SAND CHIGGERS

Easter Sunday, 2009

On Sundays I carried baskets

from the red Studebaker 

to the Portage Laundromat

and helped my mother sort

loads into washtubs, then

filled the coin slots with silver dimes

and turned the knobs to "Hot/Heavy Wash"

and when the tub of whites began

to churn we opened up the lids

and added a cup of bleach

that stank more than the truck

that pumped sewage from the machines.

It was the grocer who ratted me out.

Given two nickels to spend 

at the Beer and Wine by the creek

I scoured the old highway ditch

for empties, discarded bottles of Blatz

and Drewrys for their 2 cents bounty,

I fished among the weeds for rusty

train line spikes, steak bones,

among the dragonflies and 

the weeds stung my legs, my hands

bled with rust.  At the beer store

I exchanged my loot for Milk Duds,

Necco Wafers and a bag of Be-Mo

Bar-B-Q potato chips and

a bottle O-So black cherry

to wash down the orange fire.

That night the fire spread to my legs

and red welts from my scratching.

I spent hours in the bathtub

every night, soaking while mother

daubed each scab with bleach

and I yelped at my stinging

flesh, shins and calves and ankles,

fierce blisters, laying in  the water

and kicking my skinny legs 

for inspection and more bleach,

an agony with each cotton dab

as my skin bunched into red

knots that bled puss.  "I told you 

about the chiggers," she said, 

and with swab I kicked and

thrashed, splashing water on

her and the linoleum.

Penance, the punishment for

disobedience and gluttony,

the stink of bleach curdling

my stomach like the Bar-B-Q

dusted chips and the chocolate

and soda syrup, stinging flesh,

the nettled fire a reminder

of the wages of sin, the price

of sin, the suffering of 

Jesus Christ our lord and master, 

and the real cost of living 

in this unforgiving world.  

WRITING SENTENCES

Those sentences 

held no meaning

save to induce

punishment, they

were meant to make 

us change ourselves,

inscribe some

awareness of 

our sins.  500 times.

Our hands clenched 

the Bic pens to

punish the college-

rule paper, inflicting

pools of ink in 

the Appollinaire-like

rain of words forming, 

always the syntax 

was declarative,  

I WILL NOT ....

as if to inculcate

good behavior 

through repetition.

The expectation 

that grammar would 

foster grace even

though as the hand

wearied, the sentences 

cascaded, forming 

a waterfall of  illegible

letters, bunched cursive, 

promises never 

meant to be kept:

I will not talk in class

I will not throw spitwads

I will not horse around in the lunch line

everyday misdemeanors

recorded in multiple

scribbles, discipline

administered and

producing pages 

of punitive grammar,

empty cages 

of time spent

begrudging the

written word 

and fantasies 

of eradicating

the world of 

"themes" and "compositions"

and eighth grade

books handed down

from World War II

by grabbing three

pens in one's hand

and scrawling one's

cleverness while 

confessing one's sins

about talking 

in choir, thankful,

in the end, that

a more crafty 

and complex or 

compound or 

compound-complex 

penalty was never

imposed: 

"Upon further reflection I understand 

that throwing spitwads at Randy Orwig

is not only  a violation of  school rules 

but also a humiliating act that I would 

never want returned upon me and, therefore, 

I vow to check my conscience before I 

chew dirty, filthy  scraps of paper into wet blobs 

and shoot them out the straws I stole from the 

cafeteria, and, further, I vow to forever behave 

in Mrs. Garvelink's class as well, which includes 

refraining from setting thick wax crayons on 

the steam pipes so that they melt into rich pools 

of color and fill the classroom up with a horrible 

stench,and also to stop talking out of turn and 

talking in smart-mouthed fashion."   

...sentences, which, 

if scrawled 500 times, 

certainly would have 

crushed our desire 

to craft primer prose 

and would have made 

penitent philosophers 

out of every petty 

lawbreaker, punk 

miscreant and

rude delinquent 

son of a bitch.  

