Mindful of the Wind

A shredded black string flaps from a nail in the roof of my porch.
I hammered the nail in the summer and hung a wooden wind chime from it.
It cut itself apart on the ragged edges of the holes drilled for the string.
Even without the chime, the wind blows through that same place.
One of the long bamboo shafts rolls back and forth on the porch floor when the wind is strong.
The string quietly jumps back from every breeze.
This happens when I’m not there.
It happens when I am.

Collision

All of the other cars
flashing past in the other lane
and the ones flowing
slowly forward and back
along with me in this lane
seem as simple as light.
They are made of knowledge.
Keep a fair distance and they pass
through the air easy as mosquitoes.

Today I made a foolish turn
and all the metal from every
automobile dropped down
heavy on every groaning spring.
The drums of the metal panels
thundered and all the glass
rattled in every door.
I let the car drift to the curb
like a body with a bad reason
for being aware of its bones.

I forced the door open
and took an unsteady step
out into a world stricken
with matter–all of it pressing,
grinding against the rest.

Watching the Moonlight in the Side of a Train

There's a train painted over with mirrors
making the moon dance like fireflies in its side.
It's a moving lake wrapping up whatever gift
it's carrying across this piece of the plain.

I've got a lake folded up inside of me.
I've wrapped all the other lakes inside of it.
It's the first lake I remember, the one
where I caught a dead bluegill on broken branch.

The lake is an ocean of lakes. It's many
horizons wide and the world goes about the rest
of its business with timeless vigor
when I float at the center in a little boat.

The boat is not a symbolic boat, the lake
folded up inside me is not the lake with the boat.
The moon was never in the train and the gift
wrapped up inside is not the fish or the branch.

A train may carry a boat and a boat may hold me
up on the water at the center of the lake.
When I see another lake, a feeling unfolds horizons
wide while the world goes about it business.

Ill

My stomach was a bowl
of hot soup burning
itself into a hard
pocked-marked knot.

The stomach sleeps,
gentle, senseless,
most of the time.

Mine awoke in a newborn wrath.
It was my fiery seed, my pit.
The heart, the mind, unstrapped
themselves from me
and the world was the Devil’s
for all my flesh could tell.

Days After the Snow

Remembrance

I bought four tiny teacups by mail
and when they came one was broken.

Three white nurses and one sick brother.

It’s silly, but I’ll remember him
when I first sip from the other three.

Poem Kills Man

How it happened is he read a poem
with a lot of strange caesuras
and subject changes in the wrong
places and just fell dead—
asphyxiated on all those dipthongs
thicketed with strangling fricative
consonants spoken on the dregs of his breath
by the last word of the only end-stopped line.

With his eyes blood-shot and his lungs collapsed,
he rolled up under his desk and died there.
The poet said that poem has always
been misinterpreted; that man
was the first one to truly understand it.

Several poems for November (with a reading of Two Faces)

Ars Poetica

A poem is one side of a conversation,
one that started with shoes, but now it’s about
the Buddha’s flower sermon. The way
you came is dark and overgrown,
but your feet feel like Lazarus tasting
his first supper after that death ended.

It’s the same conversation to read as to write.
The poet only has more decisions to make.

If you’re both up to it, you stop talking
in those places made for silence.
You leave each other no wiser.
You forget what you talked about
and you walk home, stepping on the soles
of your shoes, walking the shoe sermon.

**********

Anger

All of the old angels had a job to do.
They came when needed and left.
Gabriel spoke, Michael fought.
I don’t know the name of anger,
but I believe that anger is an angel.
His job is to look and make
you look back. He comes like a cat
from around the back of the house
and looks at you with those eyes.

Anger is an angel of truth, an angel
of love and purpose. You look back
for the righteous joy of looking
at the truth, at the love, and the purpose.
You look until your own eyes shine,
with the iron light of the angel’s eyes.

When Anger closes his eyes
late at night, late in the year,
years later, there’s the world,
like a book whose acid is eating
it own pages. The angel has gone,
so you find your own reflection and look
hard something like the truth,
or love, or purpose, or just
the anger to light the world up again.

**********

The People We’ve Never Touched Are Under Water

But once we begin to touch them
pieces emerge
like fossils, one bone at a time.

Our pools turn grassy with protruding shaken hands,
and grow
lily pads of slapped backs.

Everything shifts under the skin of the pool,
refracted,
vanishing under webs of light.

Sometimes a hand reaches out from the water
and rests
a glistening print on your cheek.

We walk with our wet faces to the wind.
Cool gusts
put the hand back. Again. Again.

Sometimes we draw someone out with our bodies.
We begin–
hair with our hands, lips with lips.

**********

Two Faces
after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.

The young man’s eyes are crescent with patience,
as if he's washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from the face,
painted white so the wounds show up well.
He cleans the same Christ whose feet
were washed with the woman’s own hair.

Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
Tungurahua darkens the land with a plague of ash.

The statue’s eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, fixed on a distant fear. This
is the Christ who felt his Father forsake him.
He’s unaware of being cleaned, unaware
of the damp rag and the hand. He’s aware only
of the fiery eye of God and of his own chosen flesh.

**********

Boredom

This is a day of ancient significance.
The mail doesn’t come, you’re boring
your family, and the tea tastes like paper.

Maybe you’ve slept too much. Your dreams
sank to the bottom and you woke up empty-
handed with no hunger for your breakfast.

Your nerves are buried deep and waiting.
You’re the exoskeleton letting go. Your soul
waits like a cicadae to break loose from you.

This is not a poem

I'm afraid that school is keeping me busy enough that I don't even have time to post the few new poems I have written. I'll try to put up an omnibus post soon.

Work

You think about death a lot
when you lift things for a living.
I stay healthy and my back is strong
but my wrist is sore from twisting it.

My shoulder blades ache underneath-
I hurt myself sometimes and it’s harder
to work. It’s easy to think about death
when a small piece of you goes bad.

I’ve pictured my knees crunched flat
by the long iron conveyor belt so often
I can feel the endorphins loading
their guns when the belt rumbles by.

The mind/body dichotomy becomes
the rag of the body damp with its mind.
Sometimes I can feel gravity
pooling the first drops up at my feet.

The Plains

You’ve heard it said that the mountains are topped with cities in the mists of heaven,
that the gods reside as far from us as the heights of Earth will seat them.
I say go down to the plains where the giants cannot hide and so are never seen,
for as long as we’re with them, they’ll stay up on the knobs of the devil’s spine.

You’ve heard it said that there is death in the valleys where the bones are frozen
in the shapes of strange animals that simply quit moving. You’re near the aching heart of Earth.
I say go up to the plains where Flesh and the firmament meet in a shifting skin of grass
where the ghosts are pooling up knee-deep and miles wide with names the length of songs.

You’ve heard that the ocean is filled with the progeny of human wonder,
that your footprints wash out into the water and salt the past with your presence.
I say walk through the plains where tide-less time has absorbed the shore,
where your footprints wash away in sound and the ghosts can barely believe you exist.

Short Poems

a dime
that falls off
a dresser
and rides the trough
of your spine
into your pants
and sleeps
in the hammock
of your underwear
until it falls
(when you first
notice it, diving
down your leg)
into
your shoe.

Looking for Good Poems in Poetry Magazines

Sometimes the only poems you can find are cobwebs,
the ones with dead bugs
hanging, but no spider left to bind them, drink them up.
They come off in your hair with a sticky rip.

There’s a phone ringing in a toybox. It’s buried.
We don’t have caller ID.
Imagine,
being a toy in that box–no usable hands.

Once, as a boy, I was so bored I left the only room
where anyone
was talking, and hummed a song that sounded
like boredom. I’ll never forget that.

Night Ghazal

Your cotton-seed ambition keeps you awake in the dark.
The clay-sod failures keep you awake in the dark.

The burning house down the block makes the trees shine
while the smoke-genie watches the neighbors huddled awake in the dark.

Roaches love street lamp light and bats stream from trees when you clap–
two things to behold when wandering awake in the dark.

Three sets of eyes: the coyote’s, the dead deer’s and mine.
One flees, one flinches, one lies still, seeming wide awake in the dark.

My daughter interrupts her bedtime story, “there’s something I need
to tell you, Daddy,” and falls asleep. I finish the story, barely awake in the dark.

A Common Wish

If not for the need of sleep
I’d be living twice the life
I now drowse through.

At night, I’d drink my wine,
my tea, my strongest beers,
or just water while I write.

I’d read my shelves empty
on a table layered with dead
pens and one live one flying.

I’d teach myself to dance, to fight,
to paint, to draw, and remember.
I’d read to my daughter till she woke up.

Then all day, with eyes still
light as diamond-shine, I’d make up
for all the lost dreaming.

Parallel Love Poem

The air smelled like your hair one evening,
the wind carried your perfume to me.

My brain whirred the possible smells around,
My mind searched for it’s origin.

