from ABRUPT RURAL

IN THE BLACK KITCHEN

 

 

It begins early, are crumbling over the yard with its salt bird baths.

Then you dream of the banister gleaming, your hand

from atop the stairs gripping a tiny casket. Heat gathers above the

     local graveyard

that dusts so resolutely the young men’s shoes with its flags.

This is where the shadows meet the white wall. Since

you were a boy you’ve moved unmolested right through them.

But you are never alone. You are never without the crumbs

your father scraped off your black toast. The whiter the appliance

the rounder its corners. The reflections on the floor are cut into many

     small pieces.

There’s nowhere to hide. He keeps looking in the window at you.

 

 

 

 

INSTEAD OF A FATHER

 

 

Because the mind conceives a love of its own,

and because it places this love,

 

because the hands fall in a radiating numbness outside the mind’s hunger,

because love in fact drips from the mind’s eaves

 

instead of a father, instead of a ribbon flying out of a grave,

instead of a handful of corn, instead of a crucifix,

 

I crave sleep and dream. I wake and we make love.

Because the mind conceives a love,

 

because I have married some father’s daughter, because my daughter drowned

in her parent’s vast masonry, because I left matters pending but often shouldn’t      

   have.

 

I wake and we don’t make love. Last night she said How sad to be dead

and have no one who could write your biography. No friends, family. Because

     wind

 

driving sleet through the mind is what I was thinking. Because I was startled

awake. Because the pasture of torches burns a hole

 

in the midnight of weather. Because the past must stand before the mind now.

Because the mind conceives a love instead of the father.

CURVATURE OF THE SPINE  

 

 

It wasn’t all that long ago I watched a guy drink himself  

to death he really died     pissed all over himself first     all over  

     the couch  

later I saw the box cutter in the sink    I wish I could have saved him  

that same week I saw a giant swallowtail come up from Florida  

     banking like  

a boat through the Dakota-like plains west of Galesburg  

and knew I was a little bit singing/dying each minute  

     my hands  

clutching the wheel of the mower    she was the angel of death  

     that butterfly  

And then my hands on the girl    who dreamed and dreamed  

     while I kissed her  

I watched her circulate in her clothes    Then I started thinking  

I’m not capable of thinking    I’m just beating the wind with my nuts  

I tell you from there things get foggy    like many arrows whistling  

through rain    a confluence of vanishing points    As a child I lived  

     near a hollow  

scooped out in the dunes     I watched the dying alewives float  

     through  

my armpits    their eyes sealed tight as iron  

my spine grew about as straight as a grapevine strangling a  

     phone pole  

As long as I can remember the trees have always clung to the cliffs  

     of sand  

Nothing begins with me    Nothing stays the same    Nothing gropes  

     its way home 

Those days and now These    snapdragons and morning glories  

marigolds    I ate a basket of purple beans last night    grew them in  

     the damp arbor  

sun of the late afternoons    when you throw them in boiling water  

     they turn green  

it’s a miracle of alchemy    they were still crunchy because I was so  

     hungry  

I went to buy my girlfriend a goldfish    I think of small bass shifting  

over a moonlit bed    I think of hot water cutting grease off a knife  

I clotheslined this guy one time    he was holding a coffee cup full of  

     beer  

it was a long time ago    there was an old wood stove smoking in the  

     corner  

of a room    it was full of burning hickory  

the ground outside was littered with fresh dogwood petals 

I reached my fingers out for a second because I thought it was  

     snowing  

I left the fish in its bag    he didn’t die but almost    I opened the door  

     to her trailer  

Tom    she said    Rick?    the TV was going  

she was watching a show about weather  

all I could see was a shutter torn off a house and blown  

across an empty street    she had one lamp on    I got out 

of there quickly    I started thinking about my life    the way it  

     sometimes  

sparkled like a bluegill caught in the sun or grew dark  

like the rain in a yard full of lumber and bricks    I could see my  

     breath 

I peed off a culvert    I listened to the hum of a streetlight  

it kept getting later and later    I walked all night  

At dawn I saw that giant swallowtail slowly fanning her black wings  

in my driveway like a candle burning inside an empty church  

LAKE WINNIPEG 

 

 

Dark 

like an animal's fur, dew-covered, a little oily 

as if decay might be arrested 

 

Night 

or nurtured, loved. Then blood on a single leaf, 

curled near a hatchet, 

a bag full of feet 

under an almost-full moon. 

Although this harbor's full moon lacks a sliver 

 

Animal 

of love. A marten, on hunt, creeps from behind 

the boathouse, its teeth shining like lemons. 

 

Bones 

The man sees them in the dark, turns up the lamps 

via rheostat. Someone else wakes 

thinking butchered, thinking 

 

Trees 

okay, so he's upset. This happens on the other side 

of the lake, trees 

crowding the skinny peninsula, 

 

Johnboat 

turning evanescent the image of the flowers left 

standing on the dock 

in the mist of twilight. She feels an ache 

in her teeth where she's been biting split shot, 

pike blood deep in her nails. 

He'd drive a chisel into the fishes' brains, 

and now her iron's fucked up. Nothing's true north. 

She's cold 

 

Fillet Knife 

and frightened. And a muskrat dives, comes up gleaming. 

