Demurrage

At dawn the yardboss gave us
orders, another boxcar of cedar
or redwood or yellow pine or fir,
it never mattered, it had to be
unloaded, it was just a matter of
what shape it was in, sometimes the bands
held and the bunks were neat and tight and
it was just a matter of dancing with
the forklift. If the bands snapped or if
the cars were banged or shunted
and the lumber jammed and disheveled,
I crawled under the corrugated steel roof
and pried and levered and kicked the wood
free, sending it one plank at a time
out the side door onto rollers where it
shot out onto the truck and Bryan grabbed it
and dropped it with a slap onto the truck.
It was punishing work, the boxcars
retained the heat they collected across the west,
the steel seared my flesh and the air smelt of baked
bum shit and rotting vegetables scorched our lungs.
Those cars were clusterfucks, we fought them all day
with crowbars and hammers and chain saws
just to wedge free tons of wood jammed and pressed
against steel, at lunch we quenched our thirst
with cold beer and smoked weed just to fuck ourselves up
in the heat, then back to the boxcars and the
fucking wood and the yardboss would stop by
banging the steel door with a two-by-four telling us
to get the fucker unloaded, he had another two piled up
and the demurrage was killing him. By sundown
we’d get to the bottom of the car, unloading
20 foot planks and feed them onto the rollers
and we could sweep out the car and call it quits
when we’d check out the walls, read what
hieroglyphics or poems or epitaphs
or pentagrams were scrawled there
on the busted plywood and steel walls
by the bums and tramps and hobos and drifters
who inhabited these cars These were
inscrutable truths scratched out in chalk
and rust, shit and blood, we found them frightening,
like evil charms, oaths, curses on us, on anyone
who beheld those mysterious signs.
Stoned and spent, stupid from the heat,
we wanted more than our fear of the flattened
cans of peaches, the busted glass from their
Old Crow and the ashes from their fires,
we wanted another history, another story,
another tangle of events. Maybe
the next car would hold the key.

C O N S C I O U S N E S S. 3.0

Written in Lake Geneva, Spring, 2007


The boss gave me the Rose House that year, a
rickety A-frame of rotted wood and dirt floor
sheathed in visqueen. In winter I stuffed plastic
pots with dirt and root stock, 100's, 1000's,
each indistinguishable, row after row of thorn-
studded crotches. I spent afternoons alone
in the dead air consigned to Voodoo and Gypsy,
Perfume Delight and Perfect Moment,
Summer's Kiss and Sweet Surrender,
day after day until the dying light of March
swelled to April and the first purple tendrils
shot up like furious antlers and soon
the Rose House swelled with green lush
and the air sweetened and wavered
with its own irresistible narcotic
paradise, I succumbed to this forced
Spring, my flesh burnt with the sun
and the first buds fired my soul,
they opened slowly at first, gentle
friends of lavender and crimson,
then bottle rockets of brilliant
tiger-striped passion and strawberries
and cream, reckless peach and blood orange.
That summer I dreamy of luscious-
lipped women, sweet, full-lipped
women, women whose breasts smelt
of lilacs and roses, of honeysuckle and
mockorange, whose hair fell like
wisteria vine and clematis and wild
rambling roses, I was not tormented
by love so much as enchanted by love,
astonished by love, the idea of love,
I took a knife and slit the visqueen
skin and peeled it back off the swinging
ribs and the sun and wind swept
over the roses, I felt as if my life
had somehow come to a end,
even the bruised sky and lightning
could not frighten me. For days
I rode the perfumed air and nights
I slept under stars of color
and rode the wave of beauty opening
everywhere, it seemed. How could any
of this be happening to me? How could I
stand such a life, stand another moment
of such wonder? How could I not
dare another?

C O N S C I O U S N E S S. 2.0

Last night I dreamt
I was starring once again
in the Red Barn's production
of Hamlet, of all things,
waiting in the dark wings,
adjusting my princely
costume when a stagehand
asked me where I've been
all these weeks of rehearsal
and, staring at the Danish
night fog I think, what the hell?,
it's opening night and I've
somehow done it again,
missed out on all the
walk-throughs and preparations,
and as I walk on stage
I look for the prompter's cues,
there's no time for anything
but the stage of my life,
my story, and these people
in the darkness reading
their programs, gasping,
I stare out at the Danish
ghosts and open my mouth
and syllables stumble
forth, as if I almost
know what to say, it's
a clumsy performance, line
by painful line, each one
a surprise, bungled soliloquies,
clodhopping verbal sparrings,
the fencing scenes are
pathetic but somehow
the audience buys all this
method madness to the point
when I'm nicked by Laertes'
blade and the cold poison
rushes through my blood, I
fall hard to the wood stage
floor, the stage lights blur,
my mind howls like some
unvanquished ghost fading,
I can hear the actors
carry on, order's restored
and the audience exhales
in tragic wonder, they will
exeunt to ponder their lives.
This is the price of
hesitation, emptied into
the night to wonder about
these things.

Black Friday

2am and
the chronicaling begins:
nights sweats, impossible
on this coldest night of the year,
in your dream you are hunted
by feral dogs on a darkening
plain, you waken to a room
entombed in cold silence,
steal downstairs to wrap yourself
in the haze of infomercials
of sex and real estate, all
that's left to prey on
in America.

At the malls people camp
out to cash in on sales,
the hype, the hoopla, the
extravaganza--they brave
the cold and snow for the
right to capture the flag
of the vanquished merchants!

