Letter to My Son From the Other Side of God

                                      from a bus in a blizzard

                                        

You asked me if I believe in God, when

I stopped, and how that happened, a question

I prayed my father would ask years ago

when I shirked that yoke of love and glory,

that guilt and story, all that sin and and faith.

You believe in physics, you say, and the way

you talk my belief sounds so distant, like

some Greek tragedy or dead Latin tongue 

chanting ancient truth from a lost monastery.

The truth is I am a prodigal, an 

amnesiac, a fraud, a minor criminal 

who bets the house that he's one confession 

removed from rebirth or salvation, one miracle

removed from the prayers I offer up even now.

But the truth is that, like you, I am godless.  

I am as empty as the void of the universe

and all that dark matter you think about,

and yet for me there will always be 

a holiness in that time before time, 

when God created order from disorder,

as if we could ever really know that 

kind of disorder.  I believe that she plucked

matter from antimatter and spun the cosmos

like a giant cotton candy machine,

spinning hot threads of pink and gooey-sweet 
substance and that this led to the great 
swirl of galaxies and light and after it all

cooled we had The Great Ocean and The Great Virus 

and aeons later The Great Lightning cleft 

the human brain so that idea and image 

might smudge and separate and lead to 

human order.

I only know I believed and then I 

did not, and when I did not I felt the 

cold.  I trembled, not out of fear for 
my soul, or guilt, or a savage sense 
of repudiation, but more the loss

of story, the loss of theory, a sudden 
solitude, so much inconsequence, 
the indifference, the lack of anything 
within the atom or the quark or the 
spaces between all that microscopic stuff -- 
it turns out there's nothing substantial about 

the cosmos at all, it might as well be 
the idea of matter, the story of matter, 
the belief in matter, in the end it's
still all an act of faith, no?

What I need to tell you, then, is about

that coldness I felt, that loss, I knew then 
that that indifference was God.  I felt alive

for the first time, son, void of feeling, the way

the universe must be like at its very core-- 

elemental and paradoxical, lacking thought 
or purpose. I was sitting at the kitchen table,

writing and listening to Chopin, my hands 

trembling, I was alone, and a dead star 
smoldered inside of me, and between the

sustained notes of Chopin, the etudes and 

the nocturnes, I felt the dark matter. 
I was a nomad, a prodigal seeking redemption
or absolution from the world surrounding me
and the terror within.

Letter to AG

Writing from the other side of God, I

need to tell you something about love.

Not that I'm expert, believe me, but

I've learned some things, I'm no prophet or

preacher but I've studied the Bible, I've done

my share of prayer, I've given witness, offered

my soul to Jesus, read Holy Scripture, 

delivered sermons, served as an acolyte 

and watched God's breath whisper across altar candles, 

passed out communion wine in tiny 

plastic chalices, dropped the body of Christ 

onto the waiting tongues of those seeking 

redemption, I've eulogized the dead, hugged 

those who were losing God, witnessed the 

holy spirit blossom from the lips of 

my mother when the insistent urge to live 

vanquished.  

                       God is not a judge.  She is a not 

a malevolent, vindictive god any more 

than she is one of those dumb nodding 

velveteen dogs you see in the back car window,

bobbing at every passing car.  She's not 

into guilt trips or sin or any of that stained 

by the Mark of Cain crap.  She doesn't believe 

in Original Sin or the birthright of evil.  

She believes in redemption because she

knows it's hard enough to find salvation

in this world.  She believes in sex and the

divine laws of the physical universe, 

the wondrous tantalizing senses, beauty, 

she wants you to enjoy yourself in this world.  

That's why she made  potato chips and 

Sugar Babies, the summer solstice and 

fireflies, mangoes and avocados, fingers 

and elbows and lips.  God is a precious 

song, a prayer, a sacred poem filled with the

 pagan stuff of life.  God does not care about 

the little things, all the wicked mind machines

we carry in our heads.  She does not want us 

to wrench ourselves into knots over 

indiscretions or the pleasures of the flesh,

over wine, over desire, over the 

contradictions of petty moralities.  

She wants you to love yourself, to accept 

yourself, to breathe and eat and love, 

to dance and make music, as we entered

the world, naked and unashamed and

holy.

SHITTING THE QUICHE/WAUWATOSA

Look, lady, I don't know

if the quiche your dog ate 

is fresh or not, it's been

in the snow for days, it

was awful, an that's why 

we tossed it out the window.

It froze, and then the fucking

squirrels got at it, they 

ate the crust, but even 

the raccoons that shack up

in the sewer wouldn't 

touch it, maybe they don't

do quiche, but they pluck 

everything else from the trash,

the jellied ham, the rotting

zucchini, the box

of bisquick, I guess

we were hoping some 

coyote might sniff it up 

and drag it off and poison

the son of a bitch but I guess

that won't happen now, 

seeing how your dog 

wandered over here and

ate the whole thing, tin foil

pan and all, jesus, all that

brie and ham, parmesan,

onion and peppers,

I mean he wolfed it down 

in frozen hunks, I don't

know how without breaking 

his teeth, jesus, imagine 

the ice chunks sliding down 

his gullet the poor son of a bitch

but I say look, lady,

we're not running a

goddamned brasserie 

here, it's a goddamned house, 

a three-ring circus of 

burnt pancake pans and

a sink full of cooked broccoli

and Kraft cheese whiz, scalded milk  

and empty wild turkey pints-- 

it's serve yourself or suit 

yourself--if your dog is 

shitting up the carpet, 

or puking lakes of yellow 

cream, or just wishing 

he were dead, his guts 

bloated like a dead opossum

on the road, I don't give 

a damn, he should have

picked the fucking

turkey tetrazini or the

pea soup or pork hocks,

but he made his bed, I

suggest he lay in it.

ARRIVING

All day we migrate south.

First, a bus that trudges 

the blizzard, gathering 

angry passengers who bitch

about cancelled flights, airport delays, 

the snow ashes drowning the world,

and the fucking cold--no wonder

no one ever takes the bus! one shouts

as we prowl deeper into the storm,

blind and blurry wet.  We make

Midway five ours late, shivering

in serpentine rows lugging 

our baggage past gates of  

the stuck, the delayed, the postponed,

terminal's  an insane sleepover,

faces hypnotized and narcotized

by florescent gloom, deep sea creatures 

insulted by the endlessness of waiting

and the gray gathering of snow, 

anxious and apprehensive, the phantasmagorical

huddled hordes, each seeking asylum

somewhere else.  The announcements 

arrive in muffled staccato, more

delays, cancellations, gate changes, 

and with each garbled message 

a wave of discontent washes 

through the terminal like

an anguished flood.  This 

should not be happening.

We deserve better, don't we?

But when our plane finally arrives

like some great ghost 

from the cold migraine,

a hideous phantom, 

an icy monster, 

an antediluvian horror 

in the fog, we board, 

in silence and shame--gone 

are the flamingo dreams  and conch shell 

cocktails, glimmers of pink crab bisque 

and sand dollars, palm trees 

and sun-drenched cabanas 

and manatees floating

gracefully in cabbages and 

mangrove swamps.  All of these 

fantasies have been rubbed free 

of the minds' wrinkles. We rise 

into the night, exhausted 

and transported into the great darkness 

that surrounds us all, the absolute zero 

of our lives, alone and drifting south, 

into the starless flowered land,

the land of hibiscus and camellias, 

of gladioli and exotic banyan trees, 

of Florida, that  great dying land 

where we all must go to die

some day.  