It’s silly to stand on your porch with your heavy bags,
A fool smells the air with his shoulders bending down.

I stood still until my brain quit flapping,
I didn’t move until I could say your name in peace.

I smelled your hair until I thought I might feel it,
I breathed the air until you almost appeared.

Listen to this poem

Stress

You pocket so many problems and then
you’re standing in the grocery store by the tea
and you feel the minerals start precipitating
out of your bones. Your body makes a little beach.
You’re speckled with dead jellyfish. Your brain,
your captain in his boat of bone is sinking
in water so salty his skin goes white.

That’s the new you for a while now. Don’t forget
to eat or the clothes won’t fit anymore.

A little fresh-water stream feeds this sea.
One day the whole thing will taste clean and sweet.

Listen to this poem

September 11th Art

Once in a while you get
wounded,
punched,
right in the mouth,
your cheek torn
ragged on your teeth.
But you don’t spit
all the blood out.
You swallow a bit,
not because you think
you get it back,
but because once in a while
you need to get
a taste of yourself,
and there you are,
already open
and running
like a fountain of youth.

Listen to this Poem

Why I Don't Have a T.V.

Religion and Science are at war in the yard.
Philosophy and Poetry quarrel on the porch.
It’s getting hard to sleep in this neighborhood
with all of the fighting. The coffee and the tea
are arming themselves with mass anti-oxidants
and preparing for battle before the water even boils.

The other day Philosophy and Science allied
against Religion and Poetry in a skirmish over free-will.
They all want me to take sides; each one fights
a little harder when I walk past, tries to look archetypal.
But right now I need the sleep, sleep and caffeine.
I walk past them every morning sipping whatever’s in my cup.

Learning to Tango

If you don’t dance well
it’s easy to let your mind
slide down out of your head
and go warm in your arms
and belly where she’s
pressed up against you.

Just keep dancing!

You can’t carry her around
inside of you like a baby.
Once you learn this dance
you’ll both disintegrate, anyway.
And then you can do
whatever you want.


Listen to this poem

Wands

Find it here

An Ode to False Love: Calling the AT&T Help Line

After fierce phone-battles with endless representatives
strung out in lines of networked webs where somewhere
in the cloud of thread there’s a moth caught and ready to be bound...
I came to Clair. I will call her Clair for her clarity,
because she told me “yes” and “no” in precisely
the right way, and that “no” I didn’t need to pay.
I said my phone battery would soon die, and then it did.
Our love did not end in a reluctant truce of warring hearts.
We were cut at the green root by the mechanical blade of fate.
She is now the rose hung bud-down with the black petals,
but I tell you they were once Phoenix-feather red
and the thorns could draw painless blood from your hand.

This is not a poem

I'm offline again for a few days.

Three Poems for August

Love for the Living

"Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same."
-Heraclitus

God commanded the light into being and the shadows came.
Creatures came to inhabit the shadows and began to draw blood.

When we sons and daughters sat on the immense skin of the Earth,
with its eczemas and cancers showing, and tried to make sense of bad,

the universe spun a womb and closed itself inside.
All the sun-lit blood runs inside it. All the broken hearts beat here.

When one of us sits on the immense skin of the Earth and tries
to make sense of bad, you remember them from the very beginning.

**********

Two Faces

after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.

The young man’s eyes droop with tolerance,
like he’s washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from its white
painted face which shows the wounds up well.

Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
It darkens the land with a plague of ash.

The is now the Christ whose feet were washed
and the one who felt his father forsake him.
The eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, not aware of being cleaned,
but only of the fiery eye of God and the One loneliness.

**********

Determinism: a Thought Experiment

Imagine, if you will, a tunnel you run through
blind folded, dancing as you go. It was built decades ago.
You never feel even a finger brush the walls.
When you turn around and take the blindfold off,
the tunnel’s shape is a silhouette of you
running, dancing–a three dimensional, hollowed
out, time-lapse cameo of you, wider by a hair.
You squeeze your way back to the tunnel’s mouth.
You have to pry your feet loose when they wedge
themselves in the narrow troughs where you stand.
When you get back to the beginning, your skin
is pink and stinging from the scraping tunnel walls.
The world glistens with the dewy question marks
of free-will. And your skin grows back, of course.

This is not a poem

I'm offline at home right now. I'll be back when I'm reconnected.

Kyobancha

The tea smells like pipe tobacco.
The smoky aroma comes from an extra
firing to which to producer treats the leaves.

My dad smoked a pipe for a time.
Maybe I drank several cups
of that tea out of nostalgia
for an old nausea I’d lost,
one wrapped in the pleasant pill
a deep reaching memory.

My first girlfriend smoked.
You can learn to love the musk
of cold tobacco smoke when it comes
to you in lover’s lust-drunk mouth.

So here’s the cup of displeasure
I steeped from the fallen leaves
of memories that are filling back in
with the stink and boredom that only
brews in the present cup. I drank
it a few days and gave the rest away.

The Cockroach

A cockroach climbs the siding
of the house. It leans into each groove
and pulls the last long section
of its hard body over and reaches again.
It looks almost human as it goes.

So, how am I like the cockroach?
There’s a poem that writes itself....
Let it!

The roach just reached the porch roof.
It crawls along the corner a little
and snaps its wings sharply open, drops
and flies in an arc to the ground.
Will we climb again, little roach?
Or is this what we’ve come for?
It it time to walk away from the wall?
We’ve got a lot of decisions to make,
you and I.

Saturn

There's a tiny, overgrown island
at one end of the lake. I've never
stepped onto it, but when the water
isn't too low to take the boat around
I imagine the narrow path that might
run from that shallow inlet, up
to the top where I might have built
a small wooden deck with a single
table and a telescope standing
strange as an ostrich in the middle.

You can look at the pale ghost of a planet
through the lens and imagine your own
spirit unsheathed and seeking shelter
on the terrain not even hinted at
byt he smokey jewel in the telescope--
it's enough to look a the gray gleam
with its just-visible rings and dream.

Often it's enought to look at the bony
frame of the telescope with it's barrel
aimed wildly high to dream your dreams.

Sometimes to paddle a circle
around the wild viney island--
and sometime to imagine the island,
the thin boundry of rippling water
between me and the first of its weeds,
and the way it seems to turn as I circle--
sometimes the lumber lays itself
and the telescope turns on its own
agianst the obscene circling of the earth.

Summer in Kansas

Summer in Kansas is why,
despite the legislature,
despite the Board of Education,
and the specter of God in politics,
there is space for the atheist.
Argument by design; the perfect
balance of day and night, the fine
cocktail of oxygen and carbon dioxide,
the unaided perfection of the eye;
all falls apart in August
when the sun, the moist smothering
atmosphere and the burning winds
all stand forth against the lives
of every worshiper and every
blasphemer to show us this world
was not made for us, and we
are not so well made for this world,
and the only defense against this creating
is a tiny air conditioner of
decidedly un-divine design.

Water

When the water main broke, I
had a pitcher in the fridge still filled.
I drank a glass of water and made tea,
and put the rest back.
This is how it is in so many places
where the water doesn’t come to you,
but this would be the happier moment,
with the water in the glass,
the tea still steaming in the cup,
whose handle is still hot–
barely a thought of the buckets
by the door and the long walk
to the river or the hard walk back.
This feels like plenty, it feels
like gratitude. My gratitude
must wait until the river runs
back to my kitchen sink, herded
along the pipes by the men
thirstier than I, breathing
the 100 degree air, making the water run.

Three Cups of Oriental Beauty Oolong

Three leaves, still on the stem,
are rolled into a twisted splinter.
You could, while drinking the brown cup,
unpack a symbol for a triune God,
but which is the tiny prized bud
and which the larger less useful leaf?
But, oh, it is a cup of blasphemy!

Maybe these are the three ways
I love you: the truth of you,
the woman I’ve imagined of you,
and the astonishing mirage in between.
I want to taste every cup of you
until you don’t even darken the water.
I’ll do it just to warm your leaves.

Each root brown pack of leaves
is a slip of birth, life, and death; but what
does it mean drink so many down? How
many souls do I drink at one time?
Do they reincarnate as often
as I steep them? Who was it said,
“when drinking tea, drink tea?”

Three

An apple goes bad in the grass;
it goes good for the grass;
it grows well for itself.

My teeth go bad in my mouth;
they go good for the economy;
my enamel is flour for an inedible loaf.

A God goes bad in the grass;
it goes good for the spirit;
grass sprouts prayerfully from the heart.

Feathers

The wind blew a feather against
the sidewalk at my feet.
It fluttered a bit on its shaft,
and until I looked straight on
I believed it was a bird
pecking the ground for seed.

Sometimes the thought of you
comes, and before I recognize it,
I feel a need to pray on my knees.

Familiar Cars

I have a brother who's moved away.
He's full of hinges and hooks. Here
he's loaded down, here he's just brushing the ground.

