from The Coldest Winter on Earth (1998 - 2011)
TURNING SEVENTEEN
(Muskegon, 1976)
The mist off the river mixed with the smoke
And made the wine glow.
Her fingers were soft. They jumped at the tops of my thighs.
An animal lingered in its cave behind me.
A red slab of meat sighed
Coming out of its plastic, and I seared it.
Big Midwest machinery under a volcano, sky bothered
By chemical rain in rural Muskegon care of outlying Chicago . . .
A house-sized generator hummed on the bank
Of the Muskegon River 18 miles upstream, sweet in its duet with razor-wire.
A moment stood up then.
We were bright against the birch trees.
Our utensils clinked, bright before the birch trees.
Industry haloed by woods,
Creamed corn used as chum in the water, soapy as factory discharge.
Like smashed plates, the broken slag,
In these shadows of gulls and homeless women and children.
At dusk even the salmon grew ravenous in the super-heated river.
Bruised, festered, eyeless—faces blown half-off.
THE COLDEST WINTER ON EARTH
My mother used to carry a brilliant symbol.
It tore down her ribs. She became the
Person standing beside the antlers,
The one in a boreal forest, angels touching
Her lips with the peppermint of grace.
A cracked block, or softer. But final.
Migraine that burns too much oil. My mother
Picks up a pen and the tulips in Michigan wilt
And the freezer full of dark chocolate sparks,
Refuses to be born again. Owls look
Through the backs of the heads of the family found
Frozen at the drive-in. Winter, flower.
Big ring of keys scattered inside the father’s pocket.
Then my mother stopped talking, a feather killed
By its own violent nature. Fading,
Like light trapped inside milk.
The syncopation of ice and pine needles,
Like real Canadian wind, is so pure small crowds
Of leaves flatten and look. Sometimes sex
Or a blizzard helps with the pain. Glasses of wine
In the kitchen. A little cemetery behind the dollhouse.
8,000 TON IGLOO
White it out. I love the sun only because of the clouds. Because they cover me. Because the snow in the winter kills me enough and I can’t not be in it. I think of the huge metal hooks and the ropes hardened with ice. Winter in town, in ditches. Cars, giant sharks, and the many nose-dives. The women, the beer. There are fish inside streams that are barely a trickle. There is something about the moon to them, the way they struggle for home, the way they glisten like mail. Then one day you wake to find the trees coated with ice and the dogs wail For the love of God let me pull something, and the architecture of reason just falls to pieces. We keep trying to mantle it up. We love, we drink. We try to pull an undertow of logic into the fabric of the day—any day—we find ourselves blessed with, but some of us shoot half our faces off, some drown in the bathtub, some throw the firewood down in the middle of the driveway and just start walking. Eventually a few of us make it to distant
southern cities, usually by train, and miraculously there are paying jobs down there, under fluorescent light bulbs, with cigarette breaks and pretty good benefits. But I’ve seen none of that. I go to the window that is big as a pool table and I watch the stark opalescence of the snow and I can’t get it right in my mind, as if whatever there is that’s worth dreaming about isn’t something you just wake up and find, suffering being somehow different in, say, Texas, than it is here in Michigan, where pain comes draped in silver and silence. And how sometimes you just have to stop whatever you’re doing, open a beer, and think about how terrible it is every single day on earth can’t be as fucked-up and fine as this one.
BODY, TOUCHING
Purblind, he dug a hole and filled it with lantern
Light so he could see, if possible,
What was ringing on the far, lost rim of the world.
He'd never forget, not for years of trying, the dim
Haze that settled in those fields—
Inarticulate, heavy, but pierced by the pair of teals
He woke to mornings, that flute note
And the banking. God’s mind opened like a coat
Wrapping around a woman. The love was splashed with dew.
The sun rose over the lake and the trees leaned over
Her body, touching the water,
Exploding with dopamine.