ELEGY

We followed the hawks for years, 

chased them from tree to tree 

across the old county land, 

hiking the swales and ridges 

and river bottom, the 

gardens where Hmong women 

bend among cabbages and 

cucumber vines and scarecrows 

made of tin cans and rags 

fluttering in the wind.  

We walked among  seasons, 

among lost orphan graves 

as we followed the dark 

birds and their lonely flights, 

the slow drift from oak to oak, 

and passed under their stoic 

judgment, as cold and silent 

as our father's eyes.  

We clawed through raspberry 

brambles, fields of milkweed 

and burrdock while hawks circled 

overhead, flashing their red 

tails as we prayed, held hands 

and kissed, poked through the brush 

to pester field mice and 

startle philosophical woodchucks.  

Along the train track, we 

harvested opossum skulls laughing, 

a deer head severed by some poacher, 

a stash of apricot schnapps, 

hypnotized by the sun's gleam 

in the steel rails before the old 

diesels lugged coal and scrap 

from the village -- we were 

blind to the hawks' prescience  --

it was always life and death, 

always the great fear, always 

the promise of redemption 

vanishing.  For months 

machines have scraped that land, 

torn up and denuded history, 

defaced the language, and the hawks, 

seeking kinship of wisdom 

and human wreckage, have 

flown west to the land of 

memory and dying, where,

we know, all of this somehow

started, and we wound up here,

instead.  

MEMORY

I forgot the sandy shore, all the men

surfing, strapped to the pterodactyl kites

soaring, the sky menacing, how they knifed

through the water.

I forgot the heat and intense sun, the

bare-bellied white men in gold chains

walking around like the fish boil buffet

with the newly-endowed women, fierce 

and punishing with their medals 

bouncing.

I forgot all the chatter in Russian,

Greek, Portuguese, Dutch, Serbian,

the polyglot of complaint about

cellphones and corndogs, Jose Cuerva,

plantains and the fear of jellyfish.

I forgot the leeside, beyond 

the insect tower lighthouse, no ancient 

marvel, but marveled nonetheless,

the cool afternoon shade as the slow foam 

crept ashore -- the lovers coupling in 

dinosaur bones -- how no one looked us

in the eye, either the desire was too

raw or the murderous rage of loneliness

spread like contagion.

I forgot how green the water was!  How

luxurious the green waves toppled in,

narcotic, deadly, ancient and new-born.

I forgot how we were too tired to pedal on,

too dehydrated to see beyond 

the migraine glare, we stopped at that cafe

and dined on seared tuna and argula, 

a pitcher of lemon water, and all

afternoon we watched the eagles circling

the gulf sky.

I forgot the grouper salad and

the existential surrender of the sea--

laying in bed sweating and listening to

Portuguese Christmas music, Caribbean

holiday favorites, Andy Williams and 

Jimmy Buffet from  the 13th floor,

the languid bay glimmering in one window

and the islands shrinking with the tide

in the other, and the ghost moon, a terror

in the gulf sky.

I forgot the pathetic cries of the osprey

bringing home their fish, how the flopping

weighed them down while I sat in a cabana chair

not really giving a damn for anything

in the world, and then not giving a damn 

about not giving a damn, and how that 

weighed on me, like the fish in the 

osprey's talons--I felt like whimpering!

I forgot reading poems about that newborn

star in Bethlehem, all the fuss about

the skies, the heavens, the portents, 

and all the palm trees, the sand, the pelicans

swooping across the coastline, and the sudden

blast of Neil Diamond from the sailboats

leaving the docks, and the angry German

father who would not hug his chatterchinned 

son because he was desperate to read 

Heinrich Boll and he was exasperated 

that his wife had abandoned them for the sand.

I forgot you sitting naked on the 

balcony on Christmas Eve, how the humid 

night wet your skin and you smelt of butterscotch

as the distant waves crept in and the pelicans

in the mangroves next to the hotel 

muttered in their sleep -- I forgot how

you spooned the She-Crab soup and stared

at the glittering sea and stars as if 

nothing in this world could possibly

save us from all of this.  

