FORWARD

Visiting the Wisconsin capitol one year

after protests to collective bargaining

On the third floor

under the great rotunda

there’s an advocacy

hearing for the disabled--

a Down’s syndrome boy

is flapping a paper, it’s

a crayon drawing

to fight budget cuts,

he’s growling like a tiger,

his grrrr swelling the dome.

Outside the meeting room

a clump of legislators

caucus. The boy waves

his drawing and growls,

grrrr, he’s no poster

boy, he’s an avenger

for action from the

gray suits, his prey.

In the Assembly

Chambers the legislators

honor the memory of

one of its great fallen

statesmen with a

proclamation and a

plaque for his

surviving family,

all of this is duly

entered in the record

and the legislators

vote and clap for

this fallen lion of

the people.

In the great room

a page delivers

cheeseheads to

an Assemblywoman—

they sit piled on her desk

like perfect faux

cheddar wheel slices.

The Assembly honors

the makers of these

wonders as the speaker

dons a cheesehead

and smiles for a

photo-op and partisan

snickering.

Then let it be known

that an 11-year-old boy

named Noah is called

to the chambers, he’s

the citizen who raised

money to save a

woman’s home from

foreclosure—she raised

100 foster kids

in that house--the

Assembly claps and

bestows Noah with

the Hometown Hero

award and thus

the sworn members

under this rotunda

applaud this fierce

boy for achieving

where they have

failed. 

LETTER TO MY BROTHER FROM FLORIDA

It's been years since we spoke.
That my fault, there are ghosts
everywhere, it seems, too many
to count, most are in my 
mind, something you've never 
understood but you've been
a damned good sport about it
all, you understand me,
just not my fear. The thing 
you need to know is I
meant it back in school 
and I meant it many times
since, it's not something you 
forget as if it never happened,
giving word to it doesn't 
make it go away. The fact
is I'm still angry, I
was sure I wouldn't wake up, 
it was not a lark, I
was serious and then 
I had to lie to the doctor
why I couldn't talk, my
voice sounded like a 
snow blower but I could
only hear a whisper 
like the sea calling from
a conch shell, for days I
saw ghosts floating on the 
edge of consciousness,
everywhere, the whisper
of phantoms, our grandfather, 
I spoke to him in the 
asylum, saw his madness,
felt his fear itching
in my veins, for years he's
scratched me in my sleep.
The worst part is always 
returning, returning,
I couldn't talk in school
and nobody noticed which was
ok but it didn't matter
there were so many ghosts
haunting the halls among 
the magpies and I 
didn't care about anything 
except the girl with the gauze-
bandaged wrists staring 
at me and listening 
to our grandfather's hollow
shouts from the darkness.
Well, that's it, really, I
thought it was time to tell you
what happened, to tell you
about this fear, it's 
there all the time, that 
whispering, that anger calling
from the heart of things, 
the darkness at the edge 
of the mind, it washes 
ashore and then disappears
as if it was never there 
and all I can say is 
it's there brother, it's 
there.

TWENTY-NINE YEARS LATER

  

You asked me why
he did it, why he
shot himself, he was just 
twenty-six. Some horrid 
nerve twitching in you,
a compatriot for all
living writers, you
loved him, or wanted to,
you consume your rivals’
heads while pumping their
apparatus in revenge.
Did he do it to get
published? you asked
because I was 26 and
I shared his book with you.
I bought it because I
loved his name, Breece
D‘J Pancake, would his
stories satisfy my hunger?
I didn’t know how to
answer you then. I did
know, but it didn’t matter.
When describing his soul
he said he left his ghost
In one of those hollows.
Would it help you to know
that if he found it, he’d
have to leave? He shot
himself. It wasn’t personal,
he didn’t mean anything
by it, he found his soul
and he shot himself in
the head, end of story, 
not yours. 

WANTING

                       
                           "we sense and experience
                           that we are eternal"
                                                   --Spinoza


So there, then. I, 
     like you, embrace 
our immortality -- 


     we are irises
in bloom, stretching
     lavender and


yellow and rust,
     twisting ourselves 
free from mud, 


     drunken bee
rubbing his belly
     in our iridescent 


stamen, dancing
     on our lusty
beard-tongues 


     for our sweet dust.
We droop at dusk,
     mock the twilight


shadows, our flags
     unfurling into 
yearning, coming


     undone, we are
jilted only by
     our presence


in gloom, time spilt
     around us, we
are lovers, ardent,


     resilient, a milt
language we must
     enter together.