LETTER FROM SANIBEL ISLAND/PUNTA RASSA

Walking this old shoreline, 

this heap of shells and sand, 

this abandoned port

heaved from the gulf of death

all of the old questions return,

all of the masquerade and greasepaint

washes off, the harlequin tattoos

and carnival blues, the jester bells

and tide pool marketplace smirks

until nothing remains when

the dark psyche spills its banks,

the sun sloshes your skin, palm fronds

waver across your mind, 

the warm, bitterswet water 

laps your feet, your eyes burn like old stars, 

sacred stones, you are being 

unborn.

- - - - - - - - - 

You have known this feeling

before--a pilgrim walking the coast 

of Manitou Island, its shipwrecks 

and green lagoons, its rookeries and 

steep dunes sliding into the west,

the buoyant couplings in Lake Michigan's

cold waves under the aurora borealis,

the failed schoolhouse and its fallen apples, 

the abandoned graveyard, making love 

everywhere in this island of ghosts

and lost ancestors, apparitions

dissolving in the morning mist,

unspoken souls wandering

the water's edge, seeking asylum

in some forgotten tongue.

- - - - - - - -  - - - - - -  - - - - -  - - - - - 

Or Northport, tiptoeing the cold

slippery stones beyond the lighthouse,

sliding and teetering in the slick muck

and rocks, like learning to walk

all over again, balance betrayed, 

you follow the shallow glimmerings,

the fabulous petoskey stones, 

scarred with ancient star eyes!,

where waves criss-cross,

an eternal dissection of diamonds,

the silver ripples on the surface,

and the luminescent light looming

across the stones below, you are now

Atlas, straddling two bodies

of water. infinity spreading itself 

everywhere before you.  There is

only expanse, only the north, 

only the unreachable and unreadable.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Years later, across the lake,

what you never tell anyone,

getting lost in Death's Door,

chanting poems on an outcrop of stone, 

blue lips trembling those words

haunting the cold November shore

like angry ghosts, the mist 

of naked birch, the fear of fear itself, 

the ache in your soul, the longing

for the end of longing, when

the dark psyche spills and

runs amok, and there is 

nothing left but you on the stones,

the water lapping, the chill,

the shivering, the fear. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  - - - - - - - - 

So, what exactly are

the old questions?

What are the words that remain

after all of the hubbub, the

flotsam and jetsam, the debris,

the trappings, the endless propositions?

They are inscrutable, the signs

and symbols inscribed in a world

of nouns and verbs, a deep grammar

deeper than anything we can know,

lines and marks, smudges and tempestuous

mood, quotidian derivatives,

tones and sounds, scents and flavors

of stone and metal, lodestone,

something we can only know

and not know, and knowing,

never fully capture, or translate,

or get down in anything like 

apprehendible form before the 

the ashes vanish into ghosts

breathing across the water,

abandoning all form and time

and being.

SEARING BLINDNESS AND CAMELLIAS/SANIBEL ISLAND

Lying in bed this morning, the sun

pouring through my eyelids like some lizard

fixed on a rock, the molten alchemy

sears my optic nerves--I awaken blind

to the rattle of the island wind 

and the smell of camellia floating.

Well, I'm not really blind.  I mean,

the core of everything I see is black,

surrounded, like the sun, by a

corona of flames and, in the periphery,

floating on the camellias, just

blurry distinctions, smeary sun and

the faint suggestions of apprehendible

form.  Like St. Paul, stricken on the road

to Damascus, I have been blessed with 

divine vision--I see sacred flames 

everywhere!  And while the loss of that old

visual field is mildly amusing, I

do not mourn it!  All is holy! Emblazoned

in sacrament!   Pentecostal!  Serpents 

and fiery symbols, black hole vortices 

pulling everything to the godless abyss!

My eyes: stone ashes!  What would I trade

for this gift?  Would I swap it gladly for 

all this stumbling in the world of built form?

Groveling in the gravel driveway, falling

in the stinking ditch of cattail muck 

and algae scum?  Of floating camellias 

and brick?  All those memories of wonder?  

The Chagall chalked seascapes?  The Northern Lights 

bursting across the night like waves crashing 

the firmament?  Your naked body diving 

like dolphins knifing up the coast?  Your back, 

the river of desire, and the camellias 

floating there?  No.  I would not trade those 

for these glowing stones, this searing beauty, 

this pagan agony, for any of that. 

WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE KISS?

Last night I dreamt

we were getting married!

Odd, given the facts,

we don't speak and

I don't love you 

and you don't love me 

and we're both married

to others.  A groomsman

was helping me with my tux,

my carnation boutonniere 

and I thought wait a minute!\

I don't even know you!

We haven't even dated,

or necked, or held hands,

hell, I don't even know 

your last name and now

this whole thing's fate,

odd, isn't it?, I'm almost 

ashamed, my only thought

was what do we do 

when we kiss?  I mean, 

since we've never kissed?

And this wasn't about you

or me but the congregation,

those people waiting for us

to seal the deal?  

Would a simple 

peck on the lips do?

Or something more intimate?,

a suggestive brush of wet

softness, or one of those

histrionic dipsy-doodles? 

A real lollapalooza,  a passionate

tongue-swimming circus!

But it was a kiss of shame--

shame that I did not want

to kiss you, that I did not

find you kissable or

attractive and of course 

knowing that you found me

repulsive, a hideous wretch, 

but wouldn't admit it, not

at the threshold of our joining, 

yet knowing this was stupid, 

that this little moment

was such a clear sign 

of how our marriage 

would unfold, a passionless 

arrangement, a quotidian 

agreement to honor

each other's schedules

and machinations.  And how, 

I wanted to know, does one

kiss another bride in front of

one's wife?  But again, that had

been arranged.  This was more

like Judas and Jesus 

squaring off for their mythic

moment in Gethsemane,

a kiss neither of them 

wanted either, a kiss of

sacrament and shame,

a kiss of indifference 

in some passion play, 

the way a kiss should 

never be.  As we approached

the altar I watched the candles

flickering, the smoke curling

into curlicues, the brassy cross

shimmering.  I could not

look at you in your dress

of white roses or listen

to the prayer of the pastor,

I could only think of

the fate that awaited us,

ambivalence, disregard,

sealed not with a kiss

but the awful knowing 

of that kiss.

CHRISTMAS DAY/SANIBEL ISLAND

No miracle last night except shrimp

and crab quesadillas, tiki torches

and the faint lights of fishing boats trolling

home, the fussing of pelicans shrouded 

in palms, all the Russians and Germans

smoking in Charley's Cabana and 

shouting across the globe into iPhones.

No, today is the celebration 

of salvation, the birth of redemption,

there are three sage ibis stalking the docks, 

stray egrets and heron minding their flock.

The Euros drink coffee at poolside 

and their children eat waffles and smoothies

in silence.  The morning mist dissipates

and the island burns under the sun.

