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.

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

flight

see here
the virtuous souls
with their still-wet wings
our grounded innocents

'fore they take flight
into the air
of a sky
pushing with the hot currents

we are in their
eyes still seen
as a high shelter
in which to nest

they will abandon
the place
together or apart
to test the wing

abiding
the rules of a higher
regulator
who makes the call

and we consent
so that the nest becomes
a diving-off
place

no urgency
commands their flight
greater than our joined
embrace and our push

it is our
pain paradox
to be selfish and
selfless at once

that of course is
the definition
of mother and father
womb and loin:

give and take
hold and release
harbor and cast off
time and no time

the wind comes nigh
we watch the wings
we turn a back
and they fly

Read More

Glass Child

come with me

she says, but I decline

because I've been told

coddling keeps the child in the cradle

you're old enough to go alone

but the figure she cuts

when she's turned and walking away

head hung, looking at the ground

is as stinging to the conscience

as a February wind to the eyes

my daughter, now turned to go alone

slender and diminished like that

seems as fragile as spring brook-ice

a veneer that can be shattered

with the heavy boot of rejection

thus shamed, i walk with her
 - she taking my hand -
and I consider what has
become of the child we
said would rule kings

the dilemma thus:
in a single day she will spar with
the bullies of the playground
who bait her brother,
the special one we've taken in

but at home she will
become a lupine in
a winded field
bent and lowered
demurred and bowed

she is strength when wanting
upon her own summoning
a solid thing
whose feet on the ground are
as firm as the pillars of Athens

and yet, lately
she has softened to become a watery thing
under certain circumstances
a kind of weak organ
collapsible under pressure

she is a force among those in the world
yet a wilting flower in my palm
brave in the face of enmity
yet a shadow in the crook of my arm
an enigma

and therein I find my clue:
my girl, the king-ruler
has made 'round herself a casing of glass
fired by the heat of a child
not of her blood, but a brother no less

and in so doing
she can deflect the light (as glass will sometimes do)
or let it pass though (no lesser a trait)
whatever circumstance may necessitate
and therefore take her out either way

because she would rather be out than in
her engagement in life being
felt as a distraction to her parents
whose life is now focused on him
out of the reality borne of his condition

where he is weak
and requires our greater focus
she says this to herself:
if i am bad
i am no good

where he is bad
and requires our focused resolution
she says this to herself:
if they see me
they lose him

at 1700 degrees
fire will turn sand to glass
changing the form
the opaque becoming clear
the source becoming forgotten

the same heat that drew us to him
- and by virtue of its intensity
requiring of us to subdue it -
fired something in our girl
that formed panes

i walk with her gladly
unashamed at her weakness
guiltless of my unwillingness
to follow the prescribed
virtues of raising a strong child

because my glass child
is strong
but not unbreakable
weak
but not destructible

i have no fear now
she will be
the ruler
and servant
of the kings

Read More

Fire Child

we found a boy
to make our own
who lacked
and desired
and needed
and burned

a special boy
into whom we infused our particular kind
of healing waters
needed to extinguish
the fires of an infancy
set and fanned by others

"he'll be good for us?"
she asked me, lying in bed
"yes"
"he'll need work?"
(more a statement than not)
"yes"

"he needs us; to help him."
(more a plea than not)
"someone should"
i said to my wife, the giver
and then, taking her hand: "yes. us. he needs us."
(more a prayer than not)

and we fell, blind
opened our lives
to a child whose soul was forged
with a brand
whose needs were greater than the vastness
of the core of the sun

he was special, especially
hard
but lovely
but hard, yes
(beyond the horizons of our imaginings)
hard and lovely together: a sun, our son

and we learned
that naivete
is an unwieldy brand of its own
that can burn
the soul of the giver
and the heart of the given

everyone said this:
"saints"
and everyone said this:
"he's a lucky boy"
and we said to each other:
"i'm tired."

but yet we soldiered on
and marched toward a healing
of the boy
tacking this way and that
bearing down
and falling back (or advancing)

never knowing truly
that there is no healing
but understanding
as much as there is no
handling a vibrant coal
pitched from a fresh fire

and some did say:
"it doesn't always have to be you"
and they said:
"he can go back, he's so hard"
and we said:
"if not us, then who?"