MARVEL THE MUSTANG

“he’s almost for real…”

And to think that

we’d fall for that,

to spur a lame-ass

plastic horse to

go faster, as if

he’s Pegasus

and we’re galloping

across Greek skies

or we’re some kind of

bronc-bustin cowboy

herdin’ cattle

across the Rio

Whatever, hell,

the spell broke

after the third

time you dug your

spurs into that

hollow-bellied 

horse, how could this 

mutant mustang match 

the stick ponies of 

your youth?

yarn manes flying

in the west wind,

you could giddyup

across the west

pony express style,

tie up at the

saloon hitchin 

post and belt back 

shots of redeye 

pepsi, gun down 

the bad guys and 

save the town from 

rustlers and  outlaws,

all you needed was

a star and a 

steed to be the 

stuff of legend.

ARLENE, 1963

Arlene, my love, you are

nothing short of spectacular, chewing pink bubble gum

and blowing bubbles as

you click your spike heels on the pavement, smoking Chesterfields

and squinting at the boys --

auto shop hoods blowing

luggies out the window, hair tonic and toothpick studs

punching each other’s arms

as Mr. Fuller lectures on the wonders of the two-stroke

engine, “I gotcher two-stroke

engine” right here says Hyet, thinking of Arlene in her

nylons and garter belt

peeking from her poodle

skirt, she’s got nice fat calves, cinnamon nude, torpedo tits

that waggle the shop boys’ tongues.

So on their third date not

in her dad’s Studebaker but Hyet’s chopped Chevy hot as

the chrome pipes draped behind

mag wheels, this is no canasta-playing Ford Comet it’s

a metal-flaked hot rod made

for necking and drinking Blatz, so at the drive-in where

they’re playing “Francis the

Talking Mule” flicks Hyet’s shoving his hands down Arlene’s thighs

and grinding his tongue down         

her creamsicle throat like a squid bobbing in the ocean

and cajoling her to grab

his Hearst three-speed stick and when she does he yanks the speaker

from the window and tears

out, rooster-tailing gravel on the hoods of the shop heads

jacking visions of Arlene.

THE CELEBRANTS' ASANA

1.


Harmony asked her friends 
in the infinity pool if they'd heard about the woman 
on Fox who was evicted.  
"She was crazy," she said, "the sherriff refused to do it.  
It took three years. Three years! 
That's why I got voted onto the board." "That's insane," said
Meredith, shivering, 
her breasts bobbing in the healing waters. In this circle
they all spread their arms as 
if to breathe life again into that ancient Dionysian
ritual. Chloe squinted 
at the clock through the sun: "I thought that was a sundial," she 
said. "No," Diana said.
"I think it's some kind of mandala," Rachel said, she 
waded over to get 
a better look and sure enough it's both! Harmony at last. 


2.  


We're all in thick cashmere robes, barefoot polar bears leaving
the meditation lounge 
to enter the mystic mist rising from the sacred pools,
some of us holding sacred
stones in our hands, some of us toting sacred champagne in
flutes, the air is crystalline,
shudderingly cold in its sacred purity, breath-
taking cold!, but the mist
is ticklishly warm, vapors condensing to cool tingling
rivulets on our skin.
We slide free from our sacred robes and slip down into the
warm waters, our healing
Ganges, and slowly as we squint in the scintillations 
we are reborn, buoyant in
the bubbling grottoes, our limbs unraveling, we are sacred
jellyfish, bodies blooming
in the tender aqueousness, limp, our faces staring
up through the sacred steam,
praying for the sun to burn through the mist, so elemental,
the screes from the eagles
circling somewhere overhead in the sacred blue, soaring
in that infinity pool
beyond this sacred spring nestled in the hallowed pines. 


3.


