the kingdom of daniel

hear this psalm
about the spirit of
the days when
we were boys
on the wing:

he came to me
from a distance
and we raised a kingdom
here out of
the salt of our skins

he brought with him
a fire
that lit this cold corner
and led me
to knowledge

he bowed to no
king.
he feared no man.
he slung against
my oppressors

he sang the songs
of a past generation;
he sang
stevie and
marvin too

he sang mostly
to me, his voice
a lullaby
on the blades
of meadow grasses

among which
we found ourselves
tracing each other's
steps
at dawn and dusk

and catching
on bare legs
the wet remnants
of things
unnamed

we gave berth
to no mystery
and charged
headlong into
all battles

he became what i
believed i
envisioned
and in kind
i became thus to him

and when apart
we exalted
each to all others
with the license
of fable writers

and together
all others
exalted our
confidence and
came to believe

would i be a
man of sin
to boast the
enduring love
of cousins?

to make myths
out of the
soft clay
of children who
rushed at eternity?

to make fun
of all those
elder fools
who had succumbed to that
long soulless march?

they called us
first cousins
yet we were not
cousins first
but bound brothers

thick and
inseparable
conjoined by
the familial
and ever in step

what coursed
through him
coursed through me
and made of us
two a single one

blood shared
between
is to bear the
shield of
the Spartans

and so girded
time and man
cannot
wrest the two
apart

we chased
the serpents from those
fields and felt the
hot air on
our faces

we danced
with the sprites
of the dusty roads
and welcomed the
cold waters in our bones

our kingdom
was a borderless
range kept
secure by the
might of our wills

it was a kingdom
of fields and forests
playgrounds and streets
the shores of lakes
and the banks of stormclouds

at its height of land
we considered no horizon
in its deepest
valley we
explored cathedrals

its earth and its
sky were ours
and her subjects therein
paid homage
to their two princes

youth is
a time
when the sun
is not yet
the center

and the
stars and their
heavenly companions
still fuel
illusions of boys

i dream in the
night
of the return
of the kingdom
of daniel

once again to play
to run
to sweep down
the pastures of that
rich country

to wait on
that friend
once more to raise our
kingdom back
from ashes

come, daniel, play
and run shoeless again
across the asphalt
in pursuit
of fortunes

come with me and
without care
in love with
the sound
of our footfalls

once more
let go the ripened
but instead reach
for the hard green
fruit of youth

i want for
all a kingdom
of your own
brought down
from on high

i want for all
that blond boy
- trumpeter of
the days of
my youth

i want for you
a champion
of your
own; a guardian
of myth builders

i pray
i praise
i want
i sing
i dream

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the hymn of a temple, this woman

i write
a hymn for love
about
a temple, this woman

whose womb was once
the dwelling place of certain
elegant souls
made flesh by her fire

the water that splits the rock
envies the woman who dances
in harmony with
the sun and earth

most anything
can tear the fabric
shatter the bone
or bring down the wall

but no greater power
exists than
that which
can forge a life

a woman takes the
simple seed
and harvests from
it the complex flower

my hymn is
one of the temple
of the goddess
who gives of herself:

the water
the blood
the heat
the breath

i write
a hymn for love
about
a temple, this woman

whose soul was now
and forever
a home
for the exiled

the wind that bullies
the sail
envies the woman whose
love reaffirms the discarded child

most anything
can propel forward
push aside
or ply with force

but no greater power
exists than
that which can
give hope to the lost

a woman takes the
broken stem
and nurses it
back to strength

my hymn is
one of the temple
of the goddess
who gives of herself:

a way
a belief
a home
a blessing

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they want i be an angel

they want i be an angel
in this world, which is my
own defined heaven
of soil and air; water and flesh

but which shall they want?
one of the celestial seraphs
pure and
six-winged?

to place that hot
coal against the
lips of all those sinners
to atone their sins?