for i'd rather die
having flown a passion-winged life
with its heart-breaks and wind-blown meanderings
than a foot-planted life dictated by the head
with its firm logic
yet cold march to the abyss

we found a boy
to make our own
who lacked
and desired
and needed
and burned

the gravity he made - not of his making, mind you
was greater than that of the others
drawing us toward him on collision
and away from
the softly spinning satellites
who needed our balancing pull as much as he

"did we fail?"
she asked me, on a walk
"yes. probably in a way"
"he hates me"
"no," i said
"he can't hate."

but her question was not
accurate, not the way she meant
because she knew a child's defiance
is not a form of hate
but a form of love-wanting
when words do not form well

and without words
there is a betrayal
and without words
there is a failing
and without words
a child burns from the inside out

and his words form less well so
than others
his tongue a tripping thing
that the mind plays games with
plunging him into despair
and fits of hot effusion

the way density and pressure
push upward and outward the magma
in the earth
and the volcanic eruption
a kind of fit
a crying-out in rage

but he does not hate
not our son, the sun
the child with the heart on fire
whose burn we believed we could
douse with a spritz
made from the waters of the heart

our time has become his time
our focus has zoomed
our peripheral crowded in
by the clouds of frustration and dismay
from a special boy's demands
and for that we cry for the other children

we crossed a bridge somewhere
to this land
blindfolded ourselves
for lack of understanding
exempt from the logic that others
seem so easy to wield

a bridge we cannot return across
for it was burned by the boy
with the fire in his soul
the sun, our son
who lights our path as much as he fires it
our douse turned to a feeble steam

but we wouldn't venture to return, i contend
to turn back on the distance we've come
because while the path we saw before us has been consumed
and the new way a thing ablaze
it is nevertheless a way
and we follow the paths our children forge, regardless the pain

Read More

The Old Man

i've been dreaming lately

of an old man 

that i'm sure is me

in a future that i seem to fear

sitting on a bench, in one example

in some park, looking inward

while casting a gaze out for something lost

i know it's me now

that i think of it because

i recognize the sting of a clenched heart

after a love has been wrenched violently from it

the way a blow hurts in winter:

a wringing crack on the skin
on a bitter day

frozen flesh rapped against stone

the man in my dream looks

for someone long blown away

a girl now years beyond their last

engagement in a sunny field when she was a year old

back then, they sat together in a field

the warmth a rapture

of brilliance on them

her infant head pushed against his cheek in love

she clutched a blade of grass

ready for the mouth

but instead pressed it into his raised palm

as an offering

now his heart leaps at finding her again

among a clutch of girl-friends

all of whom are just barely teenagers

and they preen together while walking his way

he sits taller

and picks at himself, straightening a shirt

and ironing his worn pants with 

aged palms, of course fruitlessly

and she comes, and then goes

they all look - all those fluttering birds -

at the old man fussing with his clothes

and they laugh

they all look - all those fluttering birds - 

except her

he affixes his eyes to her face

which remains bowed in a gesture of shame

the expression of someone who knows

yet desires to be elsewhere for it

and the moment is past

and the search is over for the man

who found what he was looking for:

a girl who became his only ghost

when we were children

my sister and i sat with our father

and made of him in our own way

while he watched television news

 i, sitting behind him on our couch,

combed his hair with his small black comb

(that i always fetched from his breast pocket)

the teeth of it raking a meager thatch  

she, sitting at his feet at the ends of stretched-out legs

untied and retied his shoelaces with a girl's delicacy

the shoes he wore to work as a teacher

 as weathered as our grandmother's face

his presence at our tedious

sessions was the love

that remains undefined 

 children fashion a form

of their fathers, when allowed

(a  father who abuses it is bankrupt)

by using what they have in hand

a comb

a shoelace

a blade of grass

and if the form be made of

beauty and grace

and if the form be made of

love and patience

then the distance of a thousand

years will not

encumber the memory of their

truth

i beg of time this consideration then:

to let the hands of my children

 form something of me

close to that of my father's

so that they, wherever they may be found,

and no matter the length of our time together

will know me

as i know him

and make folly the nightmare-fears

of a someday old man

Read More

A Discussion Among Boys on a Beach

"the water is high,"
my son said to his two friends

and a debate among boys on a beach
was begun

"yeah, but not to god"
the first boy-friend replied. his name, jackson

"yeah. the water wouldn't even be up to here to god"
said the second. his name, nicholas

