. Unless the lesson is a broader one,
one you learn when you take your finger off
of the spinner, put up the game, and stretch.

Fame

When I stepped outside today, I saw the sunlight standing boldly on my porch. The air was warm for December, so I started some tea and took a book outside, my teapot, cup, and strainer lined up neatly on the porch rail. Across the street, a woman set up a tripod on the sidewalk in front of the fire station and I thought that a man enjoying his tea with a good book on a warm winter day would make a good photograph, maybe for one of those front page stories about the weather they often run in the paper around here. I started reading. When my tea was ready, I put the strainer over my cup and pored from the small read teapot, a nice looking teapot, simple, elegant, a good photograph–the amber liquor pouring into the cup while the man squints against the sunlight and holds a book open on his lap. She was packing her camera into her van by now, a large black van that looked like it might be one she used for business. I looked back at my book and tasted my tea with my right hand, the one that wasn’t between my face and the van. The tea was good; I’d made it just right. It happens that way with tea. Sometime you use just the right amount of tea, steep it just long enough, and the weather is just right. There’s a lot to it. Like photography, maybe. The light, the focus, the time exposed. Maybe the woman’s photo of the building would turn out perfect, like this tea. Maybe it took her so long to finally start her car, after she climbed in, because she was wondering if there was anything she’d missed. After the van left, I started paying attention to my book, the chapter about Confucius, and tried to figure out if Confucianism is best considered a philosophy or a religion.

I spent all of the snow in the land of Doh,
but I paid only half of the going rate for all
of the impossible things they sell there.
We don't have words to describe them
but each comes wrapped in silk with one
silk worm, killed and guilded, sewn
to the top as a button to hold it together.
Once it's opened, you can't use it until
you understand it a little more. I've tried.
Here's a haiku I wrote about mine:

Christmas present--
inside of the box,
the inside of a box.

Not Impressed With Death

I read once of a Jain physician who, struggling with the Jain law against killing any living thing and the necessity of killing bacteria, concluded that to live is to kill; it’s inescapable.

Tomato seeds need to pass through an animal’s digestive system before they can germinate. The animal carries the seeds far away and, unconsciously, plants them well-fertilized.

Bamboo spreads underground and shoots up out of its underground network of roots. To stop it you have to surround it with tightly joined metal barriers. You have to kill it over and over again.

We once believed that all life needed oxygen to live. We found vents under the sea, too hot for any life we knew, with no light, no oxygen, but with bacteria we named for its breathlessness.

There are good and bad parasites, bacteria on everything, a patina of life on every surface and in every crevice. Death seems lazy--quietly taking one life at a time, as they come, no more or less.

Giving Up On the Protagonist

When you have children, you see the same movies
so many times that you start looking at everything
going on in the background, on the faces
of the extra characters and in the sky over the story.
You start looking for the ones whose stories
aren’t told. You start following the one
who doesn’t have any lines, but keeps showing up.
You’ve lost interest in the hero, his sweetheart,
and the villain. You begin to question, the way
we do in our own lives, the value of this story.
You begin to look for a better one going on
in the back of the crowd of spectators–
someone back there isn’t watching, he’s talking
to a woman nearby. He’s given up too.
Our hero has made the same promises a few
too many times, bested the same enemy over
and over again. Maybe we’ve missed the real story.
Maybe someone out there has a better idea.

Watched Through Dark Windows

It's late and cold. I park the car and lock it,
though this isn't a neighborhood where you'd need to.
The lawns are all well kept and the streets
are all curves, no right angles, no stop signs.
I'm looking for a house I saw once when I was young.
No one lives there now so I decided its ok
to get out and look, just from the street.
There aren't any sidewalks here so I have to walk
through the yards of a neighborhood that looks
like they'd call the police, and there are signs that say so.
When I find the house, it's hidden in the trees.
I stand at the no tresspassing sign, with nothing
to look at, just enjoying the feeling, hanging on me
like a long coat, of being a suspicious looking person.

Man, Work and Woman

When men get together to work
with their bodies, a sphere of prayer
encloses them–a prayer of bone
and the small, potent muscles
of the hand. This prayer is sung
to a rhythm of joints and weight.
The dead matter of the living Earth
moves through the air, weightless
with the angels’ wings of work.

Sometimes, though, a woman
walks in to give one of them
a message, a reminder, a favor,
and the prayer stops. After she’s gone,
the men stand in the thin air,
feeling strangely singular, and straining
against the heavy lead of their work,
with a new and fluid feeling of being
a whole person, doing a half-man’s job.

The Song of Time

They say humans first understood time
through music. I wonder who it was.
Who was the first singer that beat out
time on her knee while kneeling
at the edge of a cliff, harmonizing
with her echo, and received
the enlightenment of rhythm?

And when she came back to the cave
and sang, did they praise her and offer
her the best rabbit their fastest runner
could catch, or did they wait until
they found that when they cooked the meat
until the part of the song that goes,
“I carry water home in my hands
so you too can taste the stream I found,”
then it isn’t bloody and doesn’t burn?

