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