"yeah, unless he was six years old"
said my son to them, a proposal

"yeah, but he would still be a giant"
said nicholas, arguing

"yeah"
said jackson

"god IS huge"
said my son with surrender in his voice

"the water is still high, though"
said the friend jackson, wishing truce

after a silence
they went back to their water
and i was left recalling days
of childhood debates
myself

dodging and parrying with friends
with the swords of small minds
over ideas about god and the universe
surrounded by the minutiae of our hot summer days

we lost our minds in those debates
no one winning and egos bruised
hurt and ashamed
that we'd not won the argument

friendships seemed ripped forever
and the wounds from those debates
(which appeared they might bleed eternally)
always mended under the balm of youth

when i looked up again
the boys on this beach
were waded out to their chests
the water having washed the slate clean

and the sun in the sky was the center
and the earth revolved around her
and spun and tilted as ever
and the answers to the why and the how

were less important after all
and seemed to exist in the souls of boys
on a beach

Read More

The Dreamers of Dreams

We have a seasonal site at a campground close enough to home to allow us to care for the farm animals, but far enough away for us to feel escaped from the world.

A good camp is not supposed to close out all sound, just the busy chatter that we've been fooled to believe is important; the same way those old handheld a.m. radios sound tinny and distant. It's the same noise, really. Just not in stereo.

It's your typical family-oriented campground laid down into the woods. People inhabit fifth-wheel campers that are clipped to one long, serpentine dirt road; all-the-conveniences-of-home metal peas in a single looping pod.

At the top of the hill, a camp store; at the bottom, a small beach on a small lake with campers in between illuminated day and night by Christmas lights strung between trees; picnic tables beneath canopy tents; dogs on leashes and kids on bikes. It is as simple as it should be, and perfect for someone like me who grew up summering in a tent or a pop-up with my parents.

As a kid we left our home to spend week-long excursions at campsites in Maine and New Hampshire. We even went to Canada once. But the lynchpin of all camping memories for me is how the unrestricted access to the outside world, which camping naturally promotes, super-fueled the imagination of a boy always stuck inside his relentless fiction-making.

Kids, by their nature, daydream and because I fell into a certain category of dreamers - that of future writer - I hyper daydreamed. Constant was my urge to fold what I lived and experienced into a narrative that transcended reality. I was the kid whose parents were told by teachers that I was always unfocused, always looking out of windows instead of into my textbooks, always not applying myself.

But I was focused. On creation, on storytelling, on pretending. And I was applying myself. To understanding. To an explanation of the unexplainable. To the everlasting power of words. When kids in school brought their focus to their studies, I burrowed into my mind, where the fantastic world was more real than the physical one.

I suppose one might argue that the perpetual diving into one's imagination could be seen as unhealthy; the sign of a child on the run from something, of being incapable of addressing real problems with real solutions.

Perhaps.

I mean, if I were to analyze my youth to find the why of me, I would maybe point to being bullied for my height. Or maybe to my lack of the same social extroversion that made my peers popular. And these things combined (the former feeding the latter feeding the former, etc.) might explain why a made-up world running on the controlled unbroken line of my imagination (no matter how fantastic) was a far better refuge than the tangential nature of the world, ruled by the unreliable forces of nature, and even more unreliable human nature.

I don't really give a shit. Because, quite frankly, I like dreaming and getting lost and feeling empowered by having worked something up with my mind. Even to this day.

No. Especially  to this day. Because as a writer, with far less ability than most established writers, I am still an equal player. I am still, like them, a creator. I am still, like them, (who are much more successful than I - me? - at writing) empowered with what I think is one the most distinguishing traits of humans, and that is the ability to connect with fellow humans through the use of imaginative language. And not a whole lot of people can do that effectively because they've given up on the childish power of play.

It's like that quote from the Gene Wilder version of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory":

Willy Wonka: Try some more. The strawberries taste like strawberries, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.

Veruca Salt: Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?

Willy Wonka: [grabbing Veruca's mouth and pinching it a bit to hold it open] We are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of dreams.

Which brings me back to camping, oddly enough.