i'd rather not
to be honest
be anything anyone
wants

but instead be a girl
which is plainly good
and perfectly fine
in and of itself

i'd not want to carry
a bag
over my shoulder
heavy with the expectations

of Man
who loves rules
and rulers
the keepers of keys

i do desire flight
but with wings
made from the
joys of life

and not those
nailed to my
back by the
false prophets

of men
who assign controls
to people like
birds to cages

they want i be an angel
for what purpose
i can't say; it's a
two-thousand-year mystery

a girl should
rise up in the world
without someone
holding the kite spool

i desire no
tether, no strings
and would float
on currents freely

i'm a girl on a
wooded path asking
her father questions
about gnomes

or faeries
or the principles of
animals among
forests

my father
who has daughters
and sons
equally

and can be faulted
for wanting something
grand and brilliant
for me

but his assignations
are forgiven
because they are not
violent ones

he wants me to
want and to be
wanted fairly
and to be ever wishful

his wants are
not Man's wants
for girls
which is salt on the tail

i see gnomes
and wooded goddesses
and i feel the breath
of the Mother

i dance along
the paths with
the inquiry of
the innocents

i am young still
and look up
to skies and down
to fallen trees

i'm not to be
an angel
but i will
know heaven

hang no wings
on me and i will
fleet over their
unsuspecting souls

Read More

this tearless father

i did not weep
when you crowned
in the canal

i watched
the
violence to

your mother's
pink and
pliant flesh

and witnessed blood
and the pale
effusive waters

i gave love
to your mother
lying on her back

held her hand
and wiped her brow
and watched her shake

but i was not
one of those
fathers who wept

i saw majesty
in your birth;
an alien grandeur

the expulsion
of your flesh from
her flesh

made my soul
yaw and pitch;
tumble and vibrate

the intellect
penetrated the
physical

when you with your head
slid out of her
greased to the heels

i elated quietly
at the coming
of you

my mind and
my heart
together seized

a breathless
moment at your
first breathtaking

but i was not
one of the
fathers who wept

i used to wonder
in the first years
where i became broken

to not emote
to not exerience the
swell and release

that i hear
so many other
fathers have

did i not
witness a miracle
as big?

did i not love
you as much as they
did theirs?

do i not
have the same
heart and soul?

i've cried since
for you
that's for sure

at the moment
i learned you'd
been nearly killed

at the moment
i learned i
could not stop your crying

at the moment
i felt you thought
i didn't care

at the moment
you learned
i was fallible

at the moment
i was sure
you'd be taken

so forth
and so on
i weep now

a father
who felt
something

close to seeing
the beginning of
time

when you
were born
and blood covered

but did not
weep at
it for fear

i would miss
the moment of
you becoming you

Read More

the baby in the lap of the poet

see this child
climbing into my
lap this morning
just when the
muse flew in
on her wing

one an angel
in blond pigtails
and a runny nose
the other
a capricious
sprite

i'd grabbed
my pen and pad
just then
feeling the
flutter of
wing

when the child
- guided by her
own covert specter -
crossed the room
and placed a hand
on my knee

the pen falls to
child and to home
to wife, to pet
to lovemaking
to sleep
to prayer

some poets
-most all-
dogged by the
same passions,
pursued by the
same demons

are capable
of closing a
door to all
else and
cupping
the muse

till she is
properly
pinned
and the poet
is briefly
satiated

and would
find my
deference
to the baby
a weakness
of a man

uncommitted
to his art
the highest
calling of all
they would say
i was a traitor

but the baby
in my lap
whose hands
have soiled
my pant legs
with chocolate

and whose
theft of a pen
made errant marks
in my journal
one day
while i was away

and whose
nose drips
down into her
mouth as
she tries
new words

will not be
on my knee
in another day
perhaps three
this poet
knows not

and the foundations
of my kingdom
will collapse
under the weight
of time
and be dissolved

by the seas
of human
afflictions
and familial
passings and
all those hot winds

the baby on the
knee will
not wait
but the child muse
will wing
again

and i
will always
have words
and words
and words
and words

the baby
climbed
down and
the muse
evaporated
into the air

i write
this while she
sleeps
and the poets
sleep in
their books

and my lover
is away
and the pets
wag
and the rain
falls outside

Read More

the time that it takes us

the time that it takes us
to unfold
beneath blankets
is the length of ages

children to bed
dogs restful and snoring
the cats in the kitchen
finally abandoning their chase

the night now is a
quiet thing
laid over us -
a coverlet of calm

we both have equal wants in
the darkness; his greater
than hers is
the old myth

passion is something
to do with
the heart and the loin
in man and woman equally

it radiates from
an ancient place:
the tendrils of that old joy
never stop seeking

this man makes
a move with a hand
to breast
and you awaken

this man's lips
find the shoulder
and the triceps and the
rib behind flesh

a delicate kissing of
curves
your head turned away
coy to my touch

the arousals are
problematic of course:
the din of the day
pressing back

the invasions of
the domestic;
the cries and the wails
of all those boorish bosses

old lovers
are not young lovers who
can find heat in any place:
in parks or a dark bar

we too were pilgrims
once in a lush green
land of hot forests
and milk white rivers