I have a friend with open window and boxes
packed to go, always different boxes.
She is light and a band of darkness.
I almost see her everywhere. I always look.

I have a friend who's never the same.
He's wrecked or brand new, just bought
or borrowed. He's a yardfull of parts
and a history of shifting machines.

I have a friend who is long and blue.
When she moves everything rattles
and I feel it with my whole body.

Old Road

Strange machines shave the street
down to the original brick in long
ragged paths. They’ve left it open
but no one drives this road because
it feel like driving down an open wound.

You step into it like a river, like you think
you’ll feel fish tapping past your knees.
They’ve taken up the curb so the road
runs up to a grassy bank. Down this far
you wonder what’s under your yard.
How deep down have they pressed
the past, like old cities buried up
to their spires in new earth, like layers
of ages that skirt the hollows
of ancient chapels in planes of colored dirt.

Someday soon they’ll pave it again,
but now I like to step down where the bricks
run wild red with the long claw marks
from the bright machines ripping up
the present and showing the raw, red past.

Letter

Somehow, by the guidance of blue ruled paper,
small packs of words bear up all the weight
a voice won’t. When you wrote “sweet dreams,”
I nearly felt you lie down beside me.

Yellow Ribbon

Someone gave me a magnetic star-spangled
ribbon that reads “support our troops.”
The package is topped with a plastic flag.
The ribbon is water-proof, it does not fade,
and it was made in Taiwan. The money
goes to support more ribbons on more cars.
The magnetic silhouette back can look, depending
on how you turn it, like a grim reaper’s hood;
a simple fish with one enormous eye; or
a sack, tied at the top, bulging with its load,
and holding the reaper’s face, the fish’s eye,
or a ghost's glimpse of the empty space inside.

Off to War

The 891st Engineer Battalion, Company A, Kansas
National Guard left Pittsburg on a warm December morning.
I took my daughter downtown to watch them go.
The streets were clean and breezy. On each corner
and storefront a small group stood talking
and shifted homemade signs from hand to hand.
We all spoke to strangers without asking names.
When the bright yellow buses turned into the light
down the road and came our way, everyone
put their coffees down at their feet, I pointed
and told my daughter that we were going to wave,
and the soldiers leaned out the open windows
into the gentle air of the town and waved
their whole arms, smiling like school boys at us all.

For the Body

I've crossed two iron arms
thought the air by my heart.
It's not a cross to crucify
or to ward off forces old and low.
It's to feel the mineral moan
in the throat of the iron
when it brings it own bones together.

I've broken my bones over each other
and my throat told no stories but this:
grass stains on the bent parts
of the body, that body badly
shaped for the slatted light inside.,
the ghost holding on in long bags
hanging out of the fracture....

A part of you has seen
the daylight now; the sun
has been inside your darkest parts.
You are sutured-up, scarred, and full of stars

Sitting Outside at Night

I welcome the air into my clothes. The pleasure moves
through my hair like bats through the body of a tree.

You infested me like the air churning with bats.
We were a cave breathing wing-beaten air.

The cave spills bats like ink into the moon-glow
of the clouds from its countless chambers and veins.

Here’s a red stone from one of those chambers.
It balances on my pulse and dances faster

as I remember the shining blind eyes, the air
between us, and sound still echoing from the cave.

Giving Up on My Eyes

I’ll let myself go blind by decades.
My eyes are a little less awake each year.
But I won’t get the new pair of glass
every time the driving frightens me.
I’ll bear down harder on my eyes
and bend the world in to sensible shape.
I’ll press them like marbles in my pocket
until they become two oval stones
with hazel-blue jewels floating
in their cracked-glazed halos
By then the light in my eyes will come
from their own molten cores.
I’ll have the visions of prophets
and the world of darkness w
will feed me its dreams through
the thirsty soil of my body.

Love Poem

I like the last breath of candle smoke
after the flame is snuffed.

I prefer the embers blushing with black
patches to the waving flames above.

I love the prayer that’s spoken
over the grave of a God.

I love you like a heart that’s given up
every idea its ever had about loving.

I love you like there’s no love
left in the world to lie down on.

I’m blessed with the neglect of God
and the gifts of creation to inhabit.

I’ve toppled the pillars of heaven
and the whole thing came down on top of me.

Highway Trees

The wind breaks planted along the highway look
like the front porch of a forest full of sunlight.
There’s always a hawk dropping down, talons out,
onto a limb in the crown of one of those trees.
You could be flowing down a trench, cut smooth
through the wooded swells of the Ozarks,
but look out the side window and the empty fields
show behind the shallow blind, breathing in the heat.

God is growing along the roadside. The loneliness
of old lovers grows here too. This is a dark
forest made of long twin rails of trees. There are
no hawks standing in the dust on the fields;
they’re all landing in the trees right in view.
Each one reminds you a bit of a tree you climbed.
Each has a wide nest, and every nest contains
an egg already rocking itself awake.

Lament

This is a season of death but my heart
won’t darken. Oh, Lord let me turn
black and damp with blood. Give me
a handful of nights coiled on the floor
hammered numb with sadness.
Don’t let my heart turn hard and green
like an unripe tomato where the worms
have already begun to bore.
I want the desert and the water.
I need the cave and me eyes
burning with sunlight.
I need my body turned inside out
and the spirit to weep out in the night.
I want to walk back in among my people
with the light orbiting around me
and the power of death turned back on itself.

Prayer

Empty my heart of dreams.
Lower me slowly into the pool
so the surface doesn’t ripple.
Put me alone in an empty room
where the only light is yours.

May the only sound be my song
and the only words be my prayers.
When I’ve no words left
and my prayers become a clean wind
wordlessly moaning from my throat,

fill me again with dreams;
let passion redden my blood.
Let me out in the darkness again
with eyes that shine and a tongue
like a candle flame burning with new words.

Witless

I have the wisdom of fools today
and my wit is a cicada in the earth.
We're sitting with our drinks between us
and I want to make you happy the way
the witless and unwise  try to make
happiness, out of laughter and long
hugs, out of memories, and floral praise.

Here is a story I've told you before.
You laughed and looked like a saint
when you heard it the first time. I notice
you pretending you've never heard it now.
Let me take the ring from your finger;
here is a ring for you. Here are the best
times I can remember, tied up
in new ribbons and given to you again.
I'm practicing for next time. I'll come
out of the earth and cover your heart with wings.

The Half-Mast Flag

The post office flag hung at half mast
but I felt no sorrow. Why is my country
mourning? The wind had wrapped
the fire station flag around the top,
the stripes like a barber pole. It seems
the country is divided. All at once,
it’s dizzy in the thin air of pride
and fallen down on it’s hard knees weeping.
I’m here again, impassible and happy
on my porch with a cup of strong tea,
watching the train of my nation pull away
from the platform where I stand waving
at the wallet-sized snapshot windows.
I'll call the post office and ask them why.
I’ll get back on the train when it comes around.
I might even tell the firemen the reason,
and we can all rend our garments
and feel like brothers who’ve lost
something, someone we both need.

This is not a poem

I'm taking a few days off from this blog. It's been keeping me up too late and I need to get that under control. My days have become short and unproductive because of it. I'll be back soon.

Lights

I light my room with white Christmas lights
nailed along the edges of the ceiling.
They don’t remind me of winter anymore
except for the shadowless light they cast.
I don’t remember Christmas in their light.
Neither do I think of Christ, the tiny
lights in the sky over the manger,
or the one that showed the way.
They are not a poet’s lights, not
the lights of apocalypse or prophecy.

They are the lights that banish
the darkness just enough to read by.
Some of the bulbs have burned out.
The string has pulled itself off
of a few nails. They’re empty of ghosts.
The eyes that give light to objects
have closed. The light has lost its mind.

Gasoline

I like the smell of gasoline,
just a whiff, enough to make
you think about the thin elixir
running through the shining pipes
with the gray resin of earth
and fumes on the outside.

But someone parked a car
with a leaky tank nearby
and I can feel my memories
smelting out of my brain
and burning like a new fuel
for America’s engines.

If you’re a traveler, America
is a whirling dervish vision
rising out of the blur of all
the grassy roadsides going by.
The smell makes the past combust
and you live in the present, burning it up.

Fantasy

If the lightning punches a surge
into the frail capillaries of my computer,
I could lose all of my poems, stories,
and half-built plans for a better life.

I’d stand in the middle of the room,
and, with curses drying up on the floor
and the sweat of helpless rage in my clothes,
I’d put a chair out on the lawn and sit.

I’d look away from the house and try
to forget it exists. The grass would be
a little wet, and I’d let the bugs crawl
up to my knee before slapping them flat.

I’d let the sun set and feel every last
thread of the illusion that my life
just started over, and that it only began
when I fell asleep that night.