Sailboats anchor offshore, filling the air

with Neil Diamond songs and the smoke 

from charred steaks and when Charley shouts 

"Hey, you want bloody mary's?" above the jet ski drone 

and the waves lapping off the cigarette boat wake,

we know a miracle has been born.

What it will be we do not know, only

that the the myth is written in our blood 

and takes us years to understand.

CHRISTMAS EVE/SANIBEL ISLAND

One thing is for certain in the world
tonight--surrounded here by tiki flames
and fountains, palm trees languishing the shore
and the primal darkness of the gulf:
the world turns just like a great big wheel
just as the night swirls above the firmament--
stars of spilt ash from God's great bonfire
aeons ago return in the cosmic wind,
prehistoric birds roost in the mangroves--
you can hear them muttering among crickets
and the muted trumpet jazz piped in from
Charley's Cabana.

Two thousand years ago the old story
kicked off, a star, a manger, an innkeeper
and a couple seeking asylum.
Are we any less forsaken now, Son of Man,
cast on the edge of the desert of the great
Babylon? Sprawled on the poolside deck chairs,
our skin illuminated by the day's sun
and the eerie watery glow, the flickering
tongues of the tiki torches, ignored by
the concierge and obeying some
inscrutable impulse to please someone
we do not know--are we any less chosen
to these portents in the sky, these omens,
these signs burning in the ancient night?

Tonight is the night of the great story,
the story of our great belief, here, in
this ring of tiki torches, these palm trees,
these fountains and heated pools, this jacuzzi
bubbling and steaming, this savage night
of ancient birds and loneliness and betrayal--

it is the only story we know, the only story 

we tell ourselves, the holiness of 

making it through, of wondering, what do

the stars hold for us tomorrow, what do

we do with ourselves until then?

DESDEMONA

Desdemona, seated this morning
on the verandah looking over the gulf
of ibis and pelicans brooding
across the water, drinking coffee, legs
crossed while she writes in her journal,
reclaiming her life here, returning to
the elemental, the sea, the morning
wind, the sun, her black dress, her black hair
draped suspiciously down her shoulder,
looking for words, for the four-handed
massage at the spa, stones warming
her back, the promise of spiritual joy
and awakening. O for mimosas at brunch!
A love affair, and coffee! Starfish and collecting
shells naked along the shore, feeling Cuba
in your mind, in your thighs, candlelight and
starlight from the balcony, incense
in your sleep, seared tuna and spinach salad,
bowls of she crab soup, kisses from
the past, anguished betrayals, the cleansing breath,
the promise of love, the memory, and
of course the words, these words, these words
she lives by, abides by, the words she cherishes,
conch, whelk, cockle, sand dollar, dolphin,
scallop, lover, lonely, alone, naked,
the shore, the tide, the stars and the moon,
mojitos and Italian jazz, destiny...
Desdemona, the unfortunate,
waiting on the verandah, and writing.

MORNING/SANIBEL ISLAND

Christmas Eve


Sun through the shutters creeps
across the bed, a blessing
in our sleep. We rise
to prehistoric birds circling
our dreams, pelicans and
osprey, audacious crows
spreading their malarkey
in the palms, even eagles
with their fingers stretched
upon the sky.

Coffee on the verandah
as the hotel staff spray
down the deck from last night's
carnaval, spilt pitchers
of sangria and cerveza
and mojitos, and you now
in your peacock hat
and your Ben Franklin
flip flops I find so fetching!
After breakfast I walk
along the docks, the shore,
the boats, and find the poolside
abandoned, save the fountain
of steel egrets spitting
a pool, and old lovers
in a white panama hat
and pink flamingo pantsuit
drinking prune juice
under the palms. I am
here alone, drinking coffee,
sprawled on a cabana,
bathed in the sun as the wind
washes over me. I am
the prodigal, a hedonist
stretching my limbs,
my sinews, closing my eyes
so the translucence pours
onto me, a stiff and godless
thing, an emptiness,
a wastrel in god's poetics,
these lush and pagan
latitudes awaken the body
slowly, lovely, the winter blood
and bones stirring, waiting
for you.

Tenderly

For the last eight years I have been listening to Chet Baker, especially a song entitled "Tenderly." I found it on a CD entitled "The Last Concert" that I stumbled upon in the stacks. His music has always seemed hauntingly familiar, as if somehow imprinted on me, especially this last recording, in which you can definitely hear the rasps of mortality in his voice. There are moments when the trumpet work is divine. I have played the CD over and over these past few years, have listened to his earlier recordings, and have even written a poem for him. There is something wonderfully fragile and vulnerable and confident in "The Last Concert" that has really had a pull on me. It's shaped my sense of nuance and mood and feeling. So much so that I've sought out other artists recordings of the song "Tenderly." (Even this afternoon I was caught off-guard when driving along Captiva Island Road to find a residence named "Tenderly." Among all of the typical nautical monikers and island names and pirate titles, we saw "Tenderly," which seemed as out of place and refreshingly rare as any boat or place name I've seen in years. So tonight, imagine my surprise when listening to Mantovani's recording of "Tenderly" that I suddenly recognized a song I'd been listening to all of my young life! The version is so schmaltzy and cleansed of countermelody that it sounds almost unrecognizable, except a particularly rich phrasing of trumpet. I used to place that song, and that Mantovani album, over and over when I was young. I played it because it evoked a deep sense of feeling in me--a confusion of tears, of sadness, of joy and love, of grief and sorro, of loss and loneliness. (Leave it to Mantovani's rich strings) . There was something in Mantovani that said it was okay to feel in music, something I realized in snippets in band. It was a bit grandiose, and haunting, and full of bathos, sure, and for me it was the ultimate escape in a household that seemed devoid of emotion--schmaltzy music that was nothing but emotion. It was about being alone, letting my constructed self go, and letting this music in, letting feeling in. In a way, when I was home alone and listening to my mother's Mantovani album, for that brief respite of loneliness, the solitude of being alone and listening to the music, that hour of self-indulgence, the house could have been called "Tenderly."

POEM FROM SANIBEL ISLAND

for SD, Winter Solstice, 2003


Walking the frozen trails
of the County Grounds
(now excavated and
smoothed of their history)

the narrow ice-tamped
runs in fields of hip-high drifts,
burdock and milkweed husks
stubborn in the wind,

you walk ahead, fists buried
in your pockets, your arms
scored by stigmata, burning
even in this savage cold,

you trudge along, stingy
with your secrets, the past,
the unimaginable story,
the unspeakable crime,

and yet, behind you, stumbling,
I keep asking, lest the words
spilling from your blue lips,
the burning anger, the raging

star beneath the skin, should
suddenly stop. You let blood
speak but it does not speak
the truth you know you must

shape with guttural sounds,
while overhead as we trudge
in the angry ghosts of breath,
a big hawk chases us, his cold

eye glaring, his yellow beak
knifing the solstice air:
is he a menace? or
guardian? and below us

as we crunch and grudge,
we see runnels of mice,
like veins in the ice, rivulets,
passageways dug through

the snow skin, shadows
scurry in the cold, let's admit
it, we came here on the
shortest day to witness

the death of the year,
the death of the world,
to punish ourselves, to
reach beyond the darkness

and the fear, beyond
the ice and the terrible
cold, to somehow lay bare
the great betrayal

and the unspoken
remains, to begin again.
Tell me your story
one more time, and this

time, when you ask me
why I care, think about
those trails, how much
our fingers ached, your

trembling lips, that hawk,
those mice running under
us--the stubbornness
and the world's last gasp.