Oh it's all hens and drakes here at the spa, lovely barelegged
women sleeping in the
sacred cabana chairs, their rivers of hair swept in towels 
and drinking cucumber
water, exhilarating in their exfoliated 
radiance, the men still 
sandaled and robed, their minds rubbed free of any any earthly
desire beyond the sacred
song of flesh itself, sated and staring not at the
glowing legs and arms, but
at the sacred ring of fire, sacred flames rising from stone,
staring in a strange 
philosophical mood they've rarely known, no penetrating
words or concepts here, just
a hint of some dignity, a loneliness of some sacred
source, not fear, not lust, but
some ineffable something, something slippery, something they 
cannot return to again.


4.  


Each of us here in this astral plane, this way station,
is suffering. That's what
the Buddhists say, so here, among the men staring into the
emptiness and the women 
floating on the sun's unconsciousness, we're suffering
while just beyond the wall 
we hear the grackles' cold cries, plaintive, the agony 
of being cast here, orphans,
unfulfilled in the sun, their black and purple fate awaiting them,
our fate shared in these 
vessels. these bodies always wanting, wanting, something we
will never know, praying
in sacred chants, sacred aches, there is no relief from 
this being, this wanting, this
incessant insistence, this persistent urge to know
what we will never know.

EARLY SPRING

“Don't turn around, your gypsy heart”

U2

It started on the coldest of days, walking back in the

wind and snow, shivering and

face-chapped after a day buried in the dull stacks that smelt

of Dewey and Veblen

and Hemingway, penciled notes scribbled in the margins,

witnesses from a time

of meaning, when there was a purpose, not like now when we

agree not to think hard

anymore, it was all behavior, and so walking in

the snow it seemed so cold

when that maroon Buick appeared from the flurries and you

stormed out in a t-shirt, 


bare arms hugging yourself, you trudged off into the flurries 
and I was afraid, 
so much passion in such bitter cold, scorched by your hot

syllables exploding

the air, I tried to offer you my snorkel coat but you’d

disappeared in snow, a ghost.

Come Spring when all the ballyhoos of forsythia burned

their glaring yellow in

yards of mud my cat Henry prowled the grass tracing the Spring

and found it in your house,

he wandered through the open door and curled asleep on your bed.

You invited me in

to retrieve him, this ruminant philosopher, this skinny

black Lothario, this

bundle of behaviors, this stimulus-response machine,

there we stood, you in your

overalls skirt, Henry in his finest black fur curled up

on your bed and me in

my St. Vincent de Paul finest thinking I dare not look so

I grabbed Henry and took off

only later to drop a letter in your box, a poem

I’d written right after

I’d locked the cat inside, it was a lark, something I was

sure you’d laugh at and scorn,

wad up and curse, I was happy to have sent it so I 
could return to the stacks

that smelt of old hay, to Emerson and Thoreau in that 
false spring, and knock my head

against sentences that taxed my frugal brain. When you wrote back 
my hands shivered,

I was reading about the oversoul, of all things, and 
just not buying it, it 


was the 70’s, there seemed to be something and nothing
at all there, all the 
Baba Ram Dass “Be Here Now” 
shit among dusty museum fetuses floating in 
flecked formaldehyde jars,

cold buoyant bundles of stimuli and response severed
from the world of feeling

and yet feeling and thought was everything, wasn’t it?, the 
poems and letters in our

mailboxes appearing every night, we saw Jr. Walker 
and the All-Stars play

“Shotgun” and when we walked home that night we were not lovers, 


we weren’t really talking 
except daring each other’s presence and when I reached
for your hand as we crossed 
the railroad tracks you pulled it back, but later that night,
sitting on the wicker sofa 
and reading the paper you pretended not to know me 
and yet there you were,

abstract and concrete, we slept on my mattress with the moon-

light on us, agreeing

to keep it decent but naked, like Emerson, you were

so lovely, so stoic

so smart and so real, and your gypsy heart, your itinerant

fortune-telling heart, turning

and turning as you danced, I could not face you, or myself,

that Spring, without fear, without

tiring of Thoreau living in his shack, without feeling

what I felt, spelled by a

gypsy and a cat, each evening returning to that

mailbox praying there’d be          

another letter answering my poems, hoping there’d be

no letter, not tonight,

I could feel your heart turning and turning, this time in my

chest, and how one dances

with that, so suddenly alone and feeling, alive.