fall down with the day

fall down with the day

now, fall down the day-

let the fever go.

let it go now

if you were afloat in

an ocean on your

back you'd let it

let you feel it let

go and your arms

would be outstretched

like falling down with the

day. now, let it fall and

get those arms outstretched

and wait for the collision

with the world

we all love the fall-feeling

but not the fall, it has a

sinister meaning that we

know but always forget;

it is unknowing the known

forgetting the unforgotten

when i'm writing i am

falling down the day

down with the day

arms outstretched and the

rush is in the belly and in

the cock

so there is power in

the fall, intelligence in

the descent, of the going

down too fast but sometimes

not fast enough

we must go to it:

go to it, to have the

pleasure tamped,

the pain amplified,

but neither giving quarter

to the other

falling is a skepticism,

like the feeling of being

confronted by a crying friend

and not knowing what to

say

i still feel the tumbledown

for those who tell me

they've sat at the bedside

of a dying sibling, even though

i've sat there with them

so someone says to me,

'she went home to the lord

last night' and

<she had cancer>

is in the white noise of the grief

and i nod and i say

'our thoughts are with you,'

which is a terrible thing to say

and then i am pulled out

of the fall, fully out

fast, and i feel like

throwing up

after my brother, dethroned,

left us all standing around

that dark, shrinking hospice

room i wanted everyone to

just shut the fuck up about it

or at least to say,

'your brother was an asshole

to me in 1979'

or to ask,

'was he still a drunk?'

or to weep,

'i didn't come around because 

i didn't like cancer'

something approaching

honesty; something

approaching a look in

a mirror; something

other than all that public

masturbation

instead to be

falling down with the

day, fallen now -

the day, float-falling

low-flung and arms outstretched

giddy with the fast rush,

the belly pull, the kink

in the groin, in that place of

shade between fear

and knowledge, the

good long slide

listen:

when love comes

it's a fall

when death comes,

it's no ascent, child

when the sun sets,

it's a plunge of the earth

when i make love to you,

it's a driving down

the baby sleeps in the

arms, and she flails from

a primal reflex

then shutter-sobs for a

moment then is at peace

again

fall down with the

day now, fall down the

day. let the fever go

let it go now.

arms

don't forget the arms

Read More

so you wanted to know (it is)

so you wanted to know,
but i've avoided your
request these last few days
yet i see you're not going
anywhere without an answer

(it is the tipping of the glass
by a misdirected hand
and flailing to catch the
fall before spilling the wine)

so you wanted to know -
and your persistence is admirable -
but i question the motives behind
that limp smile and cocked head;
your expressions a familiar stage craft

(it is a boat abandoned on the bank of a pond,
flipped over to expose her slatted bottom
and spiny keel, laid to rest in a rabble of wild
grass while the pond moans for a lover's return)

so you wanted to know -
forgive me, that was harsh, but you see ...
i've had my fill of the glad-handing campaigners
who knock on my door only when the clouds stir
above my head and the rain comes a'crying

(it is an unseen finger burning a hole
in the middle of the breastbone
that lets life bleed out all over your
lap and onto the floor at your shackled
feet while you look the other way)

so you wanted to know:
i don't know where exactly the water all sheds
to after it rains. i don't see the evidence
of the storm until after i've
opened my eyes and smelled the air

(it is the beginning feelings of hunger,
just before weakness, when the gut
expands and you feel like
someone has pulled the plug that
sucks you down to a smaller place)

so you wanted to know
and have outlasted my
dodges and vague excuses
and stand there now illumined
by a fluorescent sensitivity

(it is the queer pull of the ocean
water past your feet as the tide
is lulled back out to sea, how it
feels like you're what is
moving, not the briny draw)

so you wanted to know:
so i will tell you, as long as you
understand that i do so from a position of
a man who has crawled under
his own chapped skin to hide:

it is not merely sadness, baby

Read More

sea glass sister

all those sea glass pendants

in the shopkeeper's window

hung from gold twine

a certain constellation

catching the sun

and diffusing her light

we stood, my sister and i,

outside and remained

hypnotized by the watery

glean of their reflections

how they penetrated

us from their distant universe

she was older than i

my sister

and the atlantic ocean

sighed in the background

the breeze a whisper on the bare

shoulders of burnt siblings

'i like the green one'

she said, pointing

i scratched my bare leg

her arm was slender and

her fingers were slim

you could snap her with a word

'i don't have a favorite'

i said, squinting

'of course not, dummy'

she said and she told

me to stop scratching

the same spot on my leg

sea glass the shapes

of an egg, an amoeba

a horse's head, a marble,

a tear drop, a fingerless

hand, a mountain, a

heart, a coin

'they must be a million

dollars,' she finally

said, about the brilliant

pendants, how they were

jewels on a string and

how we were always out of reach

and then, just then,

i saw our reflections

in the shop window

my eyes refocused, fading

from within to without

and we now stood clearly

two burnt and squinting

siblings on a white

commercial row of a street

among rows of coastal

streets and we looked like

hungry ghosts

i didn't like that

my eyes had fooled me,

sliding from pendant to

these two helpless

waifs, teacher's children

on a day's vacation to the ocean

so i closed my eyes

and opened them and the pendants

came back, sharply

dangling, motionless

behind the large glass of

the shopkeeper's window

'someday -'