In my childhood world, a small campsite became a wide world. Whether I pedaled along dirt roads or marched through woods, my mind engaged itself in a game of belief-suspending. All things that I observed with my senses were absorbed and reconstituted into a fiction. Not necessarily always a story, with a beginning, middle and end or with characters. To me, I found as much delight in the simple, quick act of imagining a thing as something otherwise as I was in the drawn-out act of coming up with entire universes.

And ever in these states of wonderment, I was found to be staring off - as usual - in thought, with this peculiar smirk on my face and with the eyes of a child who could peer into rocks and trees and people and see their potentials. Daydreaming children and those who turn into writers never lose that look of lost stupor.

So recently, I caught myself there again. With that face.

Gabrielle and Griffin and their new-found friend, Brook, had me trek with them through the woods on the perimeter of the campground. Just a few yards in, far enough away to feel the giddy sense of being on a real hike, but close enough to know where to point your body just in case.

We plod-stepped through, coming across wooded things like thin trees bent completely over to make what the kids called "tree rainbows" and deer droppings that made them squeal and gag and patches of wildflowers that Gabrielle marveled over for their ability to grow in a place that got no sun. At every turn, they transformed what they saw into a definition of what they were experiencing. This is how the passivity of television-watching was and will always be trumped by the actively engaged. A tree forced into a back handstand by a winter's weight of snow is now a tree rainbow. Deer droppings - as disgusting as shit is to any child - became a "group of tiny BBs" to my 7-year-old son. And those wood anemone - those small white flowers found in congregations on the ground - were, to Gabrielle, "too important to pick, because they might save the forest."

I may be 47, but I was right there with them, squeezing myself through the portal of imagination that bridges the real with the unreal. I couldn't help myself, nor did I try. I elated in their easy, almost matter-of-factly assignation of uncommon virtues to common things. It made me giggle, if not in my head.

They led me on with the encouragement that I would soon not be disappointed in coming (they were under the impression that, as an adult, I was hating this) because they had a surprise for me.

And soon enough, they led me into a wide sunny field at the edge of which was a camper sitting on a creaky steal frame and a twin set of flaccid tires. Abandoned years before and picked over since, the camper had been the unfettered refuge of mice and birds. And before they could tell me, I knew it would be perfect for a clubhouse.

And before they could tell me, I knew it would be a place of uncontainable dream-kiting.

And before they could tell me, I knew it would be a place, 35 years or so ago, that I would have gotten lost in.

They made quick work of a clean-up detail, asking me to come with. I did. They gathered soap and brush and broom and paper towel and we all fled back up to the camper. But no one - even me - called it that. They scoured it and chattered about what would go where, and what would happen in it when, and decisions were made as to the importance of it all, with no debate.

I stayed outside, ambling around the large expanse of grass, swallowed up in a vibrant sunwash, listening to the voices of my children and their friend ecstatic in their gorgeous escape, in their manufactured reprise from their real worlds.

By myself, I made the camper into something else. Something of which I'm not capable of revealing the details quite yet. But I can tell you it no longer sat in a field of grass. Its metal body no longer a metal body. It did things and became things that it had never done or had been. The doors were doors, but better than just camper doors. The battery - dead for years now - was a new gadget. And the tires alone - these worn, slack rubber things - were the focus of at least ten minutes of my shooting-star imagination. And for a long time, I was gone.

And yes, I had that look on my face.

Read More

no rest

my son, he jumps off his bike

that his legs and arms are still too small to master

and he bounds across the road

I'll just run instead!

he battle-cries and

gallops uproad toward siblings

his abandonment is a

retreat, a falling-back

from a relentless gravity

that has pulled him, since birth, away

and up an incline

toward something that is not me

on this day,

i love the bike-tossing

for its rebellion against what I hate

this giving-up fills me

with a joy

for a child's world of non-betrayals

a place where he (therefore i)

can do what pleases him (yes, i);

free of the stone-throwers

i love the boy

for giving up just

this one time

and how he comes back

downroad at me smiling

and dodges an imaginary whatever

bounding into a ditch

tumbling head-over;

his body tossing dirt and sand

at rest he scares me

the way a stopped sun

would blow up my heart

he needs to be at-speed

for when he does find rest

he will be gone from me fast

Read More

Disney Tripping

We took the kids to Disney On Ice on Valentine's Day, thanks to the generosity of my employer, who received several comp tickets and took pity on me when he saw the family portrait-mural that stretches across my office wall.