Combat

I’m struck by the clever method of the trap,
the poison a favorite food taken to the queen
who must delight in the first ant to bring
the rare, aromatic gel. The queen, glutted
with eggs, touches the favored ant’s head
with a feeler and sends her back up the tunnel.
The little ant droops to the floor and,
when the ants behind start dragging her body
out of the way, believes it’s the queen herself
inviting her back to the chamber to share
a bit of the golden ambrosia in her jaws.

I feel a tiny red insect of guilt moving.
I’m glad for it. My queen is not dead.
My guilt is wingless and sterile. I set
the traps in the best places for a quick kill.

While the ants find the traps, my queen
asks me about metaphors. Have I
poisoned sweet food for the queens
in the chambers of another’s heart?
Am I the bait, the worker, or the poison?
I tell her the truth, and she takes my food
for the firey red larva moving in my chambers.

Stone Heart

It is said that if you don’t
worship God, the very
stones will cry out.

I keep my peace
among the stones.
My heart holds my mouth closed.

If the stones cry out
I’ll let their songs
loosen my throat again.

Power

Back in grade school, I once heard
one boy tell another about the time
he killed a man. He’d been hunting
ducks from a bridge when one shot
missed and hit a man fishing
from his boat on the river.
We learn to tell lies long before
we learn to hear them.

I could feel the warm halo
of death on that boy from my chair.
He had stolen power from the locked
toolshed of adulthood and found
that his hands fit the grips.
When he saw his shot, he must
have raised the sights, just so.
I could not have; I wrung my useless hands.

Poem

We’ve given God love’s name.
When we feel our prayers
rising into a Godless world,
we speak of love and feel
God turn to hear his name.

Creativity, wit,
passion, strength, and patience
are the virtues we use
to make the hearts of lovers
hurt until even the flesh aches.

He feels uneasy with this name.
Without God the damned stay
uncreated and never weep.
They never look back on love
and wish constant, hopeless wishes.

Watching the Chiggers

The chiggers like the concrete slab
on the sides of my porch steps.
I often have breakfast out there
where I can watch them up close.
The slab looks plain and gray a moment,
but when you lean close, countless
needle pricks of dancing parasites
draw into view. They move in fractal
patterns of turning and stopping,
and seem never to touch. They must
be looking for blood, but they don’t
act at all tempted by me. My nose
is a foot away at most, and they should
smell the CO2 of my breath and know
there is a bouquet of capillaries
for each one of them in the sky.

I like to watch them and know the trouble
they would bring me if I put my cheek
down on the slab and let them come.
I don’t pour out my boiled water on them,
or spray window cleaner just to see
what it does. They allow me to look
patently at the face of villains, and don’t
we all long to see the devil’s face that way.

Cold Fire

My daughter stomps on the blue chalk
until it’s a lump of powder on the floor.
She pushes it into a neat pile
and calls it a “cold fire.” The small
toy animals huddle around it
and she joins them, keeping cool.

I imagine a few small twigs
turning dark and glassy, the soft
locks of just visible blue flame
dancing with one toe on the ground.
It draws the water out of the air
and freezes it to the fuel.
You keep it going with wet moss
and green leaves until it starts
to slide of the mound of ice
building beneath the twinkling embers.

And speaking of inverting the extremes
of nature, I could have often used
“hot ice” to warm my tea or my hands.

Imagine a planet like this. You’re welcome
to the arrange the gravity however you like.
But when you come to its inhabitants,
you’ll find their emotional lives identical
to our own. Once in a while, they’ll have
to imagine impossible things to set
the world right in their hearts: fire
that burns and blackens, cold ice,
wet rain, and creatures living lives only
slightly different from their own.

The Curse

You want to be seduced by the eyes
of pythons; you want to stop breathing.
You want to see the bones bent
over the rocks on the Sirens’ island.
You want your body bent over
those rocks in the burning salt water.
You want to lick the stem of a rose
and grow sick on your own blood.
You want love from the sons of devils
and impossible oaths from their throats.
You want back the blood they took.

It’s in a heart shaped bottle stuck inside
a devil-man’s chest. But you’ve lost
the power to break hearts. Your own
is so full of glass, it can barely beat.

Giving Up on Your Dreams

I remember that it was this mug
I was looking for, not the chalice
with the stem long enough for the hand
that passes and the hand that accepts.

And I was looking for the cold tap
instead of some hot spring turned
baptismal magic with the salt
of legend and dream-crafted quests.

I need my slippers, which I would
have found by now if I hadn’t looked
so long for.. what was it,
the plane tickets and the frame-pack?

My neighbor is burning his trash
in a bent metal can. I’m certain
he’s done something wrong. This
is the wrong I’m here to right.

Poem

I grew used to thinking I could heal
the lost and brokenhearted.

I thought the arms of my immense heart
could fill your pillaged spirit with blood.

Now I carry your untouchable pain
like a dead son in my arms.

The Man in Your Garden

They say he was born an old man
without wisdom and with a fierce
ache in his heart for youth.

He pulls up the weeds and waters
the dirt till it turns black and wormy.
He sleeps in the moonlight.

But he’s locked you out of your yard;
he’s eaten the roots of the new sprouts,
and planted roses on your rugs.

Your clothes are snagged in the fast-
growing trees. They’re turning gray,
and brittle in the high sunlight.

One day you go back to turn him out.
You stand in the wind on the porch
and knock at your own door.

Giving up T.V.

In the end, it’s just one thing gone.
You know about American Idol;
your newspaper runs urgent
headlines and daily analysis
on the show.

Now you’ve begun to notice
how you use your radio.
You stopped listening, but
it stays on. You’re the silent
guest. You’ve turned your back
on your hosts and let yourself
simply be in that company.

You begin to notice the way
you use your computer, all
your food, and your car.
You might keep going and stop
when you’ve drained the entertainments
from your life and put yourself
inside that running mercury bead
of present time.

Jaw

The walnut bag contains shells which
can crack your teeth, depending
on the strength of your jaw.

So many things are like this;
one bad bite and you’re changed,
just a little, forever.

Give me false teeth, an honest tongue,
and a stomach full of walnuts.

How about love that comes out
like a baby from its mother, with pain,
with labor, with new life and need?

Your teeth erode like tombstones.
You’re buried under the jaws
of white mushrooms chewing the sky.

Habit

The nearly-ex
husband has gotten
used to fidgeting
with his ring.

It left a smooth
loop of soft skin
around one finger of
his worker’s hands.

He won’t keep it.
He has a daughter,
and photographs should
he ever want to remember.

Still, there ought to be
a kind of ring that means
nothing, one
you can still

twist with your
thumb and not
invoke the ghosts of
any old promises.

The Coffeeshop's Last Week

The manager says they can’t make money.
Business is slow and the construction killed
what was left. He scrapes the dregs of tea leaves
from the bottom of the jar and make me a cup.

The machines tear up the sidewalk outside.
The back door is the only way in. Here
at this table, you can watch the yellow
machines work. It’s a good view.

You watch the sidewalk and the street
disintegrate under the machines.
They eat at it like bacteria, and you watch
pleasantly from inside the dying body.

Lost Things

You’ve found your pencil tucked
neatly behind your ear. You’ve found
your hat on your head, your glasses
on your face, and your keys in your hand.

Little pieces of your body go numb
once they’ve got their flesh pressed
with crisp, vigilant, purpose.

You’ve fallen out of love this way.
You’ve lost God this way.
You’ve given up on your dreams like this.

Your hands moved up to your face
charged with purpose and found it
vandalized with pen, pencil, hat,
glasses, earrings, and a cigarette.

Your hands took them all down
and held them up in a pile, while you
waited to remember why they were there.

Driving Tired at Night

You’re floating down the city’s throat
and your dreams are filling your head
like water and your rubber skull is stretching.

Balance your car like a plate on a stick.
The illusion of lightness burned off the car
and even your body feels as heavy as it is.

You have the momentum of a pulsar falling.
If you crashed into the ground, you’d bore
a vein through the earth and come out weightless.

Ecdysis

In the summer, the trees scream with cicadas
and their amber shells speckle the trees.
Few of us ever see one emerging.
But we’ve imagined them inside and wondered
how they squeeze out through the neat split
in the back. And suppose we did the same.
Imagine your neighborhood studded
with the fragile statuary of shed skins.
One of them looks familiar, and you knock
on the neighbor’s door to find out
how they’ve changed and what they expect
this stage of their lives has armed them for.

Work Routine

Sitting in the bleach-blue glow
of the florescent lights, a worker
sits busy on his break listening hard
to the slowly paced stories his boss
tells with practiced accuracy.
He looks like a movie through
this window, flickering
in the sick light. And the glass
is glazed with tape and stains.

This is how images disappear.
The light goes bad, the glass turns
opaque. Your glasses are dirty
and so thick you can see your eyes
looking back in the reflection.
The air is so thick, your ears
can hear each other listening.
You hear the worker laugh
at the end of the boss’s story.
Now it’s time to work again
and you look back out on the world
with its images clunking
loosely back into place.