THE GENIUS OF BEES
(Bloomingdale, Michigan)
Dreaming late into the morning. But let’s say
You wake a second time in a sunlit barn
Full of snoring animals, 75 degrees
Already and the ripe green smell of straw, sleep’s love
Of death becoming amplified
In the face of all that bright-baled languor,
While nearby a neighbor takes his coffee to his couch,
Deploys his SAP function,
And a bee looks in the window
Using all three of its relatively weak eyes.
And in fact the man looks out at the bee.
When these two consciousnesses collide what you hear is
The softest cooing, followed by a whippoorwill . . .
An hour later, plastic and standing water, a pale red
Wiffle ball near some grass. The cow looks out her crude window
At a fence but can’t tell
She isn’t part of it. Part producer of bombs and plant food,
Part idiot savant, she swishes
Her tail and chews while simultaneously rolling her eyes . . .
Straw followed by shit followed by straw and more shit.
One thing touches on another.
And so when a barn swallow swims toward you from inside
This cave of swirling pigeons
She is as intense, burning at her center of gravity-in-motion,
As the cow is, sedately twitching out ripples of energy as she’s pulled earthward . . .
You can feel the heat in your fingernails.
When you first woke up at sunrise, and came outside to pee,
There was a wolf spider in the wheelbarrow.
It wouldn’t move. It was floating on water.
It was picking up radio signals through its legs.
It stood like a tower
Fragile with lightning bolts.
It was about to speak Japanese.
Now a free-roaming white chicken stops and peers
At the masticating cow
Who appears dubious about the dimensions
Of her stanchion. It’s almost noon
And the heat causes the cicadas
To whine. The bee back in the hive
Rattles with dance. The man
Checks the stock market, stares into a virtual window . . .
We know what’s happening because we’ve seen it all before
(the bee is giving directions, the man calculates his wealth).
And so it goes. The recently informed bees
Stream toward the house, but then they fly right over it
On their way to several sunflowers,
Some lavender sweet in the shade of a mountainous oak tree . . .
And the man begins typing.
He understands he’s lost in the present tense forever . . .
Meanwhile, it’s a crow the cow’s confused about
It looks so much like a person about to speak.
But instead it’s the goat who starts speaking, bleating,
Who glares at you with his hard-split eyes
As if to say Stop imagining so hard . . .
So you pick up the dented wiffle ball
And loft it high into the barn
Where it gets hung up in a breeze.
It bounces around on the cow’s back
Then comes wobbling out toward you . . .
You aren’t going to die in this lifetime.
THE SPIDER PINE
Dark dog biting the left side of the night,
And the dew. It’s early, but the dew . . .
Little personal threads all over the air
Screaming through the outfield.
There is a quality to a bumblebee, like a bite of food,
Out in the fresh grass, molesting the clovers.
HEAT WAVE FROM A DISTANCE
The heart's like a river
going underground. Pale glowing
pearl insides of broken
clam shells. The red wine in
my glass is replaced by
black moths. The clay-handled knife
shivers in the white sink.
A glacier shifts, the legs of crabs
drained from the Bering Sea . . .
These moments—an aftertaste,
the eagle’s wing torn, one woman’s thigh streaked
crimson. It’s low tide, her mouth
drops open (he enters her from behind the moon),
fingers filtering
the cold mountains, the blades of
light-rippled water . . . I put the
Percocet in my black
coffee, miles of snow drifts . . .
LITTLE SPLIT STILL LIFE
The bird feeder hangs in the wind, it's unmolested,
all person-shaped malingerer, sunlight eating her feathers like
birthday cake, an explosion of seeds, the clockworks
in the throat of a cardinal, he’s handsome as the man is wet,
slicking his hair for winter. Other sparrows, a little razor-
burn she suffers, one aspirin tablet split in half, two snowballs
in her tiny fists. The hawk remembers the time he caught
that junco by surprise, for instance. There wasn't anywhere
to hide. That night they made the whole house shake.
THE EGO THAT IS THE BODY
1.
From my mother I passed through sand and ice.
It was a long way to go, and she kept
Getting smaller. Later, I said some things.