Maybe she kept it to herself and only
sang at the edge of that cliff every
morning before anyone else was awake.
Maybe she died with that song in her heart
and let someone else bring song of time
to all of her kind. Maybe it was another
singer on another hill, who heard her
and, one day, hid his own voice inside
of hers, echoing back to the hilltop.

A Dream About Fear and Love

Hundreds of us chose an empty building
by the mall and waited for the storm to pass.
But when we saw the roof of a Wal-Mart
floating past us like a space ship, we all
hushed. Someone started it in my corner.
We all began kissing each other. One
by one, we’d kiss one time, hold hands and smile.
Then we’d say goodbye and take up the hands
of someone else close by. We did this so
we’d remember each other the next day,
when someone asked, “have you seen my son?”
someone else would say “yes, I’m sure I did.”

Darkness and Light

for Jason Miskell

The way you loved darkness was like the way
I saw the stars yesterday, miles outside of town.

I think you wanted to extinguish every flame,
every lamp and candle, so you could have only
the light that survives the violence of this world.

You said you wanted to get a permit to carry
a broadsword with you wherever you went.
Is there anything left to fight with a sword?
Are you out there guarding the darkness
and re-killing the old armies that fell there?

They say you can see a candle flame through
miles of darkness. I don’t know if there’s enough
darkness left, enough respite from the glare
of all the unclosed eyes in this world, to see
if that candle is still lit, if someone took it
out of the window and pinched it to the wick.

I don’t think any news I might hear about you
would surprise me now, but no one has any news.

The last I heard, you were in Wichita and dying.
That was a long time ago.

And just in case you’re wondering about me,
I havn't heard anything. I could be anywhere,
but nothing here in the dark and the light
would surprise me anymore.

Snow Angels

Maybe some of us would look
like angels if we could see
ourselves as a blur of our entire
lives, frozen in one image.

If we could see our lives
in the snow, as we’ve lived
so far, we could watch ourselves
change, and know when to turn back.

If we could see our images
sweeping out the very truth
of ourselves as we lived, the world
would soon fill with angels and devils.

Kansas Gets It's Kids Back from God

My state came before the throne of God
and laid at his feet an offering, itself, the whole
state of Kansas, and said, “would you teach our young?”
God took them up and, forty days later,
sent them back, in love with everything,
and curious about this world. In fact,
no sooner had they come, than they began
studying, and, in between their speeches
about wisdom and brotherhood delivered
on the green lawns of the schools, encircled
by friends and some who laughed, they looked
out at this mysterious world saying, “Wow!”

Learning Coffee

The first time I smelled
coffee beans, I smiled.
I would smell the can
while Mom and Dad
drank that mysterious
black liquid that seemed
like the cup that all
adults must one day drink
and become serious.
Even when I forced myself,
years later, to like the taste,
I used the memory of it’s
smell to search the walls
of its flavor for the door.

Pouring Hot Water into the Snow

Close to quitting time
I turned off the coffeepot I use
for tea and carried the glass carafe
out of the break room and walked
through the cold warehouse.
The water rolled and steamed
as a walked. It look like something
useful still and I felt like I could be
doing something more useful
than I usually do here.
I would like to walk outside
and pour the rest of this water
into four cups, shaking
in the awkward grasp
of four gloved hands.
I would like to splash it
on the hinge of a frozen door
and hear it groan and give.
Instead I opened the white
metal door to the dock
of the warehouse and walked out
to the snowy edge and held
the steaming water out.
As it poured the eight feet
to the snow paved parking lot,
it gave up its heat in a puff
of steam that leaped out
of the thin rope of water,
and climbed up–the same way
we often imagine the soul
leaving a body as it falls,
suddenly killed, to the ground.

Killing Animals

I set up a plastic mouse trap and left the house.
When I came back, I’d caught one. The trap
hadn’t even broken the skin, but the mouse
was dead and I was grateful for the bloodless
counter top and the peaceful look on the mouse’s
face when I dropped him into the trash can.
He still had a peanut in his mouth.

If I should ever have to kill a man, I hope
it will happen the same way: bloodless
and quick, no visible injuries, an open
casket funeral, and a look on his face
that made it seem possible I’d just done him
a great charity–that I’d taken him before
his life got any worse, before he could do
whatever it was I had to kill him for
trying to do–hope still shining in his eyes.

Regeneration

Isabel and I are drawing
in the dirt with a stone and a
stubby twig. First letters and then
round faces with little dot eyes.

She wipes out everything I draw
as soon as I finish. Each face
disappears the moment it’s born.
I’m annoyed a moment and then

I notice I’m getting better
at drawing tiny round faces.
Each one comes a little faster.
Each one looks a bit more alive.

Inside My Home at Night

At two-o-clock in the morning, my light
is the only one on. There's nothing
for the windows to let in so they've turned
on me. They reflect my image as a gray
ghost sitting in a chair so black, it punches
a hole in the window and lets in just a few
dirty gray stars. When I look at the window,
I can feel them at my back, holding me up
with the dim fact of their existence.