When you ask me why I care
think about the stories
buried all around us,
those who could not give voice

to the truth of their lives
and how all of that does not
matter any more to anyone
and that when I say it matters

to me I mean it, it
means trust me and what
I say, it means I am here
and I will follow.

Our Song

Thanksgiving Day, 2008


"Remember?" you ask, over Sunday morning
bloody mary's and Mandy Potemkin's
"Over the Rainbow," your Kim Novak necklace
sparkling over sausages and strawberry-stuffed
waffles as lucsious and delectable as
that summer we spent ourselves on the shore,
hypnotized by the rhythm of the waves,
claret and chablis splashing your skin,
"Remember?" you ask, "our laundramat?"
like lovers who share some sacred poem
whispered, like a prayer, by some erotic
prophet, or some secret sign, or some song,
"our song," some Captain and Tenille ballad
while we shuffle under the gym backboard
and slide across the sawdust in clumsy sweat
and English Leather in darkness, or
"our cafe," that cheap Chinese joint next to
Coney Island hot dogs, our first date
where I first tasted sweet and sour,
Cantonese pineapple, we spilt mustard
on our fingers feeding each other egg rolls,
and rose water!, and fortune cookies we
savored like divine oracles.


Our laundramat! Remember?
Sunday evenings as the sun spread
across the west and the dying river,
all lavender and brassy, we hauled
baskets heaped with sheets and cordouroys
and dangling bra straps from the Electra,
fed the washers with fists of quarters and
powdered soap as darkness bloomed in the
streaked windows and neon Open script,
the candy bar and coffee machines, we
leaned against the machines as they cycled,
the sweet vibrations opening us, like
those fat reducing belts on the Lucy show!,
ridiculous gyrations that shook us silly,
we trembled and hummed, unconscious
to our lives, the tremor in our bones
like bees sleeping and abuzz! As the night
emptied, we moved through the joint like ghosts,
desperate for the warmth from the dryers
and the glass-eyed doors, our oracles!, to
return the heat to our souls. Later
we will drive home in the cool of the night,
cross the river in silence, and unload our lives
for one more week, cheap date!, reaching
into the darkness, neatly folded, still
radiant with out hands smoothing the
wrinkles, preparing ourselves for what is
to come, our laundramat!, our song!, our
children!, our bodies loving and
unloving in time.

Idea...

For two years I was known as "The Boy."

Or "Boy."

Two summers at the nursery, the Dutch owners called me that.

I was 15 & 16.

I was the water boy. The weeder. I carried trees and shrubs and lifted them into cars. Toted fertilizer and peat moss and manure. I swept the parking lot. Carried flats of flowers, unloaded trucks. Anytime someone needed help, they called for The Boy.

"Where is 'The Boy'?" Thelma used to ask. Robert called me "Boy." "Okay, Boy," he'd say, and he'd lead me out to the beds and show me something new, how to prune junipers, how to mulch, how aerate the root stock, how to tag shade trees.

I was the gopher, the errand boy, the bell-hop.

No one really knew my name. I was the skinny nameless kid in cut-offs and wet shoes.

Strange how for over thirty years I have forgotten that. I was an imp, a curmudgeon, a cur, a ragamuffin at the beck-and-call of everyone in the nursery: Get a hose. Get a wheelbarrow. Load this. Unload this truck. Go get that.

During the busy season, I was a blur of activity, 4 hours a day after school, twelve hours a day on Saturdays. In summer I'd work 60-70 hours a week. Near mother's Day and Memorial Day I exhausted myself. We were all running on adrenaline, on vapors, literally running all day. Then later, as the days lengthened and business slowed to a crawl, I spent hours in boring stasis watering, weeding, sweeping, unloading semis. I guzzled bottles of Mountain Dew and cheap grape soda all day, my skin scalding crab red. My feet wrinkled like prunes and stank. I disappeared among empty greenhouses and the lost beds of leftover nursery stock. It was wretched, watering the same baskets of dirt and plants every day in silence, listening to the hot wind waffle the visqueen skin of the hoop houses...I was tormented by a routine in which no one saw me or was aware of what i was doing, but when they needed me they didn't even know my name, ad I felt rescued by the faint praise of that lame recognition. "Boy, there's a truck of fertilizer that needs unloading." "Boy, can you carry this stone deer?" "Boy, go get a rfope and tied this down."

.. .

...

UNTITLED, Riding the Robert Noble

As the Robert Noble is unmoored, a
heron, standing on the jetty rocks, spreads
his great wings, a curious omen, of
what? Darkness? Our doom? That we are fated
for some tragic end? Who knows? We sway and
nudge each other in ways we dare not
on shore--the ferry invites us to share
our bodies as we join the waves, strangers
in the wake and volume of our lives, we
are always departing into this cool
blue existence, aren't we?, this "This is who
I am!" and "That is what I was!", as if
the very sense of being empties itself
into the widening gulf, this bay of being.
Here in this buoyancy you are blind
to the future, this now unraveling
in the foam and sway is the only now
that ever was, waves splashing the sandbar
and shoals, what a pleasure to be freed
from the tyranny of time! That buoy
bobbing off starboard is not is not a warning
or a marker but a sign of affirmation!
No regrets! No danger here! Bird Island
creeps up from the horizon with its
long-billed ibis and egrets stalking the shores
and here, swooping across the deep blue,
a string of white pelicans, they, too, are
immigrants escaping memory. We
are floating in consciousness itself, Gravel
Island, Hog Island, they all slide past like
so many lives we once led, no regrets!,
until the engines slow and the ferry turns
and we dock again, the lines are fastened
and we join the the great sadness, the weight
of our souls, something we know that pulls us
where we do not want to go.

To a Lone Bird on a Phone Line Outside Sevastopol, WI

Look mister, let's
get one thing straight.
Your attitude

needs adjustment,
you've got your beak
all bent outta shape

over what? Perching
there above the field,
feathers all dusty

and raggedy-ass
in the heat like
all this somehow

comes down to you?
I don't think so,
Mister I-don't-give-a

fuck!, Mister Lord-
of-all-creation!,
Mister chirp aleck!


Let's face it.
no one wants to
hear any more of your

cute-as-a-kitten
singing, that sweet
music you seem to

think is so god-
damned important,
we don't want

to hear another
peep! Smart ass!
You best get off

your high horse, mister,
if you know what's
good for you -- it's

high time you started
acting more like
a crow or a hawk

or even an owl,
for Christ's sake, not
some shrunken finch,

it's time you
acted your age. son.
I'll knock that

smirk right off
your beak! I swear,
you think I won't,

but I'm not afraid
to tan your tail
feathers, trim back

your little wing hard.
I mean it. I don't need
your sulking, your

judgement, your high
falutin' airs! Now,
stop acting so

sorry for yourself
and help me rake up
all this hay

before the sun
goes down.