All the while she shrank away, like a stone
Tossed into a spring-fed pond. Other people,
They moved over and through me, and I want
To say they stayed long enough. Women came
And we curled, our faces close, in the wind
On the beach. I spent years in this snow
And now I really can’t leave. I watched deer
Navigate creeks and ravines, dry with fallen
Leaves. Deer, winter, and the violence of the
Father. My mother rattled hard against
The bark. She spoke, and the snow rushed around
Her. She grew compact and couldn’t yield.
I wanted to smell rain on piles of lumber.
I thought the woman I touched might live a long
Time. When we opened our shirts I thought she
Was telling me everything I needed
To know. I watched my father push his fist
Down his own throat. He was eager to
Express an opinion. On one side
Of the creek sand, a cliff, a shelf of blue moss.
In the hospital I watched out the windows
The reckless snowflakes fat in December.
Deer like threads running through a simple
Glance between visitors. How do you negate
The father? Put these mittens on, and I held
Onto her fingers. They inched forward like
Grass giving up, snow falling like a murderer.
2.
When too many mockingbirds crowd a space
They scream at the shapes of other birds. They
Stop trilling patterns. Mirrors couldn’t
Have made what followed more intimate, her
Eyes bright in the cold air, the way I watched
The deer who didn’t know. No one spoke
For many years. But twigs snapped in the
Distance and my lover put her mouth close
To my ear. It was a kind of Communion.
I thought of the air, the caves of heat
She released, the intimacy of skin melting
Sleet . . . I took some money and rubbed it hard,
Using my fingers, over the muscles in her thigh.
I could force flat the ten dollars, but it was
Nothing like watching her cry. Invisible.
The bodies kept right on churning. The lake
Seized the horizon. Sand blew over the
Fissures of ice. Her face faded like music . . .
HELLGRAMMITE
Anna filled a milk jug with beer
and we hid in the trees
finding deer runs to where the white sand glowed beneath the power lines.
There is a fish with her own eggs
In her mouth. I often imagine
Stroking its throat. It is a woman.
Calcium of spurs in the thigh
When she sighs. Where the head shop used
To be—over a few of these hills,
Grease all over the plastic and
Gears, worn sprockets, the smell of
Gasoline clinging to the curtains,
A box of corn flakes resting beside
A tire pump on a utility spool—
Dragonflies swarm a pond choked with
Weeds. The oars make a plummeting sound
Because the pond has no floor but
Isn’t all that deep. I bought her some
Flip flops. I thought her kisses tasted
Like cherry-flavored rolling papers.
The store was now an apartment,
And the screen door banged shut for lack
Of hydraulics. It was pretty
Much what I used to call perfect.
The way Anna kept holding my feet
In her hands. Massive drums of menthol
Blazed in my dreams. Tooth, with a nerve
Dangling. These bolted hard into
Place on a kind of conveyor belt
For sticks of gum. I left that job. I took
A Civil service exam. The
Pencil bled all over the paper. I bought
Milk and popcorn and couldn’t wait to
Get home. I sat watching the buzzards.
Fur coats all around, balding, hobbled,
Mouths slick with tripe. I wanted her salt.
She said the pond was the opposite
Of heaven. It was a hundred degrees
Outside. The window ticked, a second hand.
I had hellgrammites, new fish hooks . . .
Then I watched the glass crack, like a thought,
Like voltage. Residual torque.
Her voice like a chemical, a sur-
Reptitious kiss. She had cuts on both
Arms. Deer breathed in the orchard at dusk.
Anna’s fingers spread like a wheel sailing
Into an open garage. She’d sit
On the vinyl and the sweat in her
Skin made the room smell like burnt wood.
Afterwards, prostrate on the plastic,
She crossed her ankles. We were both sleepy.
The landscape was a lament with four
Borders. The glass hissed like an aspen. I
Cracked the gun barrel over my knee.
I could see at the other end what
Might be heaven. The light splashed in my
Face and I started. I thought of the
Hellgrammites as something keeping time.
They turned in the cup like a womb
Growing legs. A stopwatch for desire.
