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.