AIRPORT ROAD

Heart of the island, we
ride our old beater bikes
past birches lining the road
just to lie here in the meadow
and wait for the planes
to arrive. We are lost
in the blue, lake wind
blowing back our hair,
gossiping in the tall grass,
the wind sock floats
as casual as a whisper.
From the fields, ripe
hay rolls over us as
grasshoppers click and buzz.
Then we hear the the plane
approach, a lonely drone
as he circles the field,
steel dragonfly drifting
in slow circles, it's all
so narcotic!, so dizzy!,
the earth spinning, hay
and clover smelling of
mock orange and honey,
we're falling too deeply!,
and then the plane swoops
over the haystack, rumples
on the grass and surrenders.
We are passengers
waiting for our next flight
into oblivion, waiting
for the next moment
to come.

S T A V K I R K (Church of Staves) on the Island

a wooden Norwegian church,
dating from the 12th Century



Independence Day.
While the islanders
watch pagan fireworks
at the ball field, we pilgrims
seek an evening of prayer
in this stern viking church.
So strange to find this
medieval pagoda,
this tribute to conversion
of those Norse raiders,
here, under a glade
of maples where no ship
or shore or savage wind
meet. It is as stark
and unadorned as a
reformer's creed,
a Jerusalem Bible open
on a lectern, and folding
chairs, and suspended
from the rafters, like
some deus ex machina,
an empty sailboat
in the breathless
nave honoring a woman
who died too young.
Hard to imagine
a loving god here
in this frugal, dispassionate
space, hard to pray here,
and hard to seek
redemption or even
rapture in this barren
wood. Outside, as dusk
falls, we walk the garden,
retracing Gethsemane
while the sun sets
in violet and peach
and wine-blood while
the muffled fireworks
explode. In the forsaken
orchard of fruit trees
and wild wheat, juniper
and grackles, swallows
dive into darkness.
We penitents, idolators,
transgressed the coming
night, we pissed on
clover and stirred up
the bumble bees--we
were invaders, renegades,
transplanted evangelists,
zealots seeking, as
we all do, salvation.

ROADKILL ON COUNTY ROAD ZZ

Riding the crowned asphalt
of August and the black pools
of heat mirages, the coarse sand

and wind-burnt junipers,
glades of aspen tongues
gasping in the wind, a land

scorned by god and prophets.
Everywhere there are signs
of failure: bankrupt farms,

belly-up barns and caved-in
shacks, farm houses scrubbed
raw and ramshackled,

orchards swollen with weeds
and bees and rotting fruit, traces
of roads swallowed by scrub.

As I crest Watersend hill
and coast into the valley
I spot the three black vultures--

big, bold and savage in their
reality, working a carcass
in the road. As I approach

they stiffen, indignant,
their ancient filled with disgust,
their cold eyes perturbed

by my insistent wheels.
Finally, as I rush upon them,
they bolt from the road in

slow savage wingbeats.
There on the ghost line
lay the remains of their

complaint: a deer head
no bigger than my fist,
fresh blood and splintered

bone spilt on the asphalt,
the head perfectly untouched,
glassy eyes staring, the body

obliterated. I ride by,
innocent of this grisly
murder, yet somehow stained

by the act of witness
as the vultures circle overhead
and swoop back down

to refresh their appetites,
this land is unrepentant,
like so much of us, it's best

to keep pedaling in the heat,
wipe the stinging sweat
from your eyes, and find

salvation somewhere, in
water, or god, or, if nowhere
else, some scavenger of love.

DEPARTURE

As the ferry turns
in the harbor, a Russian
mother chats on her cell,
her kids giggling at the gulls
laughing in their own
Russian gibberish, at our
sudden uneasy buoyancy,
we are all drunkards,
Karamazovs freed from the
certainty of the shore's
firm language.

As we slide past the jetty
a cormorant spreads his black wings:
an omen! We enter Death's Door,
a terrible passage! Who will
place coins on our slavic
tongues? Who will carry us
to the island of dreamers
and lotus eaters, the lyrical
sirens and pagans of desire?

CAPE CANAVERAL (on the plane from Kansas City)

Yesterday, on the solstice, we
lay on the shore, sweating
in the cabana's shade, eyes

blistered from the sea's
silver searing, unable to read
or even think, just staring

through squinting slits
at the shimmering,
we spoke of physics,

my son and wife and I,
he described crystallized
miracles, carbon-fiber

ladders that would stretch
into space beyond the sweep
of satellites, gossamer

threads like elevators,
spider silks to the skies!



We lay there mesmerized
by the elemental, the heat,
the waves, the blinding

light until, exhausted,
we could take no more science.
We ran across the sand

to wade in the sea's warmth.
We spread ourselves in that
lavish wet bewilderment!,

that gentle world, where
our sunburnt lips tingled
in the brine, and watched

the ancient birds dive
among us, where jellyfish
billowed in the wind, and

we floated there, three
bodies open to the sky
like buoyant starfish,

free from the mind's
gravity, just floating,
as if consciousness itself

were suspended there
in a vast ocean of being,
waiting for the great

rising.

CUANDO CUANDO CUANDO

Why do you remember her, that
Cuban woman singing Cuando cuando cuando
in the October night? That Bayside club
of mojitos and limes and sweet plantains,
sitting at the water's edge,
dipping your hand into the warm
darkness, the moon ghost haunting
the gulf and its smell of monkfish
and crabshells on the wind, her voice
filling the evening's sadness
with a desire you can only possess,
a yearning from somewhere ancient
and familiar, an insinuation, something
deeper, cuando cuando cuando,
how her bracelets slink and shimmy
as she sings, her mango skin, cuando,
how the needlefish nibble your fingertips,
the tingling sting of delight,
how there's nothing more
to say but to let the feeling come, that
temptation, cuando, her singing,
her arms calling out cuando cuando cuando,
the sheer feeling of feeling itself,
and when she calls you must feel
that feeling, you are alive, loving
love more than you can ever stand,
the fullness of that loss, that emptiness,
that fear: giving in to that song
like a shell held to the ear,
innuendos and intimations,
inklings and whispers,
the lyric of divine anguish.

Untitled (for Joan Mitchell)

About your drawings and all that red!
And those birds! I have traveled there,
The loneliness of red turkeys
In a cornfield as the first snow flies,
The terror of red vultures
Pecking a roadside armadillo,
Those bloody crows that sway
In the wind and leaves! How they haunt
Me with their insistence of words
And meaning, surely there is some
Story scratching its way beneath
The surface, the promise of
A language I can understand
Only in the darkness of my veins.

Anyway, in my dream I got it
Wrong. It was all scribbles and lines,
Angry erasures, frissons of
Childhood, furious scrubbings of
Pastels, curlicues of color!
Flagellates! A clusterfuck of hue
And mood!

I woke up knowing you
Are in danger girl, you need to
Watch yourself! This dream is an omen!
The ancient ones burnt entrails and
Smelt the blood and gristle to
Divine their fate. The blind ones
Listened too closely to the mad
Music of wings, the awful truth
Of shooting stars streaking across
The night! Not because of the art
But because of the content
Of the story in their blood,
The bird of consciousness itself,
Always watching, preying. You draw
That darkness in your veins.

