motion

when i woke, i went straight to
music and what i heard
set a scene one might picture
if awaiting the rise of a curtain

on some expected play
between actors we know
and whose work we have
a certain anticipation toward

or maybe that was the mood
i was in already when i awoke
and the music was a mere
conspirator? either way

the music felt like a prelude:
a softly moving bass, the strum
of a guitar, the slide of the jazz rake
across the face of the snare

the laying out of a rhythm,
the pace akin to a stroll
down a leafy path in
cold, wetted autumn with its

smell of the sweet decay
of the world on either side,
of sodden woods and the effusions
of cedar and pine

a man's voice comes in,
a lofty tenor, like a swallow
crooning up high in a barn
or a coyote call on a

ridge above the valley,
singing about a slow-moving
river on a snow-gray morning
or of something she lost

and the curtain draws open
at least in my imagination and on
the stage are two figures in silhouette,
frozen and waiting the lights

and that's when i knew
i should be alone to think about
recent scenes between us that
placed me in such a closing mood

but let me keep this confined
to a simple idea: love is not won
by talk but by the violence of two hearts
and a compulsion toward their unity

so it is with you and me
that we give out so much
in our passions and clashes and
rights and wrongs, the truth is

we have our primary source
of difficulty, our dramatic
situation to keep this play
on its feet and moving

we are personality upon personality, we've
got our cause and effect, our exercise of wills;
we have our action in the wishing of something
done and the doing of it, or the failing at it

a struggle means we've got movement, my lover; and
movement means we're alive with it, pulling in our
opposite directions, all of it a kind of goodness
and all of it just enough balance to be vital and breathing

we've got the small business down, too;
the blocking is perfected;
our habitual actions that keep
the eyes and ears busy:

you draw the baby's bath and i do the dishes
and you fold the laundry in the front room while
i start a fire in the stove and by god do we
like to see things getting done

there is drama as much in the healing of a child's
bruised knee as there is in the healing of our
bruised pride, tears and laughter come to an adventure equally
and hold the same station in the theaters of heaven and hell alike

the lights on this small stage are aimed in such a
way as to illuminate us in a singular spot, giving us
tone and a sharp focus, and everything surrounding
us – all the people and their events – is in a gray shade

let our audience look upon the play
with unpassionate eyes, seeing the flaws
in our action, the kinks in the motivations,
the poorly placed climaxes

we followed our own second thoughts
in the manufacture of this story after all,
because there is greater validation in the
inspirations of the heart than in the mind;

it makes us irreducible to their methods
and therefore we should not be
surprised by their distaste for our little drama,
as if it is a foil to all their proofs somehow

we play our comedy and our tragedy
on a single wire and live not by the
shallow mechanics of some joined plot but
by the depth of our plunge into life

we have the contrast and with it
the balance and our entrances
and exits and our business and our
passionate pleas and counterpleas

and our pulls and our lovemaking
it all strikes a fire in each other and
that's what keeps the drama
moving

i thought maybe the song i woke to
was about the disaster of two people
who'd spent their currency on
the ill fates and poverty of bad living

and how it spoke to me in that one
way, how it spoke of the troubles
that vex lovers to the point of distractions
that steer them toward a tragedy of ends

but i think now i misheard it all,
listening with intent and hearing
the meaning that the mood told me
to hear

the way our audience, in their patronage,
wish upon our unfolding story
what they suspect is a truth
they themselves are eager to consume

but the plaintive song, with its
drawling moan and its languid
slide toward a darkness not unlike
the sun's bow to winter,

is talking to me of you and
of you and i and of us as a one
always waiting our entrances,
our dialogues, our business-making

our pitches, our advances and set backs,
sometimes against each other's grain, but
sometimes along the same grain, a
pardoning of sins or ungranting of wishes

sometimes, when we intermit to take a moment to consider
a scene, we become melancholy, sure that living through so
many negations is just one bad episode following
another and we become convinced that we're playing this all wrong

that all this jousting and pain suffering is
a sign of a broken thing when placed against the
play of others, whose stories seem to be framed
by more accomplished actors and with greater ease

but thinking on them, thinking on them in a reflective
way, i see that a farce moves likewise: easily along
a flat path, without motion, without fire, and performed
for the sheer enjoyment and edification of their audience

i repeat myself at this point:
love is not won by talk but by the violence of two
hearts and a compulsion toward their unity, so i say
let them talk in their stasis. and let's remain in motion

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play

someone asked me once:

why do you play like this, why

did you not leave it to children

and remember that you have a

certain elevated place now and must

put away the things of your youth?

and i could not answer him with

any honesty except with a shrug

and a blush of shame and i'm sure

my silence was the answer he wanted

or expected

the way some teachers, who question their

own life choices and are soured by them,

can turn on their students with a maligning

condescension that relieves their dismal

self loathing, at least for a bitter moment

and after some time of reflection and

reconsidering, of probing my intentions

and giving due consideration to his

inquest and feeling generally bad about myself

i went outside and breathed in the air

and i awoke day after day and kissed my wife

and embraced our children; fed our dogs and

went to work and watched television and

wept over the loss of a brother and laughed

to myself about something that was not funny

and i bled from the prick of a splinter

and i sweated when the gas tank got too low

miles from town and i called my mother to

wish her happy birthday and i got angry

and then remembered i'd forgotten something

and the world contracted upon me in a sudden

breath and i was crushed by the weight of it

until my wife said she loved me and then it all

expanded again, with a new knowledge and

with a new wonderment and with a different shade

and the question of the man went from me for months and

then came back, as if it were something placed in a bottle

tossed to sea, only to return in its glass chamber sparkling,

the reflection from the sun burning my eyes so that i had to

pick it up and remove the message

why do you play like this, why

did you not leave it to children

and remember that you have a

certain elevated place now and must

put away the things of your youth?