The Imagination of Fathers

A father's mind conjures up terror
that barely seems survivable.
Behind a varied door in his heart,
a flickering screen in a theater of fear
plays the latest scene for the demons
who work there sleepless and inspired.
You've often sat in the sticky seats
with them and watched the same piece
dozens of times without remembering
how you came here or why you stay.
On the screen is always the same child star.
Often you've walked back into the world
shining with ridiculous tears and ready
to walk out of your absurd job, go
hold your startled child, and walk
back across the vast circles of your heart.

Ugly Days

You don’t look good, some days. Or
you have a stink of ruin and malice
which alerts everyone that you
are a turn of events, a bad decision,
a mistake for someone else to make.
The grocery store clerks’ smiles
drop flat with eye intact.
Your glands are damp with new
pheromones of failure and plague.
When you get home, you make
villainous faces in the mirror.

...But the Rent's Low

The house is made of arsenic-laced
lumber and a mosaic of crumbling
lead based paint.

The porch is creased on a diagonal seam
and the boards end in jagged jumbles.
The insects come and go through their own
ancestral openings in the linoleum.

There's something life-affirming in living
among the poisons, wreckage, and parasites.
You stand there very aware of your own body.

Poems That Fail

Some poems start as the piece of road
that, stone by stone, inherits the ghost
of one that crumbled underneath
the dandelions ages ago.
But then it moves to the steady cows
by the roadside and the gray pond
with a reflection of some
invisible hawk skating across
its smooth, windless skin.
Maybe by now you want to know
what happened to the dandelions
and where the old road with the ghost led.
Well, the dandelions grow
by the cow pond in the field by
the side of the new road. Dandelions
are growing over the sidewalk outside.
And the new road with the old ghost–
which isn’t hosting a ghost at all, but is
simply allowing you to let it
represent the “ghost” of the old road–
doesn’t go anywhere that would make
you think of the old road at all.
By now you may not trust this poem.
Something vital is missing from it.
Why the pond and the bird at all?
And why can’t you see the bird in the sky?
And what is that hanging from his talons?

Creation

Isabel plays games with crystalline rules.
She tells you what she will say, what you
will say, and then what will happen due
to what you both have said. Ok? Go.

You get bored quickly playing these games.
This is the fear of lacking free will.
This is why a creator God makes
no sense to us. God must be unborable.

This poem was supposed to be about
the winnowing of wants as we age.
This began as a Godless poem. God said,
“Let there be light,” as if He were beseeching.

Hometown

Your hometown is there like a holy land.
When you’re living far away, you always
know which in which direction it lies.
You want to aim yourself like a laser
toward its white water tower and feel
it like its looking back from its flat
plot a land that’s still a little wild in its yards.

When you meet someone from your hometown,
someone you never met when you lived there,
you both know you need to break bread.
You’ll go to work late for it. You’ll miss the bus.
If you can tell you don’t like each other,
you still remember the Plaza Café together,
a shibboleth. Somehow, you owe each other something.

Acceptance

The rising and
falling white
noise of a car
passing by unseen...
you can fall
asleep to it.
It glides
past outside
as the wind itself.

Inside, the driver
might flail in the seat
of his worst
day on Earth, but
the car makes the same
liquid noise.
And from here inside
the cool
walls of your home,
the Earth is tiled
with good days.

Losing the National Debate--A Consolation

One day you learn you’ve lost. Now the country
is a little less like you in it’s character, it’s dream.
Yes, America likes dissent, and that is you, but
it’s getting to where it likes the idea of you more
than the reality of you. America is the church
that’s singing fewer and fewer of the songs you like.
It’s the Superbowl, and your team’s not playing.
It’s your hometown after the factory closed.
It’s the ice cream that doesn’t come in cones, now.
It’s the girlfriend who didn’t know you were steady.

You know your country has a place for you.
It wants you in its yearbook, because it needs
every possible kind it can get. It doesn’t feel
right without you somewhere in town where
it can wave from the car, maybe honk twice.
Without you, we’d be unanimous, and then
we wouldn’t need America after all.
Without you–you know, the general, ideal,
Platonic form of you–there’d be no America at all.

Responsibility

The first time you’re taught the structure
of the atom, you don’t miss similarity
to the solar system. It’s so
clear, your teacher may have even said it.

But no, electrons don’t circle.
They orbit not in rings, but spheres,
much less in smooth loops, but
in uncertain, barely measurable ways.

You don’t, though, quite know
where the planets are just now.
You don’t care about the speck
of dust on the policeman’s jacket.

You care about the universe
of your body, and since you were
feeling good that day, you whispered
reassuring things to the dirt on your hands.

One Man Down

Underneath a sickle-moon
he retched over the bow
and saw a mermaid in the sea
bid him to her now.

His candle shown like starlight
in the midnight of her hair.
He tried to jump into the ice
and find a true love there.

I will go down with you
to the bottom of the blue.
And if we don’t return
you can have what you have earned.
My bony smile’s for you
when my body’s rotted through.

When he woke up on the deck
he steered his ship toward shore.
He vowed to find his wife and kill
the man she’d left him for.

He’ll say to her “I’m leaving you;
this will be our last fight.
I’ve found love in the icy sea,
I’m going there tonight.”

I will go down with you
to the bottom of the blue.
And if we don’t return
you can have what you have earned.
My bony smile’s for you
when my body’s rotted through.

Influence

The tire has a nail in it. The head is grooved
and glistens. It’s been run over a million times.
The nail’s point is safe inside the tube. The hard
air comes blasting past it’s throat.

A tree has grown up through the fence.
It’s bark is scarred with a quilt of diamonds
and the metal still runs out of both sides.
You imagine being buried in a tree.

Your brain is nearly the shape of your skull.
Your hands are cast in the space that isn’t your work.
Your heart is not blood, your blood is not love.
You’re neither nail nor fence. You’re the warp in the wood.

The Workers Wait Out the Tornado

Jack Mayer stood by the conveyor belt
and read the rain’s palm: it’s falling
sideways, he said to the spray on the wall.

Steve Deb walked a beat from the door
to the shelter under a narrow I-beam
and only breathed at each stop.

Matthew Sheets couldn’t stop talking.
He belched out well-spelled laughs
and called everyone a bunch a girls.

No one could find Jason McBane
until they saw him working the lift
with a choreographed calm and fixed eyes.

Burt Davies said he’d like to kill Matthew,
and the rain in his black hair
looked like silver when he said it.

When it was all over, everyone stood out
on the clean, wet dock and one by one,
all said something about the color of the sky.

Violence of Mind

Whatever the cause, we have imagined
hurting someone without stopping.
Maybe at the top of a switchback
staircase, you created a you that jammed
a claw-hand into someone’s soft throat
and spun them up over the rail and let go.
You’ve imagined a reason to be so angry.
You know which chair you’d use if
someone had to be tied down. You know
which instruments you’d use from the knife drawer,
from the toolshed, and how to use them.
You’ve had moments where it’s gone that far,
where you’ve thought it through to the end.
But they aren’t alone. Most of us have had
our own ghosts thrown underneath a car
and run over in forward and reverse.

Get out, now, from under the wheels.
Your figment self has business elsewhere.
Someone else is waiting for it at the top
of a spiral staircase so they can walk
you down and, one by one, make
every dream you might have come true.

Love Note to Me, from Me

You’ve been thinking of yourself a lot.
I want you to think of yourself. Imagine
yourself any way you want, it’s ok.
You may give yourself brown eyes, which
I know you like. Give yourself the dark
or the red hair; I know you like them both.
But leave your voice the same, that’s for me.
You’ve been too tired lately; sit here,
let me close your eyes. If you fall
asleep, dream of me. Dream of me
from a thousand angles. I’m your
reflection in the dew on the leaves.
I watch you with thousands of eyes.
Don’t think lightly of me. I’ll go
through death with you and on
to whatever you find when it ends.

Arguments at Work

On break at work they divide
the good and the bad, the more
and the less, and wear them like
epaulettes. Work is the more and
the good–farm work, you
couldn’t do it. You’d keel over.
Graveyard shift and lifting freight
hung over on a mouthful of sleep.

They stand the quarterbacks up in rows
and rank them by good and bad
before they bother with in between.

They talk about the moral fortitude
of pizzas and prices and usually
end on an uneasy truce.

I’ve heard bars stood up
to one another and wrecked together
with a crash of glasses and chairs.

When break ends, we go back to work
with all our small preferences
shining with a new identity.

Morning, Early Spring

This is the hardest time for the soul.
The soul wants prayer and slow air
moving through the body. And it's easy
to pray on this porch, but all you speak to
is the body. You say praises for the lips;
the "p" is a kiss to yourself. If your hands
are held together, you've pressed your own
fingers into each other and felt
the knuckles in the nest of your thin
finger bones. You've held out your arms
to the sun, to the wind, and felt the fine
hairs move both ways in this weather.
Meanwhile the soul waits for the cold night.

