BLIZZARD

Where were you going that late

December night, driving into the darkness,

furious flurries swooping down from

the universe like stars

splattering the windshield?

Driving the old highway west

as if there was something

really out there, ahead, just beyond

the farm, beyond the next stretch

of fields filled with cornstalk ghosts

now buried into memory.

The road was not plowed.

All you could see was the semblance,

you were driving by recall,

following the slow bends, spotting

the snow covered arrow signs

that pointed deeper into the night.

At three am you reached

the yellow blinking eye

of Bangor, barn lights

glowing like halos. All night

you felt the pull of the west.

In South Haven you fishtailed

the empty streets in slow motion,

like some dream of desperation, snow

splashing against the glass

until you reached the frozen shore,

the pier, the urgent waves thick

with ice, black turbid water rolling in

drunkardly. There, at the edge of the pier,

among the snow still falling,

and the heaving waves,

you could not see the lighthouse

but you could see the blurry light

circling. There was some miracle

in all of this, the silence

inside your car, it was almost

too unmoving, almost narcotic,

waiting there in the great stillness,

your wordless thoughts and

the muffled snow falling

like smeary stars against the glass.

TRAGEDY

It was his absence they desired

and they presumed he would take exile over poison.

He'd been out in the field playing with his junk,

doing his thespian thing.

Things never work out as they should.

Even Dionysus has his bad days.

ON ALERT

You're in a garden cafe.  Let's say 

you're bathed in magnolias and 

sun, enjoying the jacarandas 

and the seared tuna, the pomegranate tea.

In the pastel blue above and everywhere,

black eagles circle on the updraft.  

The family beside you is 

Mediterranean, or "Middle Eastern," 

they explode syllables into their cells,

brag of "shelling" and "Florida."

It's the day after some refugee

set himself aflame like some 

conscientious monk, a jihad botched 

midflight to ecstasy.

The family under the jacaranda

cannot translate their desire, 

they want spinach pie and something

done well and everything on the side.  

Their little girl in pink shoes doesn't speak. 

She sings every word she hears, and dances

in ecstasy, flamingo flamingo flamingo!

The grandfather, gray haired and 

fierce, spies as you write down  these notes.   

You are American.  He doesn't know

that you're writing a poem. He suspects 

you watching him, keeping tabs, and 

you are, but it's the beauty 

that you cannot capture. Your eyes 

meet when you sign the bill.

You keep writing these notes, 

jacaranda, Mediterranean, 

lavender dust, ecstasy,

how the eagles circle lazily,

the honeyed taste of pomegranate

on your lips, the little girl

in pink shoes twirling among 

the patio chairs and singing

flamingo.  When she tumbles, he 

retrieves her from the lavender

flowers he pauses to glare -- is he 

hostile? embarrassed? self-conscious?

You smile at the girl's pink shoes 

and flamingo song, relieved 

to leave this incident, this tableau,

this menacing lexicon, this

delicate beauty.

LAST RESORT

No one speaks English here--it's all

Dutch or Russian or German, some

jibber-jabber gibberish, fat men

in speedos and chains and banana thong

jouncing god knows everywhere!, 

women with dark stones for eyes, 

full breasts swaying like sweet hammocks,

skinny kids sprouting water wings 

and goggles, shivering in the sun

and cute-as-shit chasing mockingbirds 

among the palms.  The poolside music

blares Jamaican, Portuguese jazz, 

Eurotrash and Caribbean punk.

The lady holding court with Bombay gin 

in her cabana explains that the secret 

to her skin is to never be exposed -- 

"I've never had anything done," she chirps, 

repeatedly, like the mockingbirds 

riding the palm fronds, she's 48 

in her turquoise bikini and heels, 

a perfect specimen of a life 

of divorce and co-dependence 

betrayed by her ADD son who 

can't get a job--even the food is 

guttersnipe Cuban and California, 

Mexican esplanade, spicy prawns 

stuck on a cocktail sword, conch shell 

delicacies, tangeray mussels 

and merlot medallions, I'm perched

on the balcony watching the sun

set, drinking cerveza and sucking limes 

while the damned mockingbirds squawk 

and cavort -- there's no oysters or 

crab bisque or lobster rolls with mangoes 

here, it's all room service cheeseburgers 

and french fries, thank you, and my ticket 

out of here, the end of the decade 

as the sun dies and replays its elegy

below lavender and indigo 

blush, jesus!, just in time for the darkness 

and the stars and the cold wind off the gulf.  

ANTEDILUVIAN

Looking out is looking in.

Here in this tabernacle of glass

and pane, a sonata of hijinks

and scuttlebutt floats down the river's

skin, Eurydice's net, an ocelot of 

eyes, bent paint cans, lumber scum,

waterlogged seagulls, bloated

and ostentatious for their survival,

perilous islands where carp

and lovers' reflections from the bridge

drown in tabernacle ecstasy.