I liked how her underwear was always
Filthy. She lifted the shotgun.
There was a sound in the magazine
Like a death sentence lodging
And then dissolving inside a blind
Prisoner’s throat. Anna placed the gun
In the middle of the sofa.
It floated there like the boat we
Used now on hot afternoons. Shouldn’t
You be working? I remember
She said once, and laughed. I said, I’m still
On vacation. She tied her rod
To the bow with a shoelace and dove in.
The water was smooth and green, but what I
Remember is her body opening.
I remember the way the gas tank
Locked into place on the black frame
Of the motorcycle and how
Perfect that felt. It was like falling
Forever. It wasn’t the opposite
Of anything. Under the boat the
Water yawned like eternity. Her
Curls dragged circles on my bare skin.
Sometimes she moaned in my ear riding
On top, “I love this Harley.” Put the
Gun in the grass, I said about
A year later. She kept leaving butts
On the windowsills. The bike, the boat,
The starlings like doppelgangers
Screaming obscenities out of the
Eaves-troughs all August. She kicked her legs.
I could see the world in her eye. I
Could see the hurricane of all
Those body parts and a stream of oil
Trailing behind her. Minnows pushing
Through her teeth. Tines on a fork, the blond
Glass falling like rain . . . A vulture
Spreads its enormous wings. She sank.
THE MOTORCYCLE
For whatever reason the mirrors all turn black. It's winter. The family
sits around in straight-backed chairs, hair growing. Pieces of shirts
flake off and float to the floor over time. The father says, "Good
night. I love you," but his mouth doesn't move. No one reacts. A
thistle grows up through a floor board. Flash-forward: the boy—who
is now a man—feels a confusion of eyes. He pulls some film from a
large frame in the wall. It starts snowing outside the windows back
when he was a boy. He relaxes. He stares at his sleeping girlfriend. They
will talk after dinner. He's been home twice in nine years. He
remembers the shining bird. How it wept in the room; how it grew.
Both times he departed quickly, happy to be riding alone, face into the wind.
This singing! he thought, his joints and round edges coming undone . . .
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH LOVE
Don’t talk to me about the beauty of the woods. I’ve been falling for that load of crap ever since
I read the Romantics, and am still not writer enough to name what I’ve learned. But I know one
thing, grassy knoll or not, I’m a long way from home. I feel it every second I’m alive. I have no idea how to correct this. The woman I am kissing grabs my wrists and holds my hands in front of my face. “Quit shaking,” she shouts. But I can’t. The spruces outside are dropping heavy with dawn,
no wind blowing, drops of moonlight still trembling on the end of each blue needle. Recently it
has entered my mind that maybe what I really want is to make a baby, that in my thirty-eighth year
I’m ready to give up the ghost and pass the flaming tongue of my soul into a little daughter or son. “I’m sorry,” I say, and peck the woman on the cheek. Outside, Menthe Drain surges around deadfall and boulders, the current foamy with salmon bumping heads. I sometimes stand in the river
until I’m wearing a beard of mosquitoes, trying to figure it all out. A day later, with dusk falling
hard, I run my hand in a rather shaky manner over the materiality of an open Bible, but think only
of my father, Catholic seed of these words, and about the trajectory that began the day I was injected
into my mother. It frightens me to think I may have been the result of such an unfathomable intimacy. To wit: my parents haven’t spoken to each other for years. My philosophy about my
conception is simple-minded enough. I am the result of a specific biological act not to be confused
with love. Surely I’m not alone in this? My own adult life is full of dead-ends and regretful engagements/abandonments, seemingly deep and heart-felt connections that just fizzled away . . .