On Attending the Conference Panel Regarding Teaching Creative Thinking and Critical Thinking

And so we all gathered in the bowels
of the great Hyatt Regency! Under the
humming florescent lights all geeked
and ramped up to talk about creativity
and deep critical thought, sharp,
intelligent mindfulness, all of us
scholars and professors, pedagogues,
eggheads, academics, intellectual
willy-willies, silver-haired, thick-tongued
cockeyed bobs, all knotted up in
cravats and scarves and blazers,
it's a Roundtable Discussion! We're
sharing ideas in this breakout
session of linen tables and ice water
and photocopied paradigms and
nomenclatures and the one thing
we're not doing is sharing ideas,
we're too busy sharing rigamarole!
Marvelous circumlocutions! Superfluous
verbosities, loquations, lofty philosophical
cogitations, gaseous construction, ideological
caterwauling, rationalistic intercourse,
mentalistic stuff! The almighty social scientists,
the holy trinity of presenters,
the sagacious brainy thinkamobbers
sit with their goblets of ice,
their flip charts and their grids
for categorizing the world and its
slippery phenomena--oh they are
geniuses! They answer every question!
They are clairvoyants, oracles, epistemologists,
lexicographers, mathematicians, logicians
of the soul, they close off every mind
like a guillotine! Snap! There are
no messes! There are no formative
concepts, no fricatives or sibilants
floating in the air! Just these ghoulish
faces staring out at us from their
black eyes and their pens scratching out
dead words on paper, and we've all got
our marching orders: we need to teach
our students to think creatively! To think critically!
They are failing! They are lugheads! Thick-headed,
vacuous, dumb beasts! We need to teach them
how to think! We run for the door,
gasping for breath, zombies all rhombus-
noggined, desperate for some life,
something real, a cup of coffee, a conk
on the noodle, a smack in the kisser,
fresh air, a poem, a punch in the belly,
a spin in the hotel's revolving door,
anything to penetrate this scrim
of vacuous ratiocinative parlance swimming
in your brain. Meanwhile, there are
cardinals bragging in Millennium Park!,
Snow Stars!, hyacinth spreading their
syrupy headstrong nectar across the wind!,
fields of daffodils, like sunflowers, like windmills,
like men kissing and slobbering each other
on the serpentine stainless steel bridge!,
girls parading by with their "Hug Me!" signs
and giggling and boys copulating everything!,
everyone with a camera flattening the world
into digital pixels, transubstantiation!, there's
your fucking miracle, professors!, there's your
fucking rubric for creativity! You can't
separate the world into Manichean
dualities, it's all one ectoplasmic
slime, one big ass swamp cabbage,
a horse lattitude jibber jabber!,
the most dishwater lurid carnival
of your life! Put that in your post-modern
metaphysics!, your General Education
academic schematic!, your post-Marxist
templates for fostering unique and
monolithic exhortations that scream
please, please, think differently, just like
we want you to.

AIDS Walk 2005

We gathered by the water
by the thousands
dancing in the sun and glitter
while freighters in the distance
braved the depths, magnificent ships!,
and flags and spinnakers rippled
in the harbor wind! The voices
from the main stage swirled around us
like carnival rides, there was so much joy
and sadness in our hearts!
Politicians declared their fortitude
and rallied around rainbow t-shirts
with pleas for compassion.
Health care workers and love-scarred partners
prayed for precious love and defiant justice,
they prayed for mercy and thanked those
thousands before them vibrating in
sun-drenched sweat, their heart drums pounding,
the children rallied and thrilled by blood
and words and music and signs that
their world was our world,
and waves swept the shore clean in pulses
that washed over the crowd
and we were cleansed by the fury
of our fierce love. And that is when
the stage emptied except for the three
cages and three white doves
stared out on the crowd
and one by one they were released,
the first flew out over our heads, its wings
fluttering in a rush
as if from a magician's hat
and then slowly circled us.
The second joined her and the two
swept the sky in perfect arcs,
circling the water as if this
were the eternal moment, the sacred poem,
the great life prayer, while the third
stood on the edge and waited, as if
she were afraid to brave the depths,
she could not dare the blue gulf.
Her friends circled wider and soared
higher until they disappeared.
We waited for the music and the drums,
the beginning, suspended in hope
when a burst of white spilled over us
in a gasp, sweeping down to the third cage
and the last dove rose and followed,
followed as they flew as one soul,
white spirits riding the endless blue
until we could see them no more,
and as the the drums and music swelled,
we walked, together, nameless and one,
following, shoulder to shoulder,
we hoped, forever.

How Do You Just

How do you just
let it all go,
open your mind
like you might
open your hand
to a lover?

How do you let go
of every breath
as if it were
your last? Do you
struggle to keep it
in til you turn blue?
Apoplectic?

Or do you give in
to the inevitable death?
What are you
holding on to?
Dying is not
so different,
you simply let go.

You wish you could
let go when you
make love, when you
listen to Beethoven,
when you look at
Matisse or Kandinsky
but it's so hard
when the incessant wars
of thought splash
over you, the words,
the clenched need
to control something,
the anxious synapse
twitch...

Opening yourself
means to live in
that dying present, aware
but not aware,
consciousness devoid
of judgment,
hopelessness
in the fabric
of all moments,
raveling and
unraveling...

He Says He'll Send Roses, Too, But They Never Arrive

Vanquished by the wicked
cold, the mercurchrome
and melancholy of love,
he rode his bike away,
shivering from the late
spring, the cottonwood's seeds
floating down in the river's
chill, his knuckles burning,
his face and lips smitten
with her fragrance. What
was it that he wanted
after all? A night's tussle
under her lilac arms, her
incomprehensible joy,
her silly clothes, she dressed
more like a snowfire crab
than a redbud, more star-struck
than slender or graceful
but behind her big fishbowl
glasses she gazed in wonder,
naked and lovely in
her robe of bearded iris,
and as he rode home
in spring's full flooding glory
he knew he must return
to his room and his books
and the window on which
he looked out on the world,
it was safer there, behind
the glass and the pane,
he had to wait for this season
to spend its fury before
he could venture again.

Ragged Time

for Eve Shelnutt

We filled our days
with church, she
swathed babies and

I swept the Narthex,
on Sundays she sang
alto, I was acolyte,

there were matins
and vespers, missions
to migrant camps,

we filled our souls
with piety and truth,
devout offerings --

these were not
acts of faith but
acts of belief.

Summer days I
walked her home
past the swamp and

heaps of smoldering
mattresses and
tires curling pillars

of smoke, rotting
cabbages and
magazines, we

walked the valley
of shadow wasps
and dragonflies

as ashes rained
down on us and
the cattails--we

we were too young
for the body's
blessing to serve,

forsaken as all
must be before
suffering holiness.

More of Something

I woke up to the sound of nothing, really, and that's the problem.

I can't hear myself, or nothing else, for that matter, but there were no dream ghosts, no Debussy, no dark Mahler, no existential pulse.

[Now... I need to start thinking.... Who is this character? What is the story he propels? I have the beginning of a mystery, a conflict.... Where does it want to go? What does he need to do? What is his story? Where will it go?]