the adventure was
made in the hunt
for the jewels in
each other's pockets

we old lovers must leave
the familiar paths
we've furrowed through each other's
earthen networks

and go blindly
into thicket or thorn
if we are to find that
fresh spring

this man's hand
is holding yours
my lover's, while
the other is on an adventure

the risen flesh of the neck
the breath of the woman
the slow descent into
focus

i made love to you once
filled with a fever
in a parked car on the side of
a road

with the growl of the
passing cars and the hum of the
engine and our breathing
becoming a certain symphony

what we were
is not what we want
what we want is
to be engorged fairly

to not deny our
time in growth
or lament or call
for past days

we're no less
lovers in love today
nor are we dry leaves
in a forgotten forest

the baby stirs now
and the flow slows
to a deliberate mechanical
and then altogether stops

we hold our breath
and listen; she sputters,
whines; and the walls we've
brought down are rebuilt

you look at me and sigh
and i sigh
and we hold hands
our bodies lit and infused

somewhere, young lovers
are sinking into
the old immersion and
believing more than they know

out there across
fields and forests
in their uncomplicated
lives touching and unblocked

not aware that they
are pilgrims just once; that
elation of discovery fades and
that they must work the land to thrive

the baby snores
now, and this man's hand
finds the folds, fingers trip down
a familiar fanning alluvial

and you turn your head away

Read More

mothers of sons

outside my window
the blossoms of a flowering tree
bob in the wind at the ends of branches
like the heads of boys in the arms
of a tired mother

the boys, these blossoms, are
restless and eager
and the mother, this tree, bends
her arms to let them wag but refuses
to release them entirely

i don't know the names of the flowers
on all those sun-laden trees
any more than I know the names of the mothers
who have held their wagging boys
on the sunny days of the years of the past

but i know one mother
who held a once-ambitious boy
to her breast on the day
he let the winds carry him
away, finally

and the falling-off
and the falling away down
was a pull on her soul
as painful as his birth was on
her womb

so i understand why
mothers and trees don't give up
their head-bobbing boys
very easily
for the double pain of it

and yet they give it
and give it all
knowing and knowing
and yet they still give it
all for their head-bobbing boys

Read More

The girl who loved dorothy the most

i was at an event
and she called my name
from across the
tops of the heads
of a crowd

a mother
holding her
daughter the one
who's been
through hell

i don't get
called across the heads
of crowds
too much
really

and turned to
see the two
wading in a line
of shuffling
bodies

the girl is
a spray of wildflowers
in the arms of her mother
the
unbreakable vase

they know hospital walls
that you don't
and prayers to angels
have been sent up
in a swallowing darkness

did you have fun?
i ask
and she nods
and tucks her face into
her mother's neck

i don't know
the color of her eyes
but they remind me
of how i imagine
worlds beyond this universe

they have cracked
open her skull
and have left scars
it's hard not
to stare

i am in love with a woman
who also embraced a child
that makes people
stare
he is my son

not my adopted
son but
he has red hair
anyway
and he is difficult

he has not
seen hospitals
and his head remains
untouched
but he needed a champion

i've known mothers
whose birth of a child
is nothing more
than an expulsion
of an inconvenience

so forgive me if i
love this woman who
holds this girl
and shouts my name
across an auditorium

she and her wife
know you must walk
the edge of a blade
that falling to either side
is not an option

a mother
is a woman
who lives in
the bloodstream
of her children forever

this is not
a song of pity
God favors no
one and loves
the lowly all the same

but something ought
be said about
the women who
live in the
shadow of the sun

and defend
the stared-at children
with the sword of Athena
lest they be slain
by wolves of apathy

it gives them
what the others have:
the right to find
beauty and joy
in anything

who is your favorite?
i ask the child
and she whispers
and she whispers
dorothy

Read More

April 10th

my father took
me, a suspicious son
toward the casket
where his own
father lie

it was 1979
i wore a K-Mart suit jacket
and a clip-on tie
and my father had to
tamp down my cowlick with spit-in-palm

my father celebrates 

his birthday on april 10th

even though he

discovered late in life

that his birth certificate says the 9th

my grandmother ina

having celebrated it a day late 

for reasons known only to her:

dad thinks she was confused

by the late hour of his birth

to an 11-year-old
who just got
his first 10-speed for
his birthday
i feared all evil

the funeral home
hummed with the
low mourn of
clingy
ghosts

he - my father - placed
his hand between my shoulder
blades and urged me forward
toward the casket
at the end of a long bright room

