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.