I AM A [click!] PHOTOGRAPHER

I am a photographer [click] -- 

I flatten and [click] frame the world

to lose [click] consciousness, I forsake

my soul [click] to surface and texture,

there is no content [click] in my 

mind or my work or my medium, 

there is no [click] meaning in 

the world for that matter, I am 

no Vermeer, no Avedon, [click] no

I am no impressionist, I

don't [click] care about any 

of it, I just shoot pictures, I [click]

steal images, peel the world's [click]

slick light and [click] obscure shadows 

through parallax processes and

[click] lenses, glass eyes and 

I think through latent processes, 

chemical and [click] electromagnetic

radiation, the stuff that 

penetrates everything we know,

[click] all that business about 

the soul?, there's nothing but [click]

pixels, numerically translated 

[click] 0's and 1's, I am what 

we fear [click] the most, a

mathematician, someone whose

work counts on what what never adds up,

[click] the deep numbers in the heart of

[click] everything since the first big

division, the [click] split of light 

searing the photosensitive

fabric of  the [click] cosmos.

FLIGHT DELAY

All day we are migrating south, 

first a bus that trudges through 

the blizzard, gathering passengers 

who bitch at the driver about 

cancelled flights, delayed trains,

and the fucking cold--"No wonder 

no one takes the Greyhound!" 

as we prowl deeper into the snow.

We make Midway five hours late,

shivering in serpentine rows

hugging our luggage like the roped

and padlocked trunks that steerage

ushered onto Ellis Island.

The gates are stuffed with travelers

stuck, delayed, postponed, the terminal 

looks more like an insane sleepover, 

faces hypnotized by fluorescent

gloom, anxious and apprehensive,

phantasmagorical huddled hordes,

each seeking holiday bliss.

The announcements come in hoarse

rumblings, the delays, the cancellations, 

the gate changes, and with each garbled 

update the chill of discontent

trembles through the terminal.

This should not be happening! 

We deserve better!  This is 

America!  This is the 21st Century!

Jesus Christ this is our Christmas!

And when the plan arrives like some 

vaporous ghost from the falling snow 

and darkness, an ice monster, 

an antediluvian horror, we board, 

in defeat, all of the flamingo dreams, 

the conch shell cocktails and glimmers 

on she crab bisque and sand dollars, 

palm trees and sun-drenched cabanas, 

gator snouts and manatees, all these 

reveries have been rubbed free from 

the mind's wrinkles.  We rise into 

the snowy night, exhausted and vain, 

transported into the absolute 

zero of our lives, into the cold 

above the world's skin, alone and 

drifting into the starless stillness.

RESPITE

This morning

while reading 

about the life

of the mind 

and the divide 

between the 

world of objects

and the world

of private 

consciousness

and all that

stuff that fills 

our heads, fear

of losing

control

I recalled 

a dream from

the night before:

We were driving

by the river

drinking coffee

from a thermos

when the boys

giggled and pointed

their skinny fingers

out the window

and there in 

the thick grass 

three woodchucks

sniveled clover

like ridiculous

lotus-eaters, 

absurd philosophers,

phenomenologists

of the soul,

their fat haunches

and stumptails

waddling to

retrieve their

dignity, their

heady propositions, 

their mentalsitic

schematics--

--they were plump 

whistle pigs,

petty thieves,

street hustlers,  

hobo pedagogues

learned carpetbaggers 

hustling ideas  

and secret theorems

as they waddled

in the grass,

and we snickered

at their brown 

wobblefur

glamuphing 

and wishing we

could join them.