Oh!  The joy of unredemptive sun,

our post-modern covenant with

carnal undulations and the wind's

ululations, death and desire,

poached and slipping past

to catch and release, to sigh again.  

PUNTA RASA BAY

                        the dalliance of wind

            in palm trees cool

                                    off Punta Rasa bay

 

 

            we snowbirds

                        stumble out from pancakes

to lay out like sausages

                         sun-desperate savages

 

 

                        the osprey lighthouse

            guardian of the cerulean

                                    circling

circling

 

 

                        circling 

            in his desperation

                                    longing

 

 

            Hurricane Charlies

and cigarette boat wakes

                        lapping shore slapping

 

 

jacaranda and crushed mint

                        the lone swimmer, seal skin

            glistening slow lapping

 

 

                        desire, habit, work

            breaststroke desire

                                    bobbing

 

 

incipience!          insouciance!

            insolent somnambulance

                       

 

                        the dolphin watch insistent

            among the strangers

                                    sweet melons          cabanas

 

 

the soul's languish

            ardor in latitudes, succulent

memories          memory and flesh

 

 

                                    language!

            languid bilabials

                        dispelling rumpled shame

            unfurling in the wind

 

 

                        shoreline tides 

whispering            whispering

            sucking, slurping the passionfruit

                        Aztec heat!

 

 

            worshipping snowbirds

exaltant exultations

                        heed this raucous serenity, this

            sleepwalking significance

 

 

luxuriant disorder

                                    oleander, the jealousy

            wind dalliance

                        in palm tree arousing

eros in sway, a blessing

                        lurid and bootylicious

 

 

            banana thongs poolside

                        it's coming, commingling

abeyance in slatitude

            the swansong surrender              beware!

 

 

                        the surrender!

silky acquiescence

            in the pent penitent              slathering

 

 

                                    abandonment

                        of it all, surrender!         relinquish!

                                                sweet sunblind meditation

 

 

and succulence

                        meditative prurience

            dying in the sun sky

                                    again

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER

 I like to think there’s something vaster than myself,

Hidden in the past, to be rekindled by a word…

-- John Koethe, “Belmont Park”

Sitting on my parents’ green sofa and

staring out the big picture window, as I’d

done so many afternoons, the room

empty of music and books, except the west

wind blowing through the screens, curtains floating

like a ghost, and here it is October,

the apples have ripened and the corn picked,

the wind gusting, unnatural so late 

in the year, 85 degrees and the trees

bending in the deep blue of memory,

sitting as I’d sat for days when my mind

slept after so many pills, the drowsy

wordlessness, empty as the vacant lot

across the road, hearing ghosts whisper

in the periphery, soulless waiting

for consciousness to return, but here,

the wind washing the world and sweating,

thinking of nothing but the fullness

of feeling, feeling now as if there’s nothing

but feeling, and waiting, staring

out the window, at the oak branches

dipping, the same brunt grass, and the vacant

lot, the anxiousness of space full of nothing

but the wind, and now, caught between that

emptiness and fullness, alone and thinking,

this is how he wanted to pass, his breath

labored by the shrinking lung and asbestos

knots, to simply scatter like ashes

in the wind, sleepy, drowsing consciousness

drifting, swept free of memory, only wondering,

wondering, all of my life waiting

for this moment, for this passing, this wordless

yearning, all the hours playing baritone,

filling the brass with something that swelled

with feeling, the elegy and all the wondering,

wandering, all the yearning to feel

something known as love, and loss, and the hope

and the hot wind off the harvest fields, what

the west carries, empty and fulsome, it’s

all passing again, like it always has,

for the very first time.

 

BLACK FRIDAY

Sitting here on the back deck ensconsced

in my down coat, I watch the wraiths of my breath,

vagrant souls fading under the sun. 

I’m drinking coffee and writing poems,

desperate and delicate poems about

the season, how the stiff leaves scuttle

across rime-frosted grass, how shadows

from the cedars stretch toward death.  I think of

my old loves, the bike races around Lost Lake,

the solitude of running lost in the woods,

seeing those lost photos from Joy of

that skinny punk squatting beside the greenhouse

writing poems, all of these surfacing on

Black Friday, alone and under the sun, wishing

all the time that I knew just one thing, something

I cannot see or know, something just

beyond the surface, like the shadowland,

where all the meaning lurks, like a truth

somehow knowable, but it turns out there’s nothing

there, nothing beyond the sun perched on the cedars,

the wind scuttling the leaves, and like the wind chimes

and a breath withheld, I can only hear

the neighbor’s hound yelping.  Even with this

coffee and crisp tingling in my fingers

I am slowly nodding off, drowsing

in the sun, dreaming -- if this is all

there is then this is failure and loneliness

at once, ecstasy slowly and exquisitely

fading from that very first captured breath —

that jolt into being! -- and now, sitting here,

years later, the chilling tendrils of breath

dissipating in the blueness, soon even this

will pass and I’ll think What was I thinking?,

What was I seeking?, beyond this, this,

and then, this.