You wake up one morning, dial that familiar number, and the line is busy. Why? Because I took the
phone off the hook. Perhaps the mistake comes in trying to reclaim some prior imaginary gesture we learned from TV, the warm kiss your mother plants on your head as she bends over to zip up your coat or wipe peach cobbler off your mouth while you sit safely in your handmade high chair banging
your golf ball-sized fists together in glee. We’d all like to believe in these things, that they happened,
or more specifically, that they happened to us. Some people try to relive such moments by having kids of their own, which isn’t exactly the same as going back. Or you can fall in love, over and over again, one day decide to get married, purchase a really colorful parrot and teach it to tell you
whatever it is you’ve been believing for years you once heard. But the past? You might as well turn yourself into a boy again by holding your breath. Forget it. I’ve tried and you just pass out.
WALKING CATFISH
Something like
being smacked around
blue jolt of a splash . . .
and the under-breath
muttering of large hearts
This is where
I want to stay
not the tongue pushes out another polished tooth
a sanctuary, no defense mechanisms
no irony
dull sense of “catharsis” firing through the sky of the human body
a pervasive inertia
Let's try it all again—he is waiting to be born
the splinter
in each of the larger bones (twenty campfires at once)
They come out of the mud
and literally burp their way onto
land
You see it sometimes
when a dog puts his head on your thigh
and looks in your eyes
I want your bologna sandwich
I mean Evolution
the whispering about the other species that made it
(The sharp eye the wide eye in my head faithful)
the sun on the grass, so fine
the traveling from point A to point B
(a single-minded man in a fast ship)
The World
But then always the murk and the watery dark
the timeless longing
the wanting to go back
THE EIGHTY-FIRST EVENING
It feels good cutting my own arm because it is more seamless
than burying a dead pet or one’s own father. Oh beautiful plow blade
of awe, salad in the swells where the grubs rise glowing
from the necklaces of roots and dirt clods, give me back my license
to make too much out of my own hardships
as if I were precisely the one not responsible for them.
We’re not exactly the sum of our hair follicles. I remember looking
at my father’s hands as they lay at his sides, rodents failing
to escape their jail, the felt-lined casket. My father taught
me how to gut a deer. Now he’s stuffed with embalming fluid.
I need a new flag, something to cry under, the way a detachable skin
eventually forms over a tablespoon of even diluted blood.
NORTH OF VIRGINIA
Who is sick, and who but I could possibly
Remain familiar with this night
Don’t sit alone without at least something to read
Pills, pills falling, falling outside . . .
Heartbeat more subliminal than rain
Summer after summer, the brain keeps talking to itself
Just a vague sensation more or less about a four foot space
Of dark behind my old garage
Fresh snow
Late the next afternoon
A few feathers, that’s what they own
But a bird can survive almost anything
IN THE HONEYMOON SUITE
(after the Howard Hodgkin painting of the same title)
God peers over the mountain. It’s something alpine
And your breasts are almost blue in it. There’s a hum like
The future. And entering you is like waking
Inside a real yellow book. “Only now do I discover you left tracks
All over the frame,” I get to tell the head of an ovenbird
Who is listening from between my shoulders. In the moment of my
Not knowing where I am, the gravity of rock-cold water
Rushing downhill scalds my bare skin.
Oh, Kirtland, I love your pink tongue, the clutch of veins
You drink raw from my warm neck. God’s eyes look stupid, like Big Boy’s.
The mountains are burning. It’s raining in your pelvis.
FISH LAKE
I said it to McCormack (fake name) driving past the egg stand,
buckets full of plankton and gasoline for the outboard
sloshing dangerously in a flat bottom boat
M. was pulling along at too great a speed
"I had this lucky hash pipe . . ."
That romance trailed off and died amidst the screaming pheasants
He just wanted to turn around
"I don't need any eggs," I said
There were vineyards nearby, but corn where the earth
flattened heading east out of Van Buren County
It thundered in the west
Deer looked off into the trees over their broken legs
A white pine was split and burned, and the air smelled green
There was a guy who looked like Bob Dylan pulling an
oxygen canister, he wanted some brown eggs
A few ducks swam on a dirty pond near a giant hand-lettered sign
O'Malleys, no second apostrophe
McCormack handed a boy a folded ten dollar bill
"I'll take two dozen," he said
The nets had gotten tangled up that afternoon
"Calm down, calm down, remember the baby sturgeons," M. said,
his gut a slight bulge over his belt, while he steered the boat
I couldn't get anything right, at home, at work . . .
