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.