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS

Spring forward, fall back.  This year the clock was

set back late, so for days our circadian

rhythms slumbered like sluggard somnambulists,

sleepy-eyed dullards sporting Venti Starbucks

to replenish our sun-deprived souls. And so

the days of costumes and ghouls and trick-or-treat

buffoonery dragged on like an endless dream.

REM-cycled jack-o-lanterns and ax-murderers,

Snow Whites and Little Mermaids, witches and seahags,

harlequins and zombies and hobos, gypsies

and goats and ghosts–it’s a dream world of pop

culture and myth, Michael Jacksons and Hercules,

Sleeping Beauties and Marilyn Monroes,

Obamas and banana-nosed Nixons, and

today I’m in the back yard sunning myself

and raking leaves, the detritus of memory

and the death of photosynthesis, drinking

coffee and reading some sun-drenched

philosopher’s poems--let’s say it’s Neruda,

but it could also be some ancient Greek

whose pagan senses seem too awake and

luscious for this tired climate, it’s the first time

I’ve felt the sun in ages, all those memories

roiling up like waves at the shore as I rake,

and the sun warms my hands, my hair, it feels

as if I’m coming alive again like I did

years ago, back in college when all of those

ideas that cluttered in my mind simply

fell loose, one by one, tumbling like the leaves

falling all around me, how delightful

that feeling was, to awaken to the world

again, the senses and even the memory

of the senses, the patron of wet leaves,

the sting of sweat on my neck, the slight ache

in my shoulders as I rake, stretching

my face to the sun to feel the sweat and

the chill rising from the ground, from the west,

and the yearning to do something, something

yet unknown, it was the premise and promise

of love, or something, of springing forward and

falling back, at once, and letting it all go,

if only for a moment, and then wondering,

What just happened?, and When will it happen again?

As I fall back into time, not quite so alert

but seeking the same warm cinnamon doughnuts,

the same cold cider, the same feeling of being

lost again, and the wonder of that.

THOU SHALT COVET

How craven! How chicken-hearted!

My milky-calved darling, my precious

Ultramarine lorikeet!  Lapis lazuli

Peahen all clumped and hissing,

Thatched tongue churning!  I am

Your begrimed rooster, your

Bug-eyed chanticleer…  Beware

My curved claws, my love-spurs,

My squawking wings!  Who are you

To resist my love spool?  My yolk

Song?  My bodacious feather creams? 

Nuzzle with me.  Strut and enter

My bower.  

EAST

At the corner where roads 

intersect beyond the harbor,

beyond the last driveway,

the last dock, the last pier, 

one last stretch of stones, a

last gasp spreads itself 

to join the dying great lake

where six swans swim white

against the firmament.

The lake has fallen.

Stones surrender to muck 

and weeds.  The swans are

unreachable, motionless 

except to bend their  sweet 

elegant necks in the cold deep, 

gliding effortlessly.  

This is what it means to be

alone, without thought 

or intention, stuck here 

on this island's end, knowing

you will always be lost.

Out there, beyond the glimmering,

you see the faintest shimmering, 

the ghost of all you've left behind.  

BOATS AND ANCIENT RIVER GODS

All summer outside my

window the river traffic

glides by, great lakes tankers

 

laden with cement, bleeding

at the hull, 3-masted schooners

with dories trailing like orphans,

 

sailboats and yachts and boats

of every size and class —

all day the drawbridge yawns open

 

for maritime commerce

and pleasure and sport,

fishermen in oilers, pot-bellied

 

Hemingways commandeering                  

cigarette boats and catamarans

and pontoon boats festooned with

 

Italian Christmas lights and

mylar balloons bobbing

in the wind, flotillas

 

of kayaks, canoes, racing sculls,

rowboats and powerboats spilling

to the gunwales with bronze-skinned

 

buxom-bikinied mermaids, their

luxuriant hair waving, but

it’s the working boats that

 

grab me, the meat and potatoes

fellas, the gargantuan

barges hauling pyramids

 

of coal and scrap metal in silence,

pushing back the water in

a garland of brown foam,

 

the tugs churn and shudder against

the current, bringing tons of dark freight,

and on top of each heap sits

 

one sea gull, fat and lordly

like some ancient river god,

resplendent admiral of our fate,

 

 

our fear, comedians of

the waterways, philosophers

or the harbor, pompous poets

 

of the people they

stare down on,

dreaming our demise. 

 

We are their subjects, their slaves,

their minions, fated to

                                    await the coming disruption

 

when order will be restored

and they will once again

reclaim their right to ascension.