I threw the useless nets into the green water
"Okay, I need to count to ten," I said, looking up at the
dark-bottomed, newly forming cumulus clouds that were racing over
the presently sunlit green spearheads of red cedars that stood huddled in small
groups along the opposite
shore--across from the boat launch--where no one had ever lived
THE DITCH
Try to explain: out of this damp heat, a blister
Moves where we shove it. And it isn’t
Your brass spoon concave against the child’s
Burned eye you should be concerned about.
If he’s not dead, perhaps he’s a porcelain doll, singing
Because it’s terrible to be blind
And feel the pine cones brushing your thighs
In the shade. Poor thing. You,
With your treacle, tenacious with bees.
A semblance between the Virgin
And a flaming white glove is not daunting to the clergy.
TINY GRAVES
(Mona Lake, 1965)
I’m not going to find you. I threaded the idea
through another lost morning, by interstitial degrees. And it stinks, frankly.
The old boy sitting in the brothering sunshine
admitted you’d been long gone searching. There was an empty greenhouse
like bone architecture standing upside-down in each eye
of the drowned wasps, who were still stinging each other
out in the shallows. I could feel my hair brush my collar
as I collected the bodies. The chicory
seemed to nod in every direction. There was froth on the beach, smooth as whipped
milk.
I imagine they dunked you till you couldn’t breathe.
Oh the stones you must have loved, without thinking, swallowing water.
THE LORD YOU WON’T FORGIVE . . .
I measure things; the bass with the widest mouth
gets my undivided attention,
I massage what's closest, I watch the way the pepper
reacts in the open. I sing
to myself. I place my hands on the sheet that covers
the mattress, time is pretty much arrested,
or I imagine the moon, neighborly with envy,
it hooks into my body. It's sometimes
the same on top of this water, pressed to within a heartbeat
of death, blood pouring out of my wrists
all jagged and into the clear blue sky, the water like an agitated
set of circumstances ringing in through the windows, a turtle
waiting with its claws and hopeless face, the cattails wrapped
around the depth of things, two poachers,
the pleasant heft of sinking toward the end of things,
the pallets of meat, the nighttime sky overhead full of
bullets and dandelions, plain coffee, the roar of never understanding;
the releasing of the rudder.
(December, 2010)
THE CAUL
In the beginning the lovelorn
birds sang from their perches at dusk. This was Massachusetts
dark, green even in the breath,
cold, the eyes of the birds stuck wide open
like a child’s gold star. In a small
plastic tub my mother’s face,
apart from her body,
seemed to sleep. There were owls then, too,
as there are now, but sometimes
those owls reached in through
the window and held onto my ankle—
I’d see a miniature human hand. I remember
feeling like I had antlers
growing in my throat because I’d found some dropped
on a small dirt path and even holding
them felt sacred and dangerous. I put them
inside a rotted stump and it rained on them, and a few of us
even pissed on them. I found myself drifting in a boat
with a caul of blood I’d somehow taken into my hands. Wake up!
The owls flew through the glass light, shivering through the leaves,
breaking out of their buggies for one thing, no more wind
blowing in from the sun. By daybreak I was moving incrementally,
a tiny fever made of knives whirring through the arch of my father’s instep—
the trees were not swaying—and I rowed my way north through the canyon of
bloodless faces.
NO TRESPASSING
The birches stand straight as
an allegation, the
spaces widening be-
tween, the blush sweet there then,
endless space in that place, but
cozy, too. The water
along one edge tastes of
the stones it comforts, birds
bathing in bright dirt, slow
horse flies, three stripped cars
left burning on gray sand—
old jobs, the city, the
end of growing up one
way, fireweed ballooning
along sunny two tracks, the
smell of cold spruce limbs; standing
at the hotel window,
different afterward, less afraid . . .