Today I did not know
who I was. I woke up
in a stranger's house
and hid under a blanket
watching the sun, drinking
their coffee, reading
their books, waiting for some
semblance of famliar
thought to remind me
of who I might be or how
I got here. I played
their music, Neil Diamond,
Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis,
and Johnny Cash. It was the
Neil Diamond that got me,
"Solitary Man." I was
sitting in a recliner
reading a book of poems
and drinking their good
coffee when I realized
I was not in a stranger's
home at all, I was simply
turning 52.

Northport

Follow an old narrow road
hugging orchards and the great
bay, hawks circling oak
and pine, where
Michigan slowly dies
in peninsular time,
a lighthouse, forsaken
of course, and the stubborn
finger of rocks pointing
north and disappearing.
This is where the waters
merge, you can teeter out
on scum-slippery stones and
your feet feel the confluence,
the crossing of waves,
diagonal diamonds forever
forming, one foot in Lake
Michigan, one foot in
Grand Traverse Bay!, you
are master of two realms,
closer to home than you known.

C O N S C I O U S N E S S

* * * * * * *

It is snowing.

* * * * * * *

The first snow of the year.
Just this week the last gold and fiery leaves
fell to the ground and we raked them in piles,
like graves in the streets, the year buried
just in time for their removal. And so
our roads clog with brooding mounds
until the city crews come at night
with their swirling lights and scoop away
the leaves and leaves and bequeath
a smear of tree-slime on the asphalt,
like the innards of a pumpkin smashed
on All Hallows morn, the street slick with frost.

* * * * * * *

It is snowing
and the air smells
like old pumpkin
and rotting leaves
and woodsmoke.
An old opossum
eyes you darkly
at the gutter
and shivers.
You are forgetting
so much right now.

* * * * * * *

You cannot leap back
into who you were or
what you once did and you
cannot dash forward
into what you would
most desire or pray
for although we spend
so much of ourselves
doing precisely these.
You are trapped here,
in the snow, in the
awareness of the
snow, and your desire
to leave this snow behind
as well as the memory
of all snowtime.

* * * * * * *

It is snowing.

* * * * * * *

When you were young you played
in the snow for hours, built
forts and tunnels and lived
in the cold domain. You
rode sleds and tobaggans
and traversed snowfields,
climbed snow trees and waged war
with snow balls and icicle
daggers, you poked holes
in the pond and trudged trails
like polar explorers
through the meadows.

* * * * * * *

Now snow is an event,
an abstraction, something
that takes place in-the-world,
out there. It is something
we fear. It is cold. Something
we do not understand.
Like those piles of leaves
in the streets that haunt us
so. We would prefer to
lean on a rake and stare
into a flame and watch
the smoke curl up to the sky,
listen to the leaves crackle
and sizzle in the mist.
At least then we would know
something.

* * * * * * *

It is snowing.

* * * * * * *

CEMENT TRUCK / 1st Draft

Tell me, who doesn't love
to watch these mastodons
spin and swirl their cement
and stone, how their sluice slides
down the chute in slops
and plops like drop biscuit
batter so workers can
spread and rake and smooth it
so it cures like pudding
or slick ice and meanwhile
the barrel rumbles like
some antediluvian beast,
these primordial monsters
invading your yard, your
neighborhood, a sure sign
of progress, where kids
with gaped pie holes can't wait
to scratch their names and press
their hands in prelapsarian
goo?

MAUSOLEUM/First Draft

Jars of gelid fetuses floating
in yellow formaldehyde, flecked
debris, bouyant stars swirling
in glass. Overhead, through the skylight,
the February sun, lifeless on marble.
These samples, this display of ontogeny,
pellucid embryos, ghost eyes staring
out from squid brains, when we
enter the museum we feel their cold
eternal eyes like stars, their banality
pentrates our eighth grade souls.
We know we must return to the bus
and sit behind the distorted glass
and stare out on the dirty snow
the depression of Michigan
with eyes no different than
those preserved in the children
interrupted and preserved here.
No philosophy or science
will save us from the world outside,
we have smelt decay and truth
among the artifacts and relics
and we are ready to return
to our lives.

Battery Park

After the drizzle and
brooding fog cleared, the city

gleamed in the honeyed sun!
The philosopher

in his ragged raincoat
licked his bigass cigar

with relish, the luxury
liner cruised by, trailing

"We Got a Party Goin' On"
roiling in its wake, like

some sweet axiom
of consciousness!

Oh the deep mental
postulations and

precepts that flowed almost
playfully as he walked

among the Hmong
fishermen commandeering

multiple rods cast
in the mighty Hudson!

He scanned the surface for
signs, for trepidations,

for scintillations of
preternatural fishness

but all he spotted was
a world trapped in aesthetics,

women cradling hands,
children dressed like bees

and wizards, barechested
joggers slick with sweat

and the air filled with a
polyglot of dialects,

you cannot square the mental
istic with the carnal

or carnival, the flesh
or the rotting vegetables

in the park or the vacant
eyes of the men selling

trinkets and plantains and
I love NY t-shirts

under the dying sycamores
at the Liberty pier.

This is Battery Park.
You lick your cigar and

smoke and fumigate your
ruminations about

the world in all its
abstractions, things,

What is the real American
idea? and What is truth?

and all the while you think
it's just a matter of

clear articulation,
apprehendible form,

like the city rising
from the fog, you'll find it

if you just keep walking and
thinking, it'll come, sure

enough.