"Do you really have 8 children?" he asked.

"Yeah. Yup."

I get asked this a lot and the reactions range from incredulity to pity to fear.  Mostly fear. Like I'm catching. Like everyone except me received the proper vaccinations against doing something as crazy as having more children than vehicles.

"Wow," he muttered, with furrowed brow and a hand over his mouth.

"Yessir."

He backed out of the office with the same look you'd give a frothing chimp waving a razor and a can of shaving cream. He returned to my doorway a moment later and lobbed a fistful of Disney tickets at my head and sprinted away.

"Aww, thanks!" I shouted to him.

"Stay away from me."

I get that a lot.

Anyway, we don't do a whole lot with our kids because we don't really like them. That, and there are so many of them that their collective weight is a gas-drag on our car, which was not built to carry passengers whatsoever. It's more of a driveway vehicle than a roadway vehicle. It performs best when we treat it as a stationary thing.

When we do go out as a family, it's usually short-lived because we get mentally and physically exhausted from the screaming and the fist fights and the name-calling and the eye-gouging and the incessant tattling. 

From their mother. 

I'm driving, so I don't get my fair shot. It's ridiculous.

You think I exaggerate? You haven't lived a day in my 1998 Sebring.

Anyway. Disney. Ice. Dancing. Kids hopped up on cotton candy in Olaf-shaped bags.

We decided not to tell the littles where we were going because, well, we were actually thinking of taking someone else's kids. Some that we abducted from a grocery store in Gray. Kids who are smarter and better behaved than ours. Kids we could leave unattended while the Mrs. and I go shag in the car while the kids watched the show. Our kids cannot be left unattended at all, which means we have not shagged in a car for years. Even in our own driveway. And it's really starting to grate on me.

Either way, and what-for, we are evil. And we love surprises. Like telling Gabi and Griffin they're adopted and Bailey is our natural-born son. Boy does that piss them off. And confuse them. And give them nightmares. Well not Bailey. He doesn't understand any of it. He thinks babies come from the microwave after you've called it a "piece of shit muthafucka" three times. Same way popcorn is made, as a matter of fact.

"It pop and you take it out?"

Yeah. Something like that, Bailey.

We live an hour from Portland and, with the show starting at 11, we had to get up extra early to get everyone ready. And when I say early, I mean half-past Corrine did it all.

Valentine's Day, if you don't recall or have chosen to gin-and-coke the memory from your mind, was -13 degrees at 8 in the morning and blustery. The kind of cold winter day in Maine in which everything, including your tear ducts, crackle. When walking and breathing at the same time hurts. When you stop yourself from yelling at the kids because opening your mouth will kill you.

Corrine wrangled the three older littles into the back seat with the broken, jagged end of a broom as usual, while I strapped down the baby in her NASA-inspired, front-facing-back car seat, standing on her shoulders while pulling straps up and clicking straps across her chest and checking to see if her pupils had exploded and that she was still breathing. She gave me a little baby thumbs up. All systems go.

And we were off.

Rumbling across the perpetually uneven, tax-wasted, poorly plowed roads of Otisfield; onto Casco, whose fire station is the biggest building in town; into Raymond, whose walkers take their side in the middle of the road; and through Windham, which has a cop-to-minivan-driving-soccer-mom ratio of 6 to 1 it seems.

The kids sang Christmas carols, the same three carols they'd been singing every day since Christmas and just as poorly, therefore once and for all rendering the argument "Practice makes perfect" the biggest bullshit lie ever told.

Once we hit the border of Westbrook, 55 minutes later, the car's heat started working, which merely replaced one complaint (We're freezing to death!) with a different complaint (We're burning to death!). Because no car ride, in the history of my family, has ever gone without the conjoined outcry of deeply wronged, near-death children. Their cries of injustice and end-of-life wailing rose above the screech of the tortured heat fan and the volume of the acid rock station to which Corrine affixed the radio dial 30 minutes earlier. The noise gathered above my head and came down upon it like the jack hammer of God. It clenched my jaw, rattled my spine, and put murder in my heart.

Corrine turned around, finally, after stewing and after the veins in her neck began to vibrate and her hands shake.

