I shivered when
I heard them say
you had a stroke
and could no longer sing
a note or offer
up a poem from Burns
or make the Whelkin ring.
It is as a salmon
who dies in the ladder–
or when too much rain
loosens the trees,
before they can scatter
their light kernels
of encoded matter,
offering up their own
ancient memories.
Grown men playing a game for love
and maybe for money
in uniforms barely changed
since the 1920′s.
Men named Santana and Hernandez
play with a stick and a ball,
hitching and tugging at their clothes,
pulling at goatees, leaning, squinting,
scratching, digging a cleat in,
mostly doing little or nothing,
until it is time
to make gravity disappear,
and slow down time
for as long as it takes
to make me and every other man
remember how that felt.
Sicilian forests
paid for Caesar’s armies.
Pickled pre-Cambrian biota
pays for the daily commute.
The moth pays with her body
for a moment in the sun.
Stone wet and bleeding
she shouldered the others aside,
spilling archers everywhere
like an apron full of onions.
Hearing the night birds in the tank of dreams,
I sounded her out.
Pleasantries? Something darker?
A witness, she said.
A winey ache. An arched back.
Pulled hair like bunch grass.
No words.
Only language.
A red goodbye.
I smell the ocean
in a tank of oil well waste water
looking out over North Dakota
Back in the day
when everything was,
you know,
pretty sketch,
shawty and I
would be…
(
making sausage?
moving the needle?
being market-facing?
)
I was all..
and she was all…
and the haters would be…
(
making waves?
moving the goal posts?
rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?
)
Nah, nah,
Just sayin’ the haters would be all
up in my grill, and I’m sayin’
I got this, I got this,
It’s like it’s…
(
In your wheelhouse?
In your sweet spot?
Correct me if I’m wrong here.
)
Ah, that’s fly,
Like a G6.
Like a G6.
Looking down from the Texas book depository window,
the first thing you realize is,
everything is so close–
my God, it was an easy shot.
The motorcade moving stately and slow
through the strangely intimate space,
like you could reach down and turn it around.
The first shot disorients the driver–
he slows down even more,
then the second,
and then the third,
finally he zooms
under the overpass.
There is a silvery taste in your mouth
and a ringing in your ears.
Your arms fly up to embrace the awful change that is coming.
Your vision narrows.
The bleached world begins to tilt.
A magpie in the tree by the road.
A song you heard your mother hum when she walked you to church.
Soon the caisson and the drums.
But now
just the magpie
and the humming.
The hints we drop
while bending down
to re-channel a river
or thread a string
of friendly skulls
into a bracelet
circle the world
like paper cranes,
swirling in the inchoate brine
of all the small miracles
we refused to believe.
in my alternate universe
the tin man in the Wizard of Oz
gives Dorothy the stink eye.
The scare crow has no desire
to hop down and follow the road
to the Emerald city and higher consciousness.
Things are fine in the forest.
Witches and flying monkeys
only bother you if you stir things up.
Dorothy, without companions,
is forced into selling real estate
in the lesser neighborhoods on
the north end of Oz.
She dyes the ruby slippers black
to attract less attention
and settles down
with one of the taller munchkins.
She never goes home.
Except at night in her dreams,
when she rides the hurricane
back to Kansas,
looks around,
and is stuck in that moment,
the moment of indecision,
for the rest of her life — go or stay?
Luckily she wakes each morning,
puts the cat out, makes coffee,
and watches the flying monkeys heading south,
on their way to disembowel
a few unlucky munchkins.
Troublemakers, no doubt.
Named after one of the infamous
butchers of history– Tamerlane,
who built pyramids of human skulls,
his nihilist namesake in Boston,
leaves a lethal orange cloud
of shrapnel, bone, muscle and grief.
No media I’ve seen
made the connection.
So will this new butcher
be lost to history.
Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
Walking in the river delta,
dog dreams slither
in the sunken oxbows,
murmuring in the under brush.
Tilting my head sideways
I see them crossing
the moment’s nerve endings,
talking always to the land.
Two barn swallows
chase the steep rain trails above.
Cottonwood trees color the morning,
knitting their leaves
together in a quilt of sighing.
It is late in the day.
Someone’s keys
are rattling in the door.
I hear two loud clangs,
one inside the other.
Like the unhurried sound
of the bell on bouy ten
at the mouth of the Columbia river
telling the small boats
their passage is only assured
for so long.
Love is–
A rubber spine.
A club footed wizard.
A calyx in a hurricane.
A funeral of tea lights.
Jurassic medicine show
sock puppet,
demonic seducer
side winder,
balancing on
the high wall between
the life I know
and the Great Curtain,
blow mouth wide,
and knees akimbo.
What do you know
that I don’t ?
A beach house
with new shingles
around two windows
keeps watch with brindled eyes
at what the sea brings
each day.
Some days it’s just wave on wave,
like a furrowed brow.
Some days birds skim the rollers
like penitents walking the breadth
of a watery country.
The sea and the house
tell each other their moods in colors.
Weathered silver on brown means contentment.
A scrim of white rags tearing off
of slate grey mounded water
means I’m out of sorts right now.
New white on clapboard means
I’m trying to impress the neighbors.
A boiling blue black mountain of water
rolling up the beach means
I told you so.
Tender is
the fleet of electric birds
bluing the trees
in their sockets,
wiring the
world with
song–
and how strange
it is that
we hear their words
with the ears
of invalids,
unsteady in
drunken ships
with keels of
calcium and
ribs of sorrow.
Where do you raise a poem?
Etch it on the surface of a pond?
Hang it in the air above a burning building?
Braid it into a web spanning freeway and radio tower?
A poem is a hunting lodge and a circus tent,
a night trauma and a nucheal ligament,
allowing the mind to race clear headed and upright
through a forest fire in a deep ravine
while the heat sears your memories
and anneals your losses
like wax on old bourbon bottles.
Like a deep ocean drift net
Cut loose by the mother ship
Drifting with the carcasses of tuna and hake
Twisted forever into its skeins,
Your poetry haunts me,
Anne Sexton.
Hunting in the Shadows
It’s a strange delight to weave the cord
between the synapses of waiting words,
to stand upon the mountain top and roll the bomb
watching it tumble with aplomb
across the hollows and the tombs,
the fecund and the unforgiving wombs,
and land where the blue heron and river shone
in flash of wing and darkening hour the life in summer riffles gone