But only the animal sees it. 

 

 

 

 

A STORY ABOUT ICE  

 

 

I might as well admit it: I am frightened of ice, the way  

it begins as a tiny flame—invisible, really—& then grows  

into an icicle as water rinses over itself. I sleep while this goes on,  

     I cook dinner, 

maybe watch TV. Outside the sparrows 

multiply, & sometimes dodge away from their reflections. My neighbor, 

after taking out her garbage,  

walks with her hands in her pockets, reflected upside-down in ice,  

     her breath  

small puffs of exhaust she chugs away from . . .  

 

And I am frightened of the lathered knobs & swells of ice  

on Lake Michigan, on which snow continues to fall even while one is  

dreaming of a child who has drowned.  

The snow falls & falls. And it sings while it falls, a song  

like the sadness of those still living, consoling each other, or praying.  

The drowned child floats now, & the sun has managed to spring loose,  

a lion of a sun 

melting a little the clear, unconscious ice resting under the weight  

     of the atmosphere. 

The child—a boy—is on a raft with a blue bedspread tucked in  

     over its corners.  

He is drifting. He has been drifting for a while, over deeper & deeper  

     water.  

 

* 

 

Nothing stays the same. By January the earth has tilted away from  

     the sun.  

Sparrows huddle near the wrists of knotted wood  

deep inside a shrub that has been pruned into a perfect cube.  

What I mean is there is not always this fear.  

                                                            The water rushes back & forth 

under Muskegon Lake’s flat ice. And the weeds down there  

wave in the current. A teardrop swings like a dead boy  

riding the moon on a string & a small yellow fish feels something— 

I guess it would be stupid to call it happiness— 

and she presses her lips against the blue teardrop  

and inhales it & even thinks she may now go rest  

in her place beside several brown rocks  

where the paper mill pours warm water into a cove after cooling  

 

 

 

the huge machines that flatten & cook & dry the industrial-sized  

     sheets of paper.  

 

There is a man whose job it is to keep the roof clear of ice at the  

     paper mill.  

He looks around a giant vent pipe at the lake while he tosses salt  

from bags attached to his belt. He moves his feet on the delicate  

rung of the ladder, which vibrates  

from the constantly moving gears inside the plant.  

 

* 

 

Anyway, the fish, a perch, has been hooked  

and so she’s not going anywhere except up toward the circle of light  

that hovers overhead like the quietest ringing,  

something we all hear as long as we’re alive, like a finger pressed  

     to our foreheads.  

 

Maybe the ringing, once we’re dead, grows louder, like a siren.  

But as we leave the flesh it fades away like a bird flying off  

     a telephone  

wire & disappearing inside a dense patch of woods . . .  

 

The boy on his blue raft is singing now, inside the fish’s mouth. 

He is drowned forever. Which is why his raft is blue, the color of  

a summer sky, the color of his mother’s eyes.  

 

                                                And the perch is flipped 

onto the ice, which is safe for now, holding us all up. And she has  

     brought some dark green 

weeds with her, laced through her gills, & the weeds stripe the snow  

and scatter in small dark flecks like a bright constellation  

she stretches across the middle of, gasping for breath.  

 

* 

 

There is nothing to fear. I have fallen through ice  

and I did not die. I have traveled in my car that is like its own  

private galaxy  

 

and have felt it veer off through the universe on sheets of black ice— 

 

So this is what death will be like, I may have thought. 

 

Like a man on a ladder, a little unsteady when  

a wasp flies too close, like the boy  

waking from a dream  

about canoeing a smooth cold river but who instead finds himself  

     swallowing water  

in his room. After a while he gives in & relaxes & breathes & goes  

     back to sleep  

and dreams once again of the small window above his bed  

steaming and shiny from a silver midsummer rain.  

 

 

 

 ISHPEMING  

 

—The dead are perfectly preserved  

    in the ice-cold Superior water  

 

So the hardware store in town shuts down  

 

It isn’t late        it’s winter  

 

Lake Superior hums like a mountain range      it’s always that deep . . .  

 

The girl’s drowned sister sleeps in its water  

 

Dimly, she is a mirror  

 

Dark in the morning           Dark in the evening  

 

The giant furnace at the hardware store whooshes on  

 

The girl switches off her lights  

 

She adjusts her radio    tuned to the sound  

 

Of snow falling  

 

She is conscious of the shape of her face 

 

She listens in the dark  

 

The snow unfolding—an animal turning around in her room  

 

 

 

 

VILLAGE AFTER THIS ONE 

 

 

I love you, world, despite my incommensurate  

lack of confidence in your keeping on:  

the street blowing with spits of snow  

turns like a page I might doom  

to darkness after reading it, forever,  

or until I reopen the book. Then: 

there it is, sun filtering  

through the air  

like faerie dust  

raining down as I turn out of the dark isthmus  

laid down by a basswood. 

Okay. How to proceed  

from here: I open the book  

and see a thousand black shapes  

like birds slowly coming into focus  

over a marsh on a windy fall day.  

I close the book, or look  

away. Happiness, you are only memory  

sometimes. But you will die full  

of the light that troubles your precious  

sadness. Be glad for once.