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.

LEAP OF FAITH (Revised, 12.31.06)


The woman on the bus
yanks the cord with
the intensity of her
life, it's comical, how she

hangs onto that line
and yells at the driver to
stop as we cross the bridge,
we are suspended

above the abyss.
STOP THE BUS NOW
she shouts PLEASE STOP
THE FUCKING BUS

until we pray for the driver
to give in and the bus
jerks to a halt
we all lurch forward

as if bent in prayer.
The woman scrabbles off
with her black trash bags,
her ballast, she means to

take her life, and as
the accordion doors
seal shut with a shush
an ambulance screams by--

she means to fly
down below down into
the valley of death and
transfiguration, we


cannot even imagine,
we smoosh our faces
against the undersea glass
as she mounts the bridge

wall and spreads her arms,
and for a moment she
floats in desperate space, she
flies, and falls, and someone

shouts HALLELUJAH!
for her soul, and ourselves
as well. The bus moves on,
a blessing for these

pilgrims bearing witness,
seeking redemption in
a sign, a symbol,
anything to live on.

LEAP OF FAITH


The woman on the bus
yanks the line with
the intensity of her
life, it's comical, how she


hangs onto the line
draped atop the smoke-
tinted windows like some
abject garland, she


yells at the driver to
stop as we cross the bridge
that spans the valley,
we are suspended above


the abyss, she shouts STOP
THE BUS NOW PLEASE LORD
STOP THE FUCKING BUS in
a shrill monotone until


we pray for the driver
to give in and someone
shouts LET HER OFF FOR
CHRIST'S SAKE and the bus


jerks to a halt and we all
lurch forward as if bent
in violent prayer and
we all grab something to


brace ourselves, the woman
scrabbles off with her black
trash bags, the weight of
her life's belongings, her


ballast of her last will
and testament, she means
to take her life, and as
the accordion doors


seal shut with a hush an
ambulance screaming with
siren whips by in a mad
rescue, she means to fly


down into the valley of
death and abandoned
train tracks and brick smoke stacks
far below, so far we


cannot even imagine
what life down there is like,
we all smoosh our faces
against the undersea glass


and watch as she mount the
concrete wall and stumbles
on the edge, she spreads her
arms and she floats in the

desperate space, she flies
and falls and we stare
grim-faced and silent
before we return to


our seats and someone shouts
HALLELUJAH we all,
each of us in our small
voices whisper a prayer


for her lost soul, wherever
it may be, and for
ourselves as well,
and the bus moves on, a


blessing, a relief, we
are pilgrims seeking
redemption, a sign,
anything to live on.

WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER (TURN OUT THE LIGHTS)


And so the performance
was over, the last words

of the tragic opera
fading, the tambourine

still chillingly alive
and shimmering like God's

breath, I lay on my cot
in the dark and waited for

it to come, in one void,
a wave of nothingness

crashing over me,
the room drenched in drama,

but there was no God
moment, no God consciousness,

no light, no stellar scream,
no cosmic swirl, instead

the room filled with dark matter,
a muffled absence,

not a terror or dread
or even an onrush

of regret, just a darkness
spreading its terrible weight,

no relief from its anguish,
just nothing, nothing,

nothing at all, until
the mind drifted away on

this dark matter spreading
in the nooks and crannies,

just diminished and lost
in the great blindness,

it was all black gravity,
I did not expect to

awaken, certainly
not in the closet,

fingers scraping plaster,
head clunking the wall,

the edge of death, the brink
of life, a trap, and the

long moan, the 3AM
freight droning, my eyes

cold stones and blind, dead stars,
I did not expect this,

this gulf, this muffled need,
this persistent voice

at the heart of something,
this anger, this stupid rage,

this lone whisper of light
shouting. For days I sat

alone, a lump, an
insubstantial substance,

something, consciousness
watching as the ghosts

appeared and whispered
in some unknowable tongue,

voices of the dead and living
indistinct, smothered,

the weight of lifelessness
itself, I had almost

joined them, these ancestors
waiting all around us,

drifting in orbit, my mind
a dead star, a cold

stone in my head slowly
warming, returning to

the grand opera, the carnival
of the senses and the

absurd roar, the theorems
and proofs I once understood

slowly unraveling into order:
a point, a ray, a line,

the universe was giving way
to tiny chunks of routine,

and soon enough, a
reprise, an encore,

the show must go on, you know,
the opera never truly

ends, the last shuddering
note gives way to the first,

you remain in motion,
only the direction shifts.


,

What would your life be like if, as in "Branded," you had to constantly, daily, prove that you were a "man"? How might you do that? Like Sisyphus, forever fated to accomplish what cannot be achieved. An eternity of doubt, fear, self-abnegation, self conscious inadequacy.

EXISTENTIAL MOON


The streelights
a string of blue
milk moons above
the snow, votive
candles, a prayer
vigil for you.

The streelights
a string of blue
milk moons above
the snow, votive
candles, a prayer
vigil for you.

NOTES FOR A POEM ON A TV SHOW THEME SONG


Wherever you go
for the rest of your life
you must prove you're a man.

from "Branded" theme song


It seems
they will

not take you
at your word

or just
your sex,

they want
something

more, a sign,
a proof

that you
are not

something
they fear

and yet
something

they need,
a promise

of where
you stand,

where they
stand so they

can breathe
freely, so

the world
they shape

makes sense,
so they

can go on
living with

men.

PRAYER WRITTEN ON THE 10 BUS IN DECEMBER


I love mornings like these
when the snow moon stares down
and the sky is milksnow
and moonlight, the air so
cold and pure it hurts
to breathe and your skin
shrinks to ice and you gasp
with wonder, a prayer
that the world is buried
and it's all so deliciously
cold and milk blue and
empty, so quiet that
you hear your blood
quicken, your breath
a miracle, you're
alive after all! And
for this blessed moment
you are a holiness,
a ghost haunting all
the loveliness.