Beginning of Something

Here it is 18 degrees. It snowed all day and night.
So this morning, when I awoke, it was still dark. The world glowed with a radiance that only a new snow can give. A crystalline luminescence, a dream.
I did not sleep, but listened to the snow falling, and all the emptiness. Ashes falling to earth and landing with a hiss. I could feel them on my naked flesh, star ashes, cold and searing, even under my comforter I could not get warm. I shivered and sweat and worried in the glittering light.


Night sweats.


So here I am, sitting here, looking out the window, drinking coffee, and this is what I know.
It is 18 degrees.
It snowed last night, all day yeserday.
The cedars are bent and sagging.
Everything has shrunk.
The powerlines have drooped, the birch tree snapped.
The sun is pouring in, blinding me.
I am staring out at all of this brightness, this resplendence, and I can't bear my own breath, can't bear that gust of snow sworling just outside the window pane, that squirrel gnawing at the plastic lawn chair. I cannot feel my cold feet.
I have missed three weeks of work. I yanked the phone cord from the wall. The sink is stacked with pans of Beefaroni.
I shivered all night.
Why didn't I get another blanket?
Why didn't I sleep beside the radiator?
I could not move.


These are the facts. The cold hard facts.
I am so tired of the facts.

Summer Solstice 2007

This solstice is absurd!
The day stretches beyond
our minds... catbirds and
cardinals, ecstatic or
confused, keep singing as
new patches of time erupt
in jubilance, the sky
never quite darkens, you
can hear children squabbling
about vegetables, freight
cars groaning from the valley,
church bells at all hours,
insect clicks and buzzings,
ridiculous laughter,
bootylicious howls and jests,
bawdy moans and cries,
green maple swellings, ripe-
bellied gibes and the mocking
bawlings of crows swaying
in the sun-splashed
tree tops. Who is that
lusty comic swinging
naked atop the dawn?

for Bob Riegert

He is The Hanging Judge,
The Great Abnegater,

The God-Who-Always-Says-No

There's never been a case
He didn't deny or reject

There is no pleasing Him

no way to earn His love,
no escape from His wrath

there is no coup, no revolt

no rebellion, no way to
overthrow this Dark Lord.



The only way to survive
this life is to install

your own appellate judge

someone who can speak to
the jury, plead your case, some

Great Adjudicator,

Someone who will take your
side, tell your story, trust

you at your word, take you

on faith alone. Tell me,
who else in your life

will do that for you?

Who else will listen to you,
embrace your soul, and love

only you?

Beach Party Dalliance

On the drive to the beach, the caravan
stops at a roadside stand for strawberries--

we feed them to each other through the windows
like baby birds in a nest gulping for more!

The berries are incredibly sweet and ripe,
they burn the lips and tongue like honeyed nectar,

when we reach the beach and climb the sand
our bodies are no longer ours, but the young

lovers we were forty years ago, the quick
and confused, the swift moving and randy-fleshed,

we laze across the warm scalloped sand,
casual as teenagers aching for love

and yet cautious as parents, mindful to
build a fire but daring to swim trembling

in icy water. We are a band of exiles,
gypsies, a woman in a sari and her

two Nigerian children, another woman
with silver rings on her fingers and a tie-dye

dress that flutters in the wind lke a peacock's tail,
she tells everyone at the campfire that "it's

destiny that we meet", her chestnut eyes
staring wide, waiting for someone to fill them.

Both women are hauntingly beautiful
on the shore, they are looking for men to

make them whole, they have known men who are cruel,
both are looking for women who will understand,

who will bear witness to the truth of their lives,
but they seem haunted, unreal, unsure of what

the evening will bring next after the hotdogs
charred on sticks and the bags of potatos chips

and crispy asian slaw. The men scatter
across the sand bare-chested in the cool wind,

all sunburnt and squint-eyed, playing frisbee
while the kids dive across the sand desperately

trying to catch up. The sun slowly sinks
over the lake, slowly succumbing to

layers of lavender and peach and plum.
The last of the sailboats sag in along the

hollyhocks and roses and soon the faintest
stars and the crescent moon rises. We all

circle around the campire drinking cabernet
and asti, the glowing orange embers and bury

our flesh in the sand, for the air is now
cold, and without partners, the loneliness

is hard...were we younger and licking these
smores off our fingers we'd be licking each

other's fingers, hugging each other, and
disappearing into the hollows of

the dunes. As it is we must pleasure ourselves
with a glimpse of skin, the memory of

a voice, the gooseflesh fraised from an ardent
glance of her leg kicking up from the sand,

his chest tightening as he ran, how her hair
glistened in the sun when she left the water,

how his hand felt when he offered to help
her rise from the driftwood. Then, after midnight,

how we all blunder through the cold,
happy for a hooded sweatshirt and a

slice of cherry pie, the crust spinkled with sugar,
to sit out on the grass of the motel lawn

and count the stars glittering over the deep sky.
This is the loneliness of our lives, the

unbearably sweet and haunting aloneness
that we carry. Another day's longing,

another day of longing!

Solstice 2007

I missed it this
year, totally
whiffed, thought it was
today and then
looked at the date.
How can you miss
the shortest day of
the year? It does
not matter, the
world was shrouded
in fog, so there
was no way to
trace the long shadows
or the thin sun.
In truth I spent
the day sleeping
and writing a poem
about the longest
day of the year,
an irony, if
you will, perhaps
like the poem itself,
I was writing
about the death of
the Big Au Suble
River when it
turns out its more
of a sandy creek,
I was recalling
the end of love
when I remembered
it was really
the rebirth of
desire.

At the Mouth of the Big Au Sauble River

This is no great river by any stretch!
No, it dies a slow and easy death
in the sandy shoals of Lake Michigan.

You can wade across the river mouth
in fifteen, maybe twenty steps, the water
is clear and the bottom smooth scalloped sand,

it feels as luscious as an oyster or
the pink skin of a conch, sacred in its
shallows, then heaved up unceremonious

on a sandbar as it pushes deeper
into our souls. A lone fisherman casts
into the shadows, for what?, good luck?,

there's no fish lurking here, only nervous
gulls murmuring at the water's edge
and waterlogged driftwood, and as the sun

sets in its honeyed lavenders and mango
pomegranates and sweet cherries, sure enough
here come the beachcombers in their sombreros

and serapes and pedal pushers,
laughing, nuzzling, kissing and holding hands.
The water is warm and indifferent, pagan,

a quiet rapture. This is, after all,
the ordinary, our love dying off.
We came here not to renew but to be

reborn.

TUESDAY

Trapped behind my
window panes I

watched the city
slump into winter,

all morning the sky
darkened and the

sullen river stared
back, anxious,

an old wound.
Finally, we could

no longer stand it!
The snow fell in

wet gobs! Big globs!
Fist-sized ashes

filled the air, a
miracle! Great

clumps of star-stuff!
Globs of nuclear wonder!

Incredible chunks
of phenomena!

it was the world
transformed, the sky,

the river, the city
and the lovely

snow, I felt
I loved all this

lovely dying,
this lovely

praying, the end
of the world.

PINK: Walking For the Cure

thinking of Ellen Vincent


1.

Remember that moment,
all of those women, survivors,
dressed in pink and roses, standing
on the stone steps for their photograph,
radiant, shimmering, an ecstasy, a riot,
as if at any moment they might burst
into star-ash rapture, an unspeakable
Pentecost!


