peasant daughter

i'm tired of
not having what i
think i deserve
she said

in the kitchen
bent once again
from the hammer
blows

the tears dismissed
by the man who swung
as the ploy of one
with ulterior motives

words, like rain,
can raise up
the seedling
or tamp it down

carelessness together
with a heavy
hand will accomplish
its drowning

if the intent
is to bully the
weaker into
submission

but in time
any abused soil
will harden
never again to yield

the ignorant man
will misinterpret
the tears
of course

say she cries from guilt
and shame
for her self-inflicted
poverty

but if the peasant
daughter is guilty
of anything it's
of caring too much

she knows happiness
and contentment
come from
doing what she loves

that having little
is not the problem
but having hurt
- and been hurt often - is

the peasant daughter
asks for nothing and wants
nothing that comes
with acrid remonstration

she seeks only a fair
balance in her
dreaming: to give
and to receive in kind

that to those
she loves she nourishes
as one would
a valued perennial

and from that softness
she expects
their flowering
and therefore hers as well

she believes she deserves
that and not
what some might think
she claims to

for she seeks
nothing of material
value and sheds no
tears from lacking it

but what is that to a man
who invests all
his passion into meaningless work
that serves nothing but to harden him?

his ignorance and
callousness will rue the day
he sees his once-flower
uproot and be gone

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in the field of wild grass with the black truck

summer burned

across a field

that day 

he took the

picture of you

leaning against

the grill of 

a black truck

with your

da Vinci smile

the man

your driver

behind the camera

your husband

who drove you two there

did he spread

a blanket and

lay out

a basket of food

for you?

was he that

kind of romantic

i have always wondered

he loved you

i know that

but i suspect in the

only way 

that the men of his

generation

could show it

which was to

not show it openly

for risk of

being pale and

weakly

did lovers

love then like

lovers love

now

i've wondered

climbing into

old black trucks

with a feeble breeze

on summer days

to fall into each other

i know my mother 

was the

whip-snap of

passion in

her marriage to my father

i discovered them

my parents

when I was 10

in their bedroom

it was a summer day then too

and my mother

being a child of the

lovers in the field

of wild grass with

the black truck

means

i 

know

that

smile

you would not

admit it of

course why would you

the war years forced

a dispassion in that generation

i must re-imagine

the field that day

he took the picture of you

how it was a place afire

for you both

that he drove

that black truck up a hill

filleted by a dusty

rutted carriage path

amid waving grasses

and escorted you

somewhere

into that fiery field

to match the heavy air

then posed you later

the hair a betrayal

the grass waving sublimely

and

your husband 

in love with you

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poetry is the throes

my poetry 

has no rhyme

'tho not from a lacking

but because

lovers

don't rhyme

they enfold

and are absorbed

into passion

with no

reason

but because they want

they suckle

and invade

and kiss

words do

and they are

love-makers in poems

messy things

full of

the dark drive

pulled by

a haunt

toward answers

lovers

seek to know

a certain feeling

so do words

when they

have coitus

they search

for the thing

that is the exposed truth

words in poems

are a breast

against breast

lips to nipple

fingers braving

flesh rising

this poet

writes to

make love

and a word-collision

in a poem

should shock

electrically

as if hearing cock

in a foreign language

for the 

first 

time

such as portuguese

or french

or italian

giving you

rise

and sublime 

satisfaction

that something

has been reached

i want you

to be lovers

when you read

my poetry

with words

that ripple

and find

each other

in violent love

go away thereafter

satisfied

and buzzing

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tools of my father

i realized recently
that i write fiction
the way my father
works a hammer and level

he came to our house
once to help me
fix a
falling-down porch

storytelling
is very much about
propping up falling
down things

a story idea is
after all
nothing more than
a house you've occupied that needs renovation

he tore up floor boards
that he called pungy
with a hard 'G'
meaning soft, bouncy, unsure

and he brought
the porch down to
its bones
in order to build it back up

writers walk the
boards of their fiction
to test strengths
and mark the ones that are pungy

we toe the sag
noting the bow in the board
treading lightly
then dig into it

my father lived on
a dairy farm as a kid with
his parents
and siblings

picking up as one
naturally would how to
use the basic tools at hand
to work a problem

learning from
experience
that creativity and perseverance
were the greatest of tools

two things my teacher-father
was able
to parlay into a career
shoring up the pungy minds of children

students for him
i believe
were not fillable vessels but
to be built up again and again

he put the level on our porch
and considered the under structure of
lumber that was still ox strong
and he began to toil

the porch was an uneven
collaboration of sloping slats
and rotted posts
and angled boards

he had to investigate
to measure and remeasure
tinker with ideas
before fabricating the new

nothing about
the job was
a straight line
toward a shining solution

he sweat around his collar
down his shoulders and back
cursing a splinter prick
as much as celebrating a snug joinery

i write like my father built
and taught:
with an eye that looks
toward problems as a blessed thing

that the idea of solving them is
not to seek a perfection
but to get to its reality
its core truth, its original strength

my father once
drove a tractor down the side
of a hill as a teenager
crashing it

i've done that as a writer
and have pondered whether
to get back up
i do, because it hurts if i don't

i don't pretend to
have inherited from him
his talents in wood working
or his natural ability to teach

as a builder of fictions, i did however
inherit the mental context of his
being, i believe:
his best tools are mine from him

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mumma

in a recent dream
he calls like he used to
when he was proceeding toward
death
in real life

but i don't answer his
calls instead i just wake at 2
and there in the darkness is
a vapor of a bad taste

he once texted
me at 2 in the morning
in june of that year
the year

he wrote ::what did I do
did i do something?
that you don't call me
why doesn't my brother call?::

fuck it
the spade still comes months later
across the head in
a booming blow at 2 a.m.

he calls again the next night in my dream
and i don't answer it except with a sigh
and a throwing-off of blankets
and shaky stumble to the kitchen

this is me running away
from the flock
of ghosts
that have come out to feed lately

until i am told
perhaps i should answer his
calls
to know what he wants

i took pictures of
him on Father's Day of the year
several of him and mom and dad
and i'm in a couple too

in my dream next night
i answer his call
and one of the pictures
floats out of an ether

of him aiming his cell phone at me
to take a picture of me
aiming my camera at him
and our mother

i say Hello? when he calls
and the picture lingers
he doesn't say anything
but i hear our mother

Andy
she says from the phone
He calls me 'Mumma' now
He hasn't done that for years

and the call is lost
the phone goes dark
and i sleep for the
first time in a week

today i found the picture
i took
and i looked at it with
cold eyes

in it, he's showing her how to
take a photo with his phone
my mother ignorant of
the workings of technology

the same phone he
used for taking pictures
of clouds in those
last days

his pallete
once paint and
chisel and stone
and drums

became a phone
through which he could
communicate what that
mind of his was figuring out

i have the cloud
pictures
and i dream of my brother calling
and i answer it now

i've not been good
at reaching out to
my loves
for fears and for pains

i don't call my mother
or father
as much as i should
i am stopped by shades of ghosts

he calls me at 2 now
in that dream and
i answer it
assured

i think he
means to call her
and dials me instead
i think he means for me to call

mumma

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