SANIBEL ISLAND, CHRISTMAS DAY 2.0

Riding the big 

balloon tire bikes

we tooled the island

      in long lazy curves

      under the hot sun

      down the narrow

asphalt roads and 

mangrove swamps

until the road opened

     and we rolled past 

     flamingo and sherbet 

     colored houses -- 

 

a drunkard's rum 

and coke fantasy, 

orangesicle bungalows

     lavender cape cods, 

     lime rickey cottages 

     bragging luscious red 

azaleas, lipstick

roses and rhodedendrons,

it's Christmas Day!,

     and once again

     we're alone, roaming

     the streets, lost

among the migraine

whine of the locusts,

all these empty

     homes and the hot

     afternoon sun 

     on our heads and

the aimless ease

of these bikes,

pedaling the world's

     loneliness, it's

     all so big and 

     distant, like 

imagining the world 

when we grew up, 

wishing we were stars in

     some rock band, Tommy

     James and the Shondells,

     singing "Crystal Blue 

Persuasion" and 

"Crimson and Clover," 

to really know what 

     love is all about, daring 

     to hold hands and 

     understand that 

unspoken something 

in the mangrove swamps,

in Percy Faith's "Theme 

     from 'A Summer Place,'"

     impossible to 

     cross that bridge

without knowing you.

DAWN, MILWAUKEE HARBOR

              How appalling it is to sit here

at river's mouth,  under the red 

lighthouse, uninvolved witness to 

the slow unfurling from the east, 

another day, like any other,

destiny borne to spread its 

indifference across the sky -- the 

river slumps harborbound while red-

bellied gulls circle overhead

like some great pagan  wheel, as if 

some eternal message can be 

divined in their mockery, the river 

pushing, insisting its vagrancy 

everywhere.

                    How appalling, then, 

to be reading  Matthew Arnold--

Matthew Arnold of all poets!  

Might as well read Arnold the Pig

or Arnold Schwarzenegger!

This is a darkling plain right here, 

the river, the sky, the dying stars, 

the sun crawling through slumped clouds

and consciousness.  You cannot hear 

the rumbling of stones here--the 

crashing of waves--there's no Sophocles 

or Sea of Faith here!, no great thought 

or myth, no blood-drama, no goat,

no redemption, just these speechless 

facts, the lighthouse, the harbor

glimmering copper, these gulls 

caught in the tragic flight of time,

the slumber of water, the 

pale phenomenon of light

dividing facts from shadows.

CEDARBURG

I should write a poem about this rain here

in Cedarburg where time is preserved in

antique shops and woolen goods, nostalgic

hideaways like this bed and breakfast where

time is arrested, where you can return

to the old values, the old ways, where craft

and truth blend in the great loom to form 

a single vision before the Great Disruption

tore our lives to shreds.  At breakfast we

gather in the dining room before the hearth

and the spread of peaches, a basket of bread,

crockeries of cream and pistachio pound cake,

crocheted place mats and oatmeal with maple

syrup.  We gather after a night's blessed and

sinless sleep in pencil post beds: the pregnant

woman, immense in her imminence, ignored

by her husband and the rest of us, she swells

in her radiance.  The women Harley riders

seeking to cleanse themselves of something they

do not know the source of, the couple from 

Illinois staring out the windows at the rain,

wistful, they'd made plans to buy scented candles 

and handcrafted silver jewelry, and now 

it's cold and raining, and, what's worse, "It's really 

a wet rain!" one of them declares, while I eat 

my peaches and pistachio bread.  

We have all gathered here to what?  

To stare out the distorted glass--the old 

wavy glass!--at time itself, this village, 

this settlement, this restoration of 

an earlier time, a simpler time, a time 

we ache to enter.  

It is March, and we are removed from 

these trappings, these rocking chairs and linens, 

the ye olde's and blacksmiths and stablers, 

by a 100 years.  We live in a Great Depression, 

where value shrinks and dies.  Here in this 

museum the air is tale, the ledges 

are dusty, the sachets of lavender and 

potpourri have dried out, we agree to 

return to this story because we 

do not dare face the cold rain, ourselves, 

the rain chilling our skin, the smells of copper 

and dirt and skunk flooding from the  marshes.  