(Fairbanks, Alaska, 2011)
APPLES
Last night when I went for a walk
in the old neighborhood
I heard the repressed hum of the garage
door openers
held in abeyance,
watched the designer mailboxes steam
like blocks of dry ice
hurled onto a football field . . .
Then, this morning,
I saw my ex-wife’s hand move for a doorknob
and watched my daughter turn her head.
And the white and red towel
with pictures of different kinds of apples
on it appeared folded over the back
of my mother’s couch.
What the hell is all this anyway?
And what lesson is buried inside
a moment that suddenly reverses itself mid-river
and you smell the same spray of lilacs over earth mixed with warm skin
but watch a different woman
close and then open her green eyes?
The beach yesterday was the same old beach.
The same blue buckets full of sand,
the same paunchy guy
in an inappropriate Speedo with mustache,
the same gray gulls fighting for scraps of food.
Then the clouds rolled in,
a black line blooming out of the formerly undetectable
white horizon,
turning our bellies brown.
And the first big rain drops patted the sand.
That’s when we heard the airplane
sputtering—its engine missing
and catching like a backfiring car—
all of us there on the beach, watching it fly
in low just over the dunes.
THE COLD WET STREETS OF SUMMER
Pinching spider webs, as they multiply in the windows,
sir, you won’t hear me, as when I serve food
to you, silently, in the voice of a glacier
*
since I will soon spend my nights in bed, eating, or taking walks along the pier
listening to the bells ring out in the fog
like crystals of melting salt in a puddle of water. Your fucking majesty,
*
at least in the afterlife I shall feel no guilt over circumventing your grave.
This is certainly a good thing. Meanwhile, I’ve a painting I commissioned
of your skull resting on top of a gleaming casket. It sits quietly
*
on top of the polished wood, grinning, like a bird
happily ensconced in its nest. Sometimes, late at night,
when the shadows crawl up my walls and the voices
*
ring like fluorescent bells in the canyons of wet streets
outside my window, I train a high-powered flashlight
on the picture, which hangs like a crucifix on the wall
*
at the foot of my bed. Sir, excuse me. It is at such moments,
as I gaze upon your future, inconsolably lonely
in quarters, that I understand you mean everything to me.
PIECES OF THE GLACIER
My yellow light cried for her,
my original ambition.
It was so unlike praying with the owls.
So you sweat a little. You’ve got
gasoline and a cooler.
Barbed wire keeps the cattle separate from the people.
You can finagle a lesser
dream from the punishment.
It’s not the last worst church standing in water.
THE HAPPY FACE
Someone was sobbing in
the shelter of the road's
shoulder. I could almost
relate. Silk, the large world
roaming inside my head,
tears dissolving in that
dark before the lights spray
on. Optic reality.
Metal threads wrinkling over
Flat Creek. I said I would
bathe in such mirrored
instants, racked with something
utterly insoluble.
The crying man's distorted
face seemed calm, carefree.
DRILL BIT MADE OF WATER
(at the airport . . .)
I have sometimes stopped long enough
So that in my stopping
I feel I am moving backwards.
I am not. I keep
Feeling my way down corridors
That sweat like cattle breathing.
(They don’t, really, they are just too bright
And populated.)
And so then somebody merges into traffic
Who looks like you.
I could’ve been elsewhere, putting quarters down
For a newspaper, so I think it matters,
Because when she stops walking she stands between us
In a wide gulf
Of business and air, radio waves,
But still
Or moving she’s as one who grows wet
With love and fear.
Then I think oddly of bones, a femur breaking loudly
On film, in slow motion.
We have these dreams. I remember the time
Father put his fist
Inside a bread bag
And used it as a puppet
Because mother was cutting
A paperback into quarters with a really good
Serrated butter knife.
His hand turned into scar tissue and a mouth
That addressed me.
“You didn’t lose your underpants
In the bushes again, did you?”
I should have said “How the hell
Should I know?”
How can I tell what’s what, even
Now, when they have
Rolling sidewalks
In the middle of hallways,
That include a lane for standing still
While you continue to move,
As well as a lane for walking while riding
That allows you to believe
You will get home much faster.
