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.