my father kissed me

on the lips all the time

and once in front of peers

after being dropped off at 

school and they called me fag

i have kissed my own sons'

lips to suck

from them the poison

of men inebriated

by their own ignorance

that's where it is
he said to me. I
was eye-level with
my grandfather
in his own suit jacket and tie

he rested there
his thin hair perfected
needing no tamping down
although i sensed my
father wanted to anyway

his pacemaker
my father explained
i said nothing but he heard
the question in my mind
it kept his heart beating

he wept, my father,

at my brother's death bed

when he said 

now i know what

god felt like when he lost his son

my brother who

could be given nothing

to keep his heart going

the victim of a 

riot of brain cells

my father took my hand
in his own
swallowing it whole
and together we patted
his fallen father's cold chest

tap
his hand was hot
tap
his hand was shaking
tap

i refused
to ride my new 10-speed
for weeks after
i remember not
wanting to leave his presence

in my silly child's way
i inferred from our
shared moment at the funeral
home that he needed my small
hand between his and his father's chest

as if my hand
acting as an insulator
protected my father
from something
sinister

and now
to put distance between us
would betray
the trust we'd cultivated
in that bright, gloomy place

a father to a child
is a connection made of
a thousand different
flowing gold strands
woven and made taut by time

we go tomorrow

to celebrate  his birthday

it being april 10th

and we'll have cake

and ice cream 

i love that he waits a day later 

than he should 

a foggy mistake by his mother has meant 

i have been afforded a day longer than what some men

have enjoyed with their own fathers

i have wondered
if my grandfather kissed my father
on the lips
or held my father's hand
passionately

i celebrate
my father's maker
the highest giver
be praised for gifting me
a lovely giver

Read More

to the three girls waiting in line

i.

the girl waiting in line
turned and kicked the
boy behind her
squarely in the crotch
and he fell
to his knees like a melon
dropped from a roof

the principal
was summoned from his
office and he stood, square-jawed
over the fallen
who wailed
and rocked with
his knees to his chest

we all gathered
in a circle
around them
the girl
with her arms crossed
looked down on the boy
and the principal did too

as if the boy
was a hot coal
that had been
spit from a fire
onto the cold
pavement of the
playground

balls
i heard whispered
kicked in the balls
my peers said
some tittered
others gasped
we all clamored

the principal
as if having
had to take some time
to measure up the
scene finally spoke
to the girl and
we all became quiet jurors

why?
he asked
and she kept her arms
crossed and
stared at the boy
she had waylaid
who now whimpered

he wouldn't leave me alone
she said
so you kicked him?
she didn't look
at the principal
but rather at
us

and we looked back at
her this girl
who shared classes
with us and hallways
and lunches who'd become
a kicker of balls
the new unrighteous

why?
our principal asked
his hair was thin
and waved in an
april breeze
he looked
like a clown

he snapped my bra
the girl spat
and then cried
her hands to
her face
shoulders jumping
i looked at her chest

we all did
and we recalled
she was the girl
who got those before
all other girls
and she was
taller too

i have a crush
on her now
that i thought of it
as we stood there looking
at her crying
all the girls were taller
than me in fact

the school nurse came to collect
the mewling boy
and helped him
back into the school
holding his balls
bent over like one of those
war veterans at the Memorial Day Parade

no one snapped
her bra after
that we all let her
be and in time
my crush waned
and the girl waiting in
line faded away

ii.

a mother in a cafe
sat across the room from
me and stared out
the window
toward some
kind
of history

her face
drawn by a
caricaturist at
a county fair
on this sepiatic
day
in april

i want to
see that history
i think to myself
it would be
a telling story
jagged as the Maine seacoast
blue-gray as sandstone

she is wearing
a long-sleeved
shirt with a buttoned
collar
and a pair of dress pants
and dress shoes
with two children

who dresses like this?
i ask my palms
with two toddlers in tow?
looking out a cafe
window
at a disappointment while
the kids eat blueberry muffins

she has been
told something that
wasn't ever true or didn't come true
or felt true but she knew
was a lie in her heart
out that window are
the words that haunt her

she wanted to finish
college maybe but cannot
or she is friends with a man that
her husband doesn't like
or she longs to
be the lead in a play
that will never be staged

one of the children
the blond boy rests a hand on her slacks
leaving an oily print
that only i notice
the button to her blouse
at the breasts has popped open
and i look away

iii.