2.

Last year we walked out
into the cold morning, a flood
of people fanning out from the city
and spilling into the harbor.
The faces of those returning
were careworn, tired, lost in memory,
and if transfigured by the walk
and the shimmering, the sun
glittering off the lake, cold
for the season, sails sagging
in the listless air.


3.

This year is harder.
There are so may things we
cannot say or do, so many things we
dare not say or do. This year
we walk in the sun, as if
we are alone and yet we are surrounded
by survivors, friends and lovers,
children and mothers, thousands,
each of us thoughtful, each of us
carrying some name, some memory,
some prayer, some fierce grip
on what we hold most precious,
that star-ash rapture!, a radiance we
cannot betray.

Hay Season

She has butterscotch lips
that tremble in her sleep.

Summer nights I stare
at her breathing in shadows,

moonlight, warm wind,
curtains billowing -- is this

the woman I love?
Anyone I know?

I study the hollows
of her eyes, the luna moth

fluttering at her hallowed
breasts, her neck, the church bell

tolls, a freight train moans
from the valley. I have

prayed for this so long,
the honeyed air, melon

ripe, the gleanings,
again.

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.

TONIGHT


ten years ago today


Tonight, here, on the edge of the West,
we are sweating in a bistro, drinking
iced cider and doughuts as the leaves
fall down around us in the hot wind.
Lightning glistens off the windows
and surrounds us in dramatic flashes--
it's just so damned big out here,
so open, no place to hide in all this
flatness, this is everything we're
afraid of, and love, the darkness,
all of this October heat, the wind,
all the withered trees rattling husks,
and driving here all day, in the dying
afternoon haze, the highway lined
with skunks and bloated deer and the lovely
smell of decay, and then, in the grove
of birch we saw a rolled car and medics
kneeling in deep grass over a body.
All around us, the world was
turning lavender and rust, bending
to the wind, and in the hills, the cattle
were slowly coming home. The sky wheeled
with hawks, as if what was happening here,
here of all places, mattered, and I thought back
to how ten years ago my father died,
how these things come to matter in ways
we can never really know.

PELIGROSO


written in Minneapolis, October 6


At Ludington we'd been walking
the pier just like always, the sun

fresh and full on our faces, the wind
gusting up the waves in heaving

sprays, and so we ventured into
the deep, dancing between billows

of green, then blue, then oil-slick black.
The swells sucked and swallowed the rocks,

then flooded the air with rain and
mist, cold foam, delicious agony!

We knelt behind the salacious
lighthouse where the wind sullied our

souls and small boats dallied and dipped
indecently. We hid there in

our lee cove and necked til our bones
chilled in the summer sun, ridiculous,

and headed back for avacados
and gouda cheese, back through the

swells and the gusts and the heaving
waves and all the vertiginous

sway when we spotted the skinny lads
in red trunks, all ribs and tanned flesh

running along the pier, several
diving in, and one red rescue boat

bobbing up and down in the green
shallows, banging against the rocks

and the DANGER/PELIGROSO
sign, it happens so fast, someone

strayed too close to the pier or was
pulled out by the rip tide and now

standing on the shore a family
of Mexicans, their black hair pasted

wet on their foreheads, shivering,
staring out at the malevolence

of the world, at the boys diving,
deaf to all of the shouts drowned out

by the wind and waves crashing
at their cold, shriveled feet. It is

so hard to love in this world of
terrors, something we must always

learn, something that seems to wash
over us again and again.

EMIGRE


That apartment on Stanford, just
south of the shotgun shacks in Freetown

and east of the Montrose cruisers,
we lived in a brick duplex above

Mr. Williams and his suspenders
who hid behind the blinds except

on rent day when his soft white flesh
ventured into the sun to collect

his check, 300 bucks got us
a second floor kitchen and front

room connected by a bedroom
and two swinging doors that creaked

and flapped like fake applause.
All day you taught in schools and I

worked with accountants -- we drove
home to shrimp and cerveza, gin

and gyros, curry and claret,
lizards basked on the brick balcony

as we burned our skin, at night
wood roaches flew blindly against

the screen door, bumping in the darkness
like the drunk strangers we'd known

in Pittsburgh. At dawn the roosters
crowed and scratched the grass, and

Mexican boys with cars that spelled
Esmeralda and Rosalita

sped down the street begging chicitas
for rides and the baseball lot filled

with men from trucks and shrunken gloves
and every spare moment I hid

behind my desk with my Underwood
propped up on three Houston phone books

writing words in a strange tongue to
satisfy someone in a distant

city, words that betrayed me, words
that I did not even mean, nor

even know that I did not mean,
I was an emigrant to so

many things then, to love, to
myself, to the world around me.

ECHOLOCATION


How I come
to know you, sending signals

into the emptiness between
the world of matter and dark

matter (which no one really knows)
until I find you & some impulse

returns, both a shiver and a calm,
something I've known all these years, a

universal constant, the pulse of
a quasar, heart beat from the

very beginning, a galactic
tuning fork! Like a dolphin

swimming in the night sea, I chase you
in the heaving, follow your mindstar,

your dance in the wet wilderness.

A CANTICLE FOR BEING


We sat there on the back deck in
the cold sun, bare feet and faces
exposed as the snow melted, we
were reading and thinking about


getting old, I was reading poems
about our bones, our skulls, the stars
and the shimmering sea that waits
us when we die. I was ready


to die, you too, embraced there in
a halo as the melting snow
splashed down into puddles and the
neighbor's wind chimes moaned like a


Tibetan flute and that's when that
bird appeared overhead, so tiny
we could not find him, singing, and
the cool wind off the snow sent shivers


through our flesh and then that unseen
bird broke out in ecstasy, divine
jubilance, absolute rapture,
a celebrant, a symphony


of giddiness, liquid trills and
warbles and whoops and hillbilly
hollers!



I swear as we squinted
at the sky we could feel that sea
shimmering at the edge of
everything! Suddenly, starlight,


the essence, the radiant truth,
the star shake quaking us! And for
a moment we were blind to this
world, it all seemed to melt away


and our eyes transformed into warm
stubborn stones holding on to the
day and the faint heat, this star, this
soul, this ash and bone, the light


penetrating the skull, this eon
stretching itself in all directions,
this bliss of being resting in
the center of our flesh and what


more we can never know for sure.

You are driving
on some splendid
day. There's a faint
chill in the sun,
a hint of winter
still as the maples
explode in green
madness, the fireworks
of tulips and crabs,
how the light pours
through the windshield
and on your hands
as you turn the wheel,
how all of this
is just splendid!,
the glory of those
hymns you sang on
Sundays, her strained
voice and you holding
up the hymnal
like a prayer
as the stained glass
fell on you singing
"O For a Thousand
Tongues to Sing!"

You just want to
tell her of this
moment driving,
this feeling, the sun
on your fingers,
the cool edge of
something vanishing,
something about
all of this, not
straining or trying,
just this joy, this
pang, this sliver,
and when it pierces
you it all wells up,
just for a moment,
the heart swells,
you gasp. It is
the infinite,
the eternal,
the elusive yet
again.