it accused me once more

and pocketing the question i went for a

walk and tread upon dirt roads and paved

roads in the rain and snow, the wind in my

face and at my back, the swell of a storm

that pushed me into the woods

i found a structure, a form, made of you

and others like you, all of whom in arm and facing

each other in such a way that felt familiar

a form, this structure, of a power and understanding

that willed me to rejoin

in a dark room, with a stage, and lit in such a way that

felt real. you and your faces and your lives

and your work and your children and your pets

and your schooling and your tears and your fears

and your bleeding and your laughing

you and you all, like me and with me,

knowing that i do this as you do this,

not for a way to run toward youth again

and leave behind life but rather to

face life head on and seek truth

the form we make in this place

in this dark room with its lights

and its make believe and with our

voices not our own in costume

is a way that we understand

i play

because

i live

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coins in a Ball jar

coins touched by the hands of a

thousand now come to rest in a Ball

jar that sits on the edge of our kitchen

counter

it was the precarious position

i found it in – on the ledge like that -

that got me thinking of the man whose

face was the first i saw in this world

something of glass so close to falling,

so close to tumbling that i could feel

the descent of it in my lungs and i

could hear the shatter of it as it

struck the floor and i could feel the prick

of the shards on my fingertips and i could

smell the copper of the pennies and the

nickels and the quarters that rolled about

i don't know

it didn't fall, that's not what happened,

i'm just saying that i felt the heavy fall without it
going down, which is the way i approach darkness

i hate the idea of the fall, knowing that

it comes to all of us, but lately it's

come to too many of those i've known

in my life

it's that feeling of the dark figure that

descends, of a soul slipping downward

toward an ending, that has had me flailing

in my sleep lately

who would be so foolish as to place

a Ball jar on the edge like that? a child

i'm guessing, who went fishing for coin

and left it in that poised way, ready

the man who passed on yesterday was a

doctor and like i already told you, his was

the first face i ever saw in this world

when i emerged startled and blinking

once when i was 10 or so he had kids

take jubilant turns sitting atop an old

hand-crank ice cream maker at a church

fellowship lunch at their house in july

how the men filled 'round the canister

ice and salt while we took turns sitting

and laughing at the vibration of the crank

and the doctor sang hymns and laughed in kind

and that was a coin

or how he was the only man of god who

assured me that my sister was no pariah

when she got pregnant as a teenager while

the other men stood with cold stones in hand

and that was a coin

or how deftly he slipped the cord from around

my daughter's neck when she emerged

in a slick of blood, naked and pissing

everywhere, but scowling and full-throated

and that was a coin

i came outside on this november morning

to write a poem in the cool air but

this is no poem, so i went back to the

Ball jar that sat in a shaft of light on my counter

and i slid it away from its edge, the weight of

the coins a dense gravity and my fingers tingling

with the sense of an impending fall that did not come

to it but it came anyway, didn't it?

it always will

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let's be friends of a thing in its spirit

let's be friends of a thing in its spirit
in the same way we view a stone
or a single blade of grass
or the sound of wind

how they in themselves
alone and free can be
considered as they are
and are not without injury

to separate them out for a time
in order that we might
enjoy within them a view
of pure simplicity

indeed they are part of something
outside themselves and into
which they belong
to be sure, of course

but have a beauty alone too
that can inform and
cut away that which
oft clouds all things

because the big calamity of life
is that of the single spirit engorged
upon by the machines of
those inebriated by expansion

and become, in time,
self-enriched and bloated
but left hollow and
undefined after all

their construct designed by
plucking us as singles from our
vast fields to form a fierce whole to
bond against invented foes

feeding us with fears of
a certain half fiction
not wholly true but that
rings in our ears as such

and so we become less
of a spirit of our single
selves enriched once by
the power of our uniqueness

and more of a larger
mass of energy drained
and oppositional and
ever shaking with worry

so for our current obstacle
i ask we extract that which is
pure in being unique and give
it a renewed consideration

so that when returned to mass,
it in itself and what
we know of it will
renew its power to us

let's be friends of a thing in its spirit
and in that view deny for now that we've
been parsed on a beach by
the coming of a deep tidal river

stepping out of the huddle of our two camps
and away from those who
throw their fists into the air against
their brothers on the other side

fomented by the false complexity
of the scene before us and
riled by the rattling words
poured into their ears

by something that got
away from someone, got
out of hand and cleft us
of our inherited reason

and in this quiet posture we alone toe
the water standing across from each
other with the sting in our lungs
of salt water and bracken

that we breathed in after that
sudden gasping when the
water came and tore through
and divorced us

nature over her time
forces us into our separate
corners but it is men who
take advantage of the obstacle

beguiling us to believe
that we have but their remedy
to repair our station and
none of our own

by swearing an allegiance
to their machinery
we forfeit what governs us
naturally and we become hardened

but standing now in
this way we must consider
not what pushed us out
but what pulls us in

for in is where we belong
alone but together, singly
and apart but embracing
and unified for a purpose

of our own making
and of our own design
a spirit of a thing that
denies the power of

those who wish to veto
the spirit of the single
soul for the sake of
their own cold machine

we as our own excellence
can believe in the pure power
of a thousand independent
souls joined through simple clarity

from a position of one who
sees the one and fears not the
many who see the one in
me likewise

that i am no threat to you
as a genuine friend of a thing
in its spirit but someone who seeks
to bridge all waters with you as you

and let all the others
who claim to be master
follow or be drowned
in their pursuit

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