a friend confided
recently that she
is the target of
a swarm of
jackals
wearing the smiles
of church-goers

she is ripe
for the picking
of course
don't let that brilliant
countenance
throw you off the
scent of blood

a girl's heart is a bell of
horsehair crinoline
bracing a skirt
of public considerations:
mother, daughter, wife
friend
lover

undress her
and she burns

her soul is the core of
a distant sun kept contained
by the mass of her own passions
she is really just another star
until she gets close to you
then she becomes your source of
heat

my friend
the one encircled
dabs feeble unguent on
the bleeding sores left
by the teeth
of the vicious
familiar

they tear at
her to get beneath
the ribs of the underskirt
taunting the source of their heat
not realizing that
her warmth will be stilled
when pushed far enough away

iv.

to the three girls
waiting in line
yours is a
story about
falling
leaves
in a forest

painted hands
at the ends of
maple branches
slip away
and down
to a wet path

to some it is
the floating down
and the impact of
the fall, and the
brief brilliance
of your autumnal
change

to me
it is
your waiting
that makes you
strongest
on the branch
a canopy, a source

the descent
will come to
us all
but those who wait
and endure
are most
beloved

Read More

The Community, The Family

Me, directing Oz while comforting Toto

In 1999, my two oldest children were 7 and 5 and would accompany me to the grand Fuller Hall auditorium at St. Johnsbury Academy for rehearsals.

We were staging Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's musical that stitches several fairy tales into a fabulously dark tapestry about princes and princesses and witches and dead cows and beanstalks. It's a celebrated and musically unyielding show that drives musicians and directors crazy for its level of difficulty. I loved being a part of it, for many reasons.

I had, just a couple years before, tried my hand at acting for the first time in "The Rainmaker" and was instantly thrust into a rare fraternity called community theater. I fell in love. With not just acting, but with everything to do with it. It was a clan, with its own language and its own set of rules and its own hierarchy of leadership and its own local history and its own grand universal mythology.

It was where one could go, no matter his role in real life, and feel as if he had an equal footing no matter his role in the production. The banker and the housewife became light designers and stage managers; the teenager and the retired chef became set builders and sound engineers; the politician and the newspaperman became actors and producers. It allowed us the chance to become absorbed, naked of our day skins, into this warm light like unabashed children bathing together.

To be truthful, the biggest benefit for me is how theater revealed the folly of my fears. You've heard this story before. You've seen the movie. Perhaps, even, you have experienced it. Growing up, I was the kid in the shadowy corner. My self esteem stunted by the ridicule of peers for being short. A bullying that turned me inward and kept me gripped in the fist of palpable fear. Over the years, I have looked at my youth and seen it as a blessing in disguise. By being shuffled aside and forgotten, I was forced to play inside the mind which allowed me to exorcise demons onto the page and find my voice as a writer. A writer is a solitary person. He wields his tools alone. There is no need for peers to be happy and successful.

It wasn't until I was 30, however, and acted a part in a play that I discovered there was a tribe I belonged to. And from that point on, I've seen my courage grow; I have shrugged off my disdain of speaking in public; I have blown up the old anxieties that come with fearing failure.

Theater, for the most part, is the only experience I have had in which no matter how tired or frustrated I felt about a particular aspect of it, I always thirsted for it. I always looked forward to going to rehearsal. I always had withdrawals when it was over. I have laughed and shouted and cried on stage with people I've only known for months, and most of whom I still call my friends today. I can't think of a single experience that I can say that about.

Except family. Community theater, when it's working right, has the convivial spirit and community-as-family bonding of a Shaker barn-raising.

Speaking of family. I can think of no other activity than community theater in which real families can do something together. I learned this during that 1999 production of Into the Woods.

Fallon and Harrison, as I said, would come to rehearsals and sit in the auditorium and watch. They weren't there to be babysat. They came willingly and I loved them to be there. They were adopted by the cast. They were adored by the crew. They got a first-row seat to the making of a musical, and they had a million and one questions that I was thrilled to answer. I felt, more than at any time, like I was their hero.

Since then, they've seen nearly every show I've been in or directed. And while they don't participate in theater directly, I believe their exposure to it has in some small way opened them up to a broader sense of community and the arts and life. Something I did not have until I was 30. And their presence taught me that from then on, my family's involvement with me was as important to me as my own involvement.

Today, I sit here writing this just hours before The Wizard of Oz  hits the stage at our local community theater.  A show I directed. In it, my wife Corrine and two of our youngest children will perform along side a cast of 70 others and supported by a crew of nearly 30. Folks who are acting for the first time. Folks who are acting with their son or daughter. Folks who have dedicated their work to the memory of someone who died. Folks who do it for their own reasons, all of which really is about being involved in something that makes them feel included. Accepted. Important.