Night

It used to be that only the daylight hours
were numbered. Time’s heart started
beating at sunrise and slept
with the rest of us. And even though
I’m writing this in the middle
of the night, 2:14 in fact, I wish
we still had a long open night
without moments, without names.
The moon would move over you
with it’s wild squinting eye
worrying about what you might
be doing out when it was busy
spraying it’s phermones out
onto the grass while the Earth
wasn’t looking. That’s the long
hour of creation where the myths
are written with timeless lunacy.

Weather Change

In animism everything
is inhabited by a spirit.
Gods are in and of all things.

On this first hot day of Spring
all of the spirits have packed up
and left their bodies behind.

Even the tea I drink is a liquid
snake skin rolling limply down
my throat and staying dead in my belly.

Even I am simply a body today.
My heart is a ghost town with
a rusty weather vane still creaking.

Routine

My daughter goes to bed by the drumbeat
of routine: snack, brush, story, poems,
prayers, hug, kiss, I love you, good night.
It works so well that when she isn’t
tired, she sings herself to sleep.

But I also like the times that she makes
the drum's heart skip. I can see in how
she smiles that she’s listening to it
in her head. So when she says “one more
story” it’s to hear the poem's chant
echo out of dead air in the bedroom.
When she wants more poems, it’s to hear
the darkness pray out on its own.

I imagine this for her, of course.
What else could I do when she laughs
and says “no kiss, no hug,” but pretend
she’s balancing them both in the air
just above her small, tired body
and waiting until her eyes are just
about to close to let them drop down.

Safe from the Storm

You miss most of the storms.
The sky flashes in the east
out of the dark broth behind
the purple budding trees
down the street. The wind
flaps at you with empty hand,
all of its knuckles thumping
the mud in the next country.
You stand on your porch with
only the breath of the storm,
a little too aware
of the madness of the world
to even think to give thanks.

On Learning of the Evolution/Creationism Debate Taking Place At PSU

What it’s really about is
each of our own magic
spheres of personal space
and the ghosts that orbit
around inside of them.

Some of us are cloaked
in a bath of invisible
angels and crackling
flashes of spirit-sent
power and purpose.

Some are infiltrated
by the Earth, the breath
and the dirt, the heart
beating it’s music out
since the beginning, unknown.

May the winner be brave!
When the ghosts learn
they can breed outside
the spheres, they become opaque
with pride, and our eyes darken.

The Hawk

One day, a hawk flew into the warehouse.
Everyone worked slower after they heard
and asked when they passed each other,
"have you seen the hawk?"

There's a pair of wild eyes watching
from the iron beams in the ceiling,
and the whole building becomes new.
You watch the ceiling for the hawk.

When I finally saw it, I had almost
stopped looking for it. But I looked up
once more and saw it perched
on the red rafter before it dove down.

It sailed like a wraith and I felt
my chemistry coil up in my flesh
and go sour when it wouldn't take hold.
Then the hawk flew back up and disappeared.

Bad Tea

Too much water:

Old sandbox--
the castle's kingdom
spread thin.

A cup of bathwater beside
a neat, unopened bag:

Smoking by the pool--
the geese take over
the water.

Steeped too long:

The lonely man prays
until the single women
have all gone home.

Bad water:

Through the smog,
a rippling orange
sunset.

Sexual Frustration

I

Eventually, you start to have dreams
about the time you moved past her
in the bathroom and the back
of your hand happened to brush
her pubic hair and you both
noticed the other noticing
and the room warmed a little.

II

Sometimes you want to offer up
praise to the bodies of women.
YouÂ’d sing about the neck
where it curves up under the base
of the ear. YouÂ’d exalt collar bones
and toes and the skin visible
underneath the eyebrow. YouÂ’d extol
the shape of the towel sheÂ’s wrapped
herself in and the wet, wrinkled fingers.
YouÂ’d sing it to the skies
and imagine Aphrodite kissing
you back with ancient gratitude.

III

Your body is an engine on
an iron stilt, running...
running....

Inspiration

There’s a poem I’m certain to write. This
is not that poem. This isn’t even about
the same thing as the poem I’m waiting for.
Yes, it’s about you. This shouldn’t surprise
you by now. This poem is not about you.

The poem I’m waiting for is eating words
so it can’t be written. It’s a yellow vat
of hot aluminum so thin it runs through
the seams in the casts. It melts the casts.
When the rain leaks through the roof
the water that falls in explodes.

This is a string of cold aluminum beads
scraped from the floor while I’m waiting
for the vat to cool a bit. The fans
in the windows are turning just from
the swelling air pressing out of this place.

This poem is the moment when I turned
my back on the glowing vat and walked out
the only open door. This stanza is where
I stepped out in the rain and let it darken
my clothes until they hung from me like sails
and I felt the hard, dry flesh of my face awaken.

Apology to My Daughter

When I pulled you out of God’s garden
and brought you home, I did it knowing
that the ground was dry and that it hadn’t
rained in years. The pots were all broken
and the only soil left could fit in my hands.

I know that the ground was damp and dark
in the ether before I took you up
and into the world, but that perfect Earth
could only kill you now, and when I wish
you a better life, you become a vapor
in my arms. So here is all the water I have.

Fragile

I buy cheap wine in jugs with the loop
at the top for your finger. I drink it
out of cheap glasses that come in packs
of four for three dollars so that when one
breaks, which it will when it taps the edge
of the sink or you scrub it too hard with a brush,
you’ll have three more left to do it again.

But the finest glass I’ve had, I found
in the thin strip of grass by the street.
It was thick and simple, sexy and heavy.
I drank more wine after that, but it
was still cheap wine. I married her
to common blood and it killed her.
She burst her hip against the sink one day,
just slipped out of my hand. She rang
like a bell for just a moment,
and she didn’t even bleed.

Hunger

My hunger is like a bell struck underwater.
I feel it on every shore, and every swiming thing
inside me darts about nervous and alert.

All the foods seem to ring me longer and I keep eating.

Every time I see you I walk away vibrating.

Leaving the Woods Behind

We hung an umbrella inside-out and upside-down
over the fire in the rain and warmed ourselves
under the tarps hung up in a circle around it.
The fire stayed dry and the wet umbrella steamed.
When the smoke blew over me it stung my eyes
and I clenched my eyes like fists, stood still
with two hot tears blooming, and took it like baptism.

I was baptized in a pool, holding on with both hands
to the strong, heavy arm of the pastor, who pulled me
back up with a strength that could have held me down
until I drifted into heaven still soaking wet.

But now I'm baptized as Jesus was. He knelt down
into the river on his own strength and imagined
the moving water running through him and taking
the salt of the old man away to the sea.

This is a baptism of smoke, not water's opposite,
but the opposite of mist, the opposite of rain.
I walk out of the woods with the smell of smoke
in my hair, in my clothes, and even in my lungs.
The first person I see looks at me like I have something
eternal to offer her. I'm certain I do. But I leave her
with only the smoke and no stories to tell.
When I go home, I shower away the new man,
all of that salt washing away in the water.

Coming Down (As requested by Aurora)

To find the top of a mountain, look around; whichever
way is up is the way you go, and if you get lost, look again.
When you get to the top and you've looked down into the mist,
sit down and drink a long draught of water and breathe.

When it's time to go back, and you have what you came for:
the wisdom, the moment to stand just underneath
the trap door to the rest of the sky and wonder about God.
It's time to bring it back down. But you slept here and now
you don't remember which way you came, every way is down.
Your fire is smoldering at camp by the river and your friends
miss you. Pick a direction, one that looks familiar, and walk.
Whatever you found on top of the mountain will start
to talk back as soon as you stop recognizing your surroundings.
Keep going. That voice is all you have now.

This is not a poem (2)

I'll have to leave this blog inactive over the weekend. I'm going hiking in the Ozarks until Monday. If the forcasted rain doesn't soak all my paper, I might have something to make up for lost time.
If you'd like to fill in for me, you may leave your own poems in the comments for this post. In fact, if you do leave a poem while I'm gone, then I'll write a poem just for you. Post a subject you'd like me to write about (the more detailed the better) and I'll either post the poem for you with a dedication, or I'll email it to you and you can have it for your eyes only.
Thanks to all of you.

Evidence

A plush elephant stuffed
into a coffee cup.

Pink vowels walking backward
through an open door on the chalkboard,
“U O I E A.”

On the floor, a vague human face shaped
out of rubber scrapers and silverware.

Plastic cats in my pocket
and coins in my hat.

The Cello Player

I

There's a pedestrain tunnel under Front St.
and, sitting inside of it, you played your cello.
The tunnel is tiled like a bathroom floor
and there's a always a damp rivulet
running down the middle.
You sat against the wall in the dim
twinkling light and held the neck high
right by your own throat.
When you pulled your bow, the tunnel moaned.
The whole city had a throat and you
opened it that night. And outside
the rows of houses, painted white like teeth,
rattled and everyone asleep started dreaming.