"If you wake that baby...! Shut! It! Now!"

The baby woke.

"That wasn't our fault," Griffin offered. More as a defense witness than an accuser.

Corrine snapped back around, her steely gaze clamping his mouth shut and therefore trapping whatever other comments were about to escape his chapped-lip mouth. Gabrielle tended to the fussing baby by making strangling cat noises. Bailey sputtered something about peanut butter and looked out the window.

The Cumberland County Civic Center is where, at 17,  I saw my very first concert - Simple Minds -  and where I witnessed a couple fornicate in the men's bathroom, where beer was spilled on my shoes three times by the same man and where the pot smoke was so heavy that I thought it was merely a part of the pyrotechnics of the show.

Now, 30 years later, I was returning to the same venue to treat my kids to a Disney show and it dawned on me that the progeny of that fornicating couple could very well be in attendance with their children. Which really made me want to toke. Wicked bad, man.

As you might expect, the concourses were jam-packed with humans. Most of whom were under the age of 10 and without adult supervision. I was convinced all these kids' parents had dropped them at the door and gone back to their own cars to shag. Lucky assholes.

These kids were all wiping snot on the sleeves of the Disney costume that they insisted their parents let them wear. There were Cinderellas and Snow Whites, Beauties and Beasts, but mostly Elsas and Olafs - the two most popular stars of the latest craze, Frozen. If you've not seen this show, or heard the music from it, how was Uranus? Did you enjoy your stay?

At once, after entering the building, the kids were instantly high. The walls were lined with Disney-colored booths selling Disney products just screaming to be abandoned and stepped on and broken in children's bedrooms across the state.  Disney music bombarded the airwaves with its mind-weakening subliminal "Disney is better than Jesus" messaging. And the smell had a peculiar carnival-chili-dog-after-a-Tilt-O-Whirl vibe about it. It made you want to vomit blood but also eat everything within a mile.

The kids insisted, of course,  on stopping at a booth to buy something. Anything. They didn't care if was a pile of dog shit in the shape of Pluto. They had to have something or they would dieeeee! And, feeling in the spirit, I treated them to a bag of cotton candy each.

"That'll be forty five," said the overly happy girl in the Minnie Mouse hat.

"Minutes?" I asked dumbly. "You have bags already made."

"No."

"Yuh-huh. They're hanging right there. I can see them next to the battery-operated overly phallic Little Mermaid tooth brushes."

"Dollars."

"Really? Can we just fornicate in the bathroom and call it good?"

I looked down at my children, who looked up at me expectantly, wearing not Disney costumes like all the little fuckers running around us whose parents were all from Cape fucking Elizabeth, but instead wearing the clothes we bought them from Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn Clothiers, Ltd.

"Ok," I said and handed the woman the last of my food stamps money that I was going to use to buy beer and cigarettes and porn later that day. But, this day was not about me after all, and so the kids came away with a lesson well learned: In a public place, Daddy becomes a pussy.

So here's the thing about the show itself. It was actually fantastic. In the sense that, for the first time in quite awhile, I was able to enjoy watching my kids experience something fun and engaging that didn't involve throwing things at each other in the woods.

They sang the songs (poorly) with absolute abandon. They danced to the music. They shared their cotton candy and popcorn. They actually liked being around each other for the two hours we were there.

And yeah. I got a little teary eyed when it was finished. Happy to have made them happy, after a long horrible year of badness.

Read More

This Is The Motion Picture Soundtrack of Our Lives

where is our gloaming sky

where is our rising tide

the one that washes happy heroes

to a sandy shore, alive?

where is the swell of strings

the vibrant song on wings

the same that lifts embracing lovers

and all the life it brings?

are we really only seen

as lost and sadly ever been

left jilted at the glittering alter

of all those silver screens?

don't you want a single chance

to make our simple, country dance

something worthy of shining greatness

that leaves all 'goers in a trance?

to be the lyrics of the songs

that all the world would sing along

and assuage this intrepid life of ours

and ease its painful, ugly wrongs?

let's take the carpet for just a day

and spin like stars in our own way

and pretend we belong in a brilliant fiction

to keep our truths at distant bay

and then come down from that white stage

the simple lovers of our simple age

a leading man and leading woman

whose song once sung was all the rage

Read More