We are each of us desperate to find our way, 

desperate to hide, each afraid that the lives 

we've been living are not wholly lies but 

not wholly true, either.  If only we could 

remain here, behind this old glass.  If only 

we could hide in this story that was never true, 

the lies of the Great Narrative, and live 

among the trappings of deceit, the shared 

awareness that it was all good, it was all 

so much better, it was even better 

than we can imagine now that we are 

trapped in our own time, our own lives, our own 

fear of the rain.

ARIZONA

This garden of mourning doves and mockingbirds,

palm trees and magpies and water weeping 

from rock into the swimming pool, so lush

with roses and succulents and fig trees, you

expect Gloria Swanson in her leopardskin 

coat and her soft bellied flesh, William Holden 

with his cigarette case, it is the loneliness

of age, in this oasis between purple 

mountains, the surrender to the desert,

the heat, the night chill, the death, the vast

stupid beauty of the stars lost in

the vagrant darkness, but here, here in this

garden of cactus and stone, you spread yourself

out by the pool beside the dead sparrow,

the concrete stained by mulberries, the slamming

of truck doors from the porn shop beyond the 

stone wall.  In  Sunset Boulevard William Holden  

was chasing a story, his own garish 

desire, prying into the decadence within

his own mind and flesh, his thirst for beauty

in the ruins, the savage thoughtless thrust,

and Gloria, Gloria, what was she but beauty

and time and desire herself, Salome, 

the great temptress with bracelets and long arms

and that face, her close-up, comic in her

celluloid past, the diva, the anguish, 

desire unfulfilled on the screen, the great hunger,

the misery of the mind and the flesh, 

the tortured femme fatale within each of us

longing to be seen once more, and consumed!

Yes, America, this is a great depression--

we built this sprawling madness in the desert,

America from our hunger, our desire,

it is splattered everywhere, we have

disrupted great rivers to quench our thirst,

and here under this dying star we must

learn to face our fear, the dead sparrow

beside the pool, that our great Babylon, 

our great tower to the heavens, the great 

garden of sighs and earthly delights, 

is just another script, another screenplay

in which our hero, our tragic hero,

too late!, discovers his fatal flaw, 

his love for innocence and sin, how he

ravaged Barbara Bel Geddes with

his ignorance, his smart ass cleverness

now reduced to the pathetic, now shot

in the back and floating face down in the pool,

and ridiculous, as ridiculous as 

the story he tells as a corpse, the great

confession from the lurid curiosity--

this is our story, the America story,

the collapse of order here in this

Arizona hotel and beyond,  this garden 

of cactus  and rock and chlorine. 

desiccation and lies, where the poor dope

gets his pool and she gets the eyes 

of the whole world.  But that wasn't good enough...

Isn't that good enough? What's money for 

but to buy us anything we want?"

NOTES FROM THE COCOA BEACH HILTON

Walking through the cabana bar

where some punk on sax and his friend

on electric piano play "the future 

of jazz," you walk over the bridge 

than spans the mangrove river

bed, the last vestige of Florida

here, in this strip of rockets

and strip clubs and cruise ships,

pass through this arch of polo shirts

and gold chains, so many men shouting 

into cell phones, to whom?, until you

enter  the sinister silver glare, 

the heat, the sand, the ocean, 

the gulf stream.  This is the existential

scene, to be stranded here on the edge

of the west, there is nothing here, 

nothing but the migraine heat 

soothed only by the sudden rain.

After all the margaritas 

and mojitos, women in long 

dresses and earrings that tingle 

like wind chimes, the iced coronas 

and seared yellow-fin tuna, 

the papayas and gator wrasslin, 

you have only this, the heat, 

the ocean's slick silver skin.  

There are no words here.

No language that can carry 

our stories on into the future.

You have come here 

to die.  There's no escaping

this, the quintessential fact.

It turns out there is no soul 

after all, no redemption

or absolution or grace, not even 

the decency of an epiphany.

It is godless and mindless,

just your skin scraped raw

by all this coarse sand,

the shimmering atomic age

insinuating itself everywhere,

radiation burning time itself.

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.