II

I drew you in pencil that night. I took you home
like a photo in my head and traced it.
I drew your green coat hanging like curtains.
I drew your thick socks piled up around your boots.
I drew the cello too small and I fell asleep exhausted.
I didn't have it in me to draw your face,
just left it a white oval shining
from the waving halo of your hair.
I ripped it out and gave it to you.
Now I can feel it like a missing limb and the sound
of a cello makes the frayed paper edges tingle.

Turning Point

Everything but the storm is lit
by artificial light. I’m sitting
cross legged in a deck chair
writing on my porch and lit
like a painting by the porch bulb.
The pavement glows dull gray
in the street lamps flood.
There’s a jumble of lit windows
in the dark ugly face of the apartments
across the street.

The air is almost no temperature
at all, a little cool perhaps.
It’s cool because of that storm
flashing out above all of the clutter of lights.

I want to make a big decision now.
Not even a good decision. But one
that means when I go back inside,
I’ll be a better man, or a crueler man,
just not this one watching the storm
and feeling a peace that wants
to be eternal.

Elegy for the Dragon

When new hooves crunched through old bones
and blackened armor lying in piles
around the tower, she jealously rose
on her haunches and uncurled her tail.

As she lay flailing with the sword
tamped into the softest scales
of her throat, she watched the white knight
climb the maiden’s hair to the high window.

Before she died she snaked her tail
into the cellar and felt the empty nest.
She saw the maiden riding away
with a bulging braided straw bag.

No one ever buries the dragons.
Their towers crumble in less time
than it took to build them, and their bones
turn to powder the next time it rains.

By now, the White Knight has ridden
his horse into a new pile of bones.
He’s dropped his visor, drawn his sword
and let the ring fall from his finger.

By now the Maiden has begun
letting her hair grow long. She’s kept
the baby dragon in the barn and taught it
how to build towers and how to breathe fire.

A Mystery

I woke up sick.
Why was I sick?
I ate too much.
I also drank too much.
My daughter was sick.
I went to work.
I worked down to bottom
of my muscles. My stomach
groaned and I sat dizzy.
I sat until I could work.
I worked until I must sit.

I went home for lunch.
I slept. I drank tea.
I ate an energy bar.
I was well again.
Why was I well?
I wanted to know.
All three, perhaps?
I did exactly the right
three things and I rose healed.

I stayed well the rest
of the day. The way
a body works is still
a mystery to me.
Still a scupture of locks
and the world a box,
heavy and sagging
with keys.

Aging

The small plastic Adirondack chair
has been on the porch long enough
to turn brittle and flaky
in the sun. A cloudy sheen
of plastic dandruff glazes
all of its sunward surfaces.
If you sit in it, it cracks.
It's a ghost of a chair.
One day it will simply collapse.
Or, I'll forget. I'll see it
facing the bird infested tree
across the street, jutting
halfway out of the roof's shadow.
I'll take my cup of tea out
onto the porch and sit.
Among the dry flakes
of memories in my brain that have
sloughed off and gathered
at the base of my skull,
will be the piece about the chair's
untenable state, so when I land,
the chair, the ash can of my skull,
and the brittle bag of my body
will all bust into the air like confetti.

Packing for the Hike

I’ll need a knife and a small saw,
a lighter, a metal cup, a pen,
a flashlight, and silverware.
I might take a book, but which one.
I won’t take a book; I’ll
take a blank book and a pen.
I already have the pen.
I’ll need a bowl, I forgot
the bowl last year and regretted it.
I forgot about food.
Granola bars, peanut butter, oatmeal,
nuts, dried fruit, candy, canned fish...
...I’ll need toilet paper,
toothpicks, mouthwash and bug spray.
I might need rope. Of course I’ll need
rope. What for? How much?
Forget the rope. What about
tea? I want as much tea as possible.
Alcohol? What kind? How much?
Should I bring the cell phone in case...?
No. No phone. Simplicity; stark
angular, simplicity!
Or comradery. A guitar
and lots of that alcohol.
A sleeping bag big enough
for two, just in case. And soap.
Soap and toothpaste and mouthwash.
No phone, though. Meditation.
No sleeping bag. A hammock!
Or my arm and my coat. I’ll go out
ahead of everyone and sleep
on the other side of the rocks.
Or, just in case, whatever comes up,
I’ll pack for each way. I’ll walk out
with strong legs and sore shoulders.
I’ll carry a garden of minds
in the five pocket on my pack.

Vigilance

I do the same things everyday. This poem
was written at the same time of day
as all of my other poems. I'm reading it
to you at the same time I always do.
My weeks are as uniform as my days.
My years have been passing this way too.
I like to think of this as a kind of
meditation. The kind where you stare
at a wall with your eyes closed and try
to look at the tiniest possible point
just in front of you, a point the keeps
shrinking just out of your focus,
and while your doing this, your mind
winds down and idles until it stops.

They don’t tell you what you do in heaven.
You may sing around God’s throne or just
exist in a state of homogeneous joy, but
never that you do this thing and then another.

This, right here, this very thing I’m doing
is on the blurry corona of the single point.
I’ll keep doing everything I do, the same
way I do it, until my life begins to hum
until death is the same as life, until this
poem is the same as shaking the lint
off of a bath towel or washing a wine glass,
until I don’t even know if I’m singing,
if that light is the throne or whether
this is joy, love, peace or what even words are.

Seven Cups of Pu-erh, Gong Fu Style

The way this tea comes to be is
a state secret. This small cup
is a dark both of whispers.
The dirt the tree grows in,
the leather from the donkey’s
back, the blood from God
knows whose opened arteries,
seems to have leached out
of these twisted smoke-black
leaves and now that it’s all
inside of me, I know I won’t
be able to sleep until
the tea is dry again and all
of it’s secrets lie dry
and quiet, and the stains
in the cup set up hard and cold.

Defending

I have tiny black ants in my house, but
I only find one at a time, never the rivers
of them running from the crack in the wall
to the bottom of the bookshelf. Of course,
they mean to start building soon, a whole
busy civilization flowing over
my wood floors in two lane freeways.
But for now, they're staking the place out.
They're waiting for the word from
the little pioneers, the explorers sent out
one by one every house in the neighborhood.
Every day, I sink another Columbus with my toe.

Marketing Death

One of the brochures on the Breast Cancer Awareness Month
table read, “Men Can Get Breast Cancer.” Inside it told you
that breast cancer is not just “a woman’s disease.” It showed
an old man fishing on a dock. The water was gray. No sun.
There was no pink anywhere in this brochure.

I heard a story about women with breast cancer waiting
for treatment who are given a care package with a teddy
bear, some paper, and a box of crayons. “Why the crayons?”
“In case you want to write down your thoughts.”

When disease takes us, it must choose between pink and blue.
You either pump one last hard breath out through tired lungs,
drop your pole and roll off the dock into the water where
your body floats gaunt and tragic halfway out to the rising
moon before it sinks to the bottom and the water ripples,

or

you sit reclined in a clean white bed surrounded by flowers.
You hold your small plump teddy bear just under your chin,
the simple beauty of your face no longer hidden by your hair,
your eyes sparkling with the long florescent lights... and you sleep.

A Father Reads the Parenting Websites

“Single parent” is a polite term for “single
mother.” “Spouse” quickly becomes “he.”
If you search for “father” you’ll learn how
to get him involved, how he thinks, what
he feels about his kids (your kids), some
things he should know (print this article
and have him read it), maybe how to
find him and get him to pay his share,
what to tell the kids about him and what
you’ll need to do when they want to see him.

I don’t feel like I’m allowed here.
The word for reading the posts
on a message board without posting
is “lurking.” That is how I feel here.
I’m the one in the long coat. I sit
in the back with the same paper cup
that looks older every time I show.
I come in last and leave first. I’m not
sure I have the right address. But
I know I’m a parent. That’s what
the sign reads on the door and no one
has pointed me to a different room,
but every time I cough, the subject
seems to change.

Breakfast

I ate my breakfast on the porch this morning
because it was sunny, windy, and warm,
and because I've read about the effects
of sunlight on the body, about vitamin D
and circadian rhythms. I sit here so
I'll learn again what daytime is. I want
to be driven by the sun again. I've worked
to many nights. I run the machinery
behind the curtain and I only walk out
in the light where everything's working
on my way home. I sleep through the show.

My skin leaches vitamin D into my blood
like a dirty rag in a pail of clean water.
I can feel it happening. My bones become
tough and pliable, eating my flesh
from the inside out and growing mean
inside me like a foetus so when I die,
my bones will stand up with fresh marrow
and get to doing the important work again.

Teaching My Daughter

The library book was about a girl
who dressed like a boy so she could be
a glass blower. She fooled them all
and the glass she blew was magical.

My daughter was young enough that it may
have been her first time hearing that girls
aren’t supposed to do some things boys do:
Monsters exist, but don’t be afraid of them.