That's 100 people of every damn walk of life.

People I now love and who I can add to my growing family.

One that started in a musty town hall in Lyndonville, Vermont when a group of oddly different people asked me to join their family.

And in so doing, slayed the dragon of my youth.

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Carnival Child

i find myself
more oft than not
playing the part
of a barker

in a circus tent
rigged with lollipop poles
up-holding a canvas of
princess pink

spreading my arms
hoping to distract the few
at a show
with but one attraction

the Man ruled
a schedule be kept to
behold the coveted
prize

saturdays and sunday afternoons
are good
how about a longer show
for wednesday nights?

regardless the toll
it takes
on the precious thing
how tired she has become

one ticket?
or two?
what price is perfect
for this once bundle of joy?

all the care is
left to us
the raising and the
feeding and discipline

so that the thankless show-goers and
their vicious, well-fed
bar dogs can lap
up a win

i can shout
to the tops of
the tent poles
and no one will hear

my voice muted
by the applause of
the ignorant
crowd

clowns all
who brought with
them their own
cold cage

to take from me
the one thing
i was forced to lead
into this ring

i'm just a barker
now, that's all
made hoarse
for all that fruitless yelling

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blind wander

i am stung for
not knowing
but still wander down
a path that
ends in a certain
calamity

against the
testimony of
friends and
family
who whisper failure
and know not my heart

there's is
an act
of moral
usury
lending love
at an unreasonable rate

mine
on the face
is a
foolish withdrawal
against insufficient
funds

i do
against don'ts
more than
i should:
call it my
prodigal path

knowing
and not
knowing
is separated by
a thin
want

to go singly afoot
upon a broken
forest row
that breathes a
whispy air of
defeat

feels better
than being
blown with
all those other leaves
down a cold street
on a sunny day

my loves
do not abide
your own prejudices
against
those who travel
blind deliberately

they still see
with eyes closed
what they seek
and travel
toward the same
pitching sea

listening
and not listening
but not uncaring
leave them
to their
sails

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no good night

because the man decreed
from a bench
we watched
you go off
for the first time

it's only
an overnight
we say
to ourselves
not forever

yet we wander
around our home
looking for things to
keep the mindwolves
at bay

supper
homework
a blister
Alex Trebek
What is Montpelier?

avoiding the
silences
in the walls
and the vacant
echo in the floors

we
have come to
be addicted to
the sounds
of you

a day is just another
to all others
when the fall
comes
to other lovers

and stones descend
from the
sky on
someone else's
head

there is no
good night
when the warmth
of a child
goes missing

this night
a shuffle of
poorly
written
dreams

that poke
at the backs
of the eyes
while the ears
swear they hear you

this lost limb
a bleating lamb
and the heart pumps
blood to the child
in a different bed

i keep looking for the baby
says the woman
who knows the
smell of you better
than anyone

i saw you
birthed
the blood and the
mess that came
with you

that makes
me yours
not theirs
i only covet
what i love

the man behind
the bench
has children too
did he have
to wave goodbye like me?

i will not
sleep before
liars
nor wake
without her

no good night
comes from
the absence of
a child's
kiss

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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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Blossoms

i took a picture
of an apple blossom row
awhile back in a distant mid-may
the blossoms a congregation
in a certain pastoral cathedral
i thought i took it because
it was something of a beautiful thing
but i won't lie
it was because i spied you there
hanging in the green pews with me

i look at the picture now and again
and for awhile did not know for sure
why it was a haunt
why it was a prick of the
conscience
to see those cotton clusters
bunched in
languid faces-to-the-sun
repose
yet on the verge of some undefined calamity

until today
looking at the picture once more
with new eyes
that see
our collective shedding seems the end of so many
i know: friends, brothers, and brothers of
friends, those of my flesh
and of the flesh of you my blossom
companions
who don't bloom again

what something is it that makes
the trees brush us away
per annum
shedding us down
to that grassy path
to that soft place
our fall that gives way to
a momentous fruition
only to return again for many
but not for all?

i prefer to believe
that the disappearances
are not some cruel
luck of nature's lottery
but rather part of a design that
passes through
human comprehension
in a way that makes us
know
even if we don't

you are part of my row
you faces in my orchard
you tree-wept brilliant
beautiful congregants
my friends and flesh
we will fall
and rise again
blooming if not here then
in that somewhere else
beloved blossoms always, all

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