Here are the jobs they had for you:
secretary, nurse, waitress, prostitute,
maid, stewardess, model, receptionist,
ballerina, princess, queen, fairy.

I never had to wear a fake beard.
When I said in school I wanted to be
a scientist, no one looked at me like
I’d said something unexpected.

I hope she won’t like the story about
the girl glass blower. I hope she blames
the father who said “who ever heard
of a girl glass blower?” instead of the world.

Most of all, I hope I never have to find
the fire under her bed, the pipe nearby,
and a heap of shattered glass bottles
lying beside the fake mustache and the glue.

Amanda's Left Hand, on the Guitar

The way she watches her hand
as it frets the strings is the way
I imagined, when I was a child,
that God watches us. He watches
with eyes that don’t seem to see,
filled with whatever love it was
that moved him to create.
They are eyes that look into
the song sung more than
into our single bodies crawling
up and down the neck of the world.

I notice that when the song is easy
she looks out into the room....
This is the song for us, the song
that’s there to make us smile.
Our smiles are for the song.
There are days that come to us
like gifts given out of simple
convenience. There are many like this.

When the song is difficult,
she looks only at her hand....
When you are watched this way,
the song is yours. You stop
what you’re doing and move
the way the eyes seem to want
you to move. When you are
the song, the song is not for you.
The song is for the song and if
you are in it, you sing, you play,
and when its over, you close
your eyes and breathe a new breath.

As a Boy

Once, in middle school, I looked
at a girl in a way that made her cry.
She stood limp and tried to peel
her soul away from her flesh
and shrink down inside of it
like a moth in a suit of armor.
I never saw her cry, but when
she stood up again inside herself
and felt the sleeves of her arms,
the obscene stuff they were now
made of, she could only have cried.

By the time the teacher sat me down
I knew I was bad. He made me speak
through my suit of armor and promised
to tell my parents. Of course they should know.
I’d been through grade school in the eighties.
I expected this to happen one day.
History is a time line of wars, horror,
and men. History moves fastest
with men in charge and flesh
feeding the prairie. We draw the maps
and count the bodies and write
the paragraph about Amelia Earhart.
We use our bodies against bodies–
enemy bodies, female bodies, foreign
bodies, and we leave the soul behind.
This was my beginning. I was a boy
ready to join the history of men.
I closed my dangerous eyes and tried
to imagine what terrible thing I would become.

Getting By

There’s a monetary way to measure me.
Sometimes the money’s after me but...

I’ve got a stack of quarters the size
of a shotgun shell. I spend it all on bread.

The bank sends me statements: remember
that day? That was a bad day. Feel better?

I hear the news about gold prices....
I wonder what my ring is good for, now.

Four-and-a-quarter percent! Sign me up!
In a hundred years, I’ll really have something.

I found three quarters, a dime, a nickle, and
a bunch of pennies. I’ll have tea–just to see you.

Four Haiku

Old bag of rice–
a moth
flies out

One cloud–
rain
in sunlight

First snow–
no snowmen,
only angels

Kansas heat–
sweat
on the keyboard

For Carry A. Nation

Since she swung her ax in Kansas,
my home state, I thought they taught us
about her as of a local oddity.
But years later, I asked around.
Everyone remembers Carry Nation.
She’s the familiar name and photo
that may not sit together on the hard
wood attic floor of your memory.
She wears black and carries an ax.
Some recall the bible in her other hand.
Some aren’t even sure how she used them.
But there’s her name, written in your
careful child script. Maybe the photo
in your head is the one of Emily Dickinson.
Maybe her poems remind you of
the clean, wet glass shards and the smell
of rum as it whipped off the ax head
when she drew it back to swing again.
Around here, she was famous as the Devil
and a good show for bar patrons.

But Carry, the bars are open here,
and they sell liquor on Sunday now!
Even your smiling wraith of a portrait,
pasted into the old elementary school
history books among the photos
of countless men–even your measured
madness couldn’t stop the cups turning.
So here’s to you... I raise my glass
and do not drink. I throw it, still filled,
into the fire, where the heat turns it
suddenly into light.

After My Grandmother's Funeral

My daughter discovered a pair
of wings in her shawl. She ran
to me and showed how they flapped,
so I lifted her up and let her fly.
She had to flap hard in the still
air of the mausoleum
and nearly fell twice, moth-like
diving and darting up again.
She worked so hard, she may have
forgotten me underneath her
with hands overhead holding
her up. When she came down
she made a memory of something
she’d never done. Her brain
made a place for the wings.

Sometimes they itch like missing limbs.
When I held her up and danced her
around the marble walls where
the missing bodies of flying souls lie,
I felt the stumps my old wings,
at the shoulder blades, ache a little
just as everyone here in the walls did
until they set their children down
the last time and vanished
into the still air shining with motes
of memories both real and imaginary–
and indistinguishable.

Jasmine Tea

To make jasmine tea,
you leave the leaves out
among jasmine flowers
at their most fragrant.
Then you take them away
when the perfume wanes.
You do this several days.

It’s the cheaper teas
that put flowers in
with the leaves and let
the tea and jasmine
meet the first time
in the hot water.

Sit by me. The way
you fill this room
so I can feel you
from across it,
the way I go home
with you throughout me...
It’s like I can sit
among you. So sit
close, but don’t kiss me
just yet.

For Valentine's Day

This poem is for you but you are not a poem.
Yes, you are beautiful, but not in the way
a poem is beautiful. You are the beauty of many
poems but not the poems’ beauty. Yours
is the beginning. You are the first line written,
and the first line erased. You are the eraser
crumbs on the floor and the ghost of graphite
in the fibers. You are in the poet’s mind
and your apparition moves his hand to write,
to erase, to give up, and begin again.
You are the beauty in the poem about weeds.
Yours was the line that became the weeds.
You are the turn in the poem where the poet
stopped writing about you. You are why
the weeds are beautiful. Beauty is why
the poet took you out of his poem. He loves
twice. He ends the poem and needs to see you.

Chance for Snow

The snow fell three times today
and each time there was sunlight
in between. Three times I had
the chance to stand in my city
in the snow. Twice I failed.

The third time, I walked to the door
and out to the sidewalk where
I paced back and forth, looking
up into the falling slant of snow,
which I can watch as it comes
from over the building whose roofs
I’ve never seen, past the power lines,
and down to the ground where I live.

I went back inside feeling like
the wedding guest who left
too soon and shook no hands.

Ode to the Guitar

The trombone is not a social instrument.
Rarely at a front porch barbeque–
the beers getting warm, the rhythmic
tones of the conversation drifting
smokey and comfortable–does someone
reach slowly down and open the long case
of the trombone, nod slow and steady,
screwing the slide to the bell,
and, while everyone else plays the easy
strings of their voices, blows a quiet
and mournful theme to Peter Gunn.

This scene, as we all know, and many
many other scenes like it, this stage
for the memories of the human race,
the very dirt the culture grow in, this
is the country of the guitar.

Blood

Blood is a symbol.
When you see it, something
in you starts working.
It means fear or victory
and much more besides.

But I have also noticed
that blood is a liquid
inside of us in great supply
and is very, very red.

There is much to think about
while I watch my finger bleed
but instead I watch the bead
grow, run, and drop like only
blood can–red, instant, and important

Wrestling

I've found that a fast way to make friends
with children is to let them tackle you.
Several times, I've let one child pull me
down to the carpet and then been attacked
by half a dozen more, each one trying to add
their weight to my chest or, if there isn't room,
to pull my arms and legs up over their heads.
How very few times, at that age, do you get
to reach out your small, smooth arms,
and bring down an adult and push that whole
mass of body you can't imagine inhabiting,
wherever you want it to go.
When you both get up, you don't become the weak
adult the child knows, you are, for a while,
the one who let's her be powerful. The way
no one loves God until he's wrestled him down
and walked away with a broken hip and a blessing.

Cut

I sliced my hand on a broken glass,
between the ring and middle fingers,
but it didn’t bleed right away, it opened
up and I saw deep inside my hand.
The torn fat was white and looked
like a web spun by dream-spiders–
as though the soul lived in the hand.
I turned away from fear, the way Moses
turned from the face of God, and then
the wound filled with sudden blood.

Crescent

Tonight the moon is crescent,
the bottom, like a short
brush stroke, is holding up
the just-visible dark sphere.

Often when we see a crescent
moon, we’ll imagine the points
actually exist, like the peak of
a mountain where a god lives.

But seeing that black side moving
through the dark, like the wasteland
of Hell before it was set on fire,
you wonder about the boundary.

From here, there is no twilight
transition into night; there’s a line
that you can edge your toes up to
and decide what kind of creature you are.

But down here, you don’t make
that decision. Instead you take
yourself, both the burning scythe
of you and the invisible shadow.

You take all the incompatible sides
and try to live in the twilight.