she began

'yes. all of them -'

i said

'every one! yes -'

she said

'you get the green one'

i said

'i know'

she said

and we walked back together

to the sighing beach

Read More

avis, of dignity

i'm calling you from across the
waves of endless hours that have
rolled upon our mutual
seas

calling back farther than
my beginnings on this earth, farther
still than the beginnings of your
children

back to the place you were when
the picture was taken that i've stolen
from my mother's cache that she keeps in her
closet

a picture in dwindling black and
white and lashed with the
patina of history and
time

i call back to that perfect you
frozen in the frame, a face with a
thousand long views toward me
here

and ask that we sit face to face
in some pastel landscape
that is nearly too sweet to
taste

beneath a tree on a slope
of green land that lapses
into the bosom of the Atlantic
ocean

with a noble breeze carrying
the midsummer fragrances on her flows:
briny salt and ripe grass and honeyed
wildflower

this is where i dream you
were before you were my
grandmother and were just
avis

this certain specimen of
history: a woman in youth, handsomely
alive in her country's leanest
years

before the world out there
beyond your slim fingers
and taut face went to
war

i call out to you in that
dreamy blur of a place i've
invented and ask you to not
respond

but listen to a grandson
on a distant horizon still ahead of you
who is living in a world of a new
scarcity

not unlike the hard, white, bone-dry
landscape of your youth in
which hope was a savage
thief

and men and women alike threw
themselves against the tide of
black and chased hatred into the
wilderness

the land here is going fallow again
i fear; the water is drying up,
the oceans staying away for
good

everything seems to be receding:
time, love, passion and God and
the goodwill of merciful men are all
impeached

there is a draining pull these days
that has the strength-in-draw
of the tides of your beloved
Lubec

where you once met Eleanor
Roosevelt visiting the sardine
factories that swelled the coastline with
workers

'she was so dignified'
you said of the First Lady
who summered with Franklin in
Campobello

the gilded island a stone's throw from
your impoverished shores: an emerald polished
by a billion-year-old sea and just out of your
reach

but everything was out of the reach
of those threadbare fingers,
those durable hands, weren't
they?

those measures of strength,
your hands, that sewed the dress
you wear in my purloined
picture

'she was so dignified'
you said of the First Lady
of the United States of
America

i want to know what that was
like: to be held fast in the vise of
brute poverty yet find in the
face

of wealth and privilege, of
first class comforts and easy
living, the visage of
'dignity'

i want your generous power to
see the long view, to peer past
the pretense of those in our ruling
class

to forgive shining contradictions
between those with and those without
when mashed together like that in
space

and see, for the better, something
grand in the superstructure
that underpins our society, something
essential

i'm of a cynic's age, perhaps, lacking
all the necessary impediments that you
endured in order to survive a broken
world

there are no real hardships in this
world that are not mere tokens when
the light from your past is shone upon
them

we've had it easy, i would tell you
in the pleasant visit under the tree:
we've all gone pale and need some
sun

but i see the malignancy around me;
the spreading crawl of a kind of
old pestilence not see since your
youth

i see the rise of a mind, a bothersome
shade cast at intelligence and reason
for the sake of the drunken dimness of
zealotry

i call out to you in your distance
there, silent and flat as a picture,
and pray that you send me
love

love of the kind from those days that
cut away the brine that separated a people
and brought them together to quell
enmity

and see in each other a lasting faith, a
vibrant energy, a desire toward grace and
kindness in all classes that gives a chance for
dignity

Read More

no easy chair

she asks if she might be able to
sit with me and then pulls herself
up without waiting
for an answer

i have a pain in my side
that she presses against
by squirming into the
small place between me and
the arm of the chair using
her bottom as a pry

it's an old recliner
its back having lost its
strength and one side -
my side in fact - lags
beneath the seat

no easy chair,
coarse from the
wear of humans and animals,
reeking of pale urine and
dog's hide and crackers

yet i have slept in it many
times, a lot lately in fact,
covered in a blanket and
embracing a pillow like
a lover, fully reclined
and listing to the right

while across the living
room my wife has taken
to the couch in those late
hours (or are they early?)
when the baby awakens
screaming from a nightmare
and hurling her own blankets
to the floor

this evening the baby asks
if she might be able to sit
with me, shirtless with
her mouth milk-ringed,
her flesh is tranquil as
sea glass, her belly egg shaped

the pain in my side is a stitch
that comes from carrying
wood into the house and turning
one way while not bending my knees;
and scaling up into the chair
her bottom pushes against it
and i flinch and settle, flinch again

outside, sleet patters the window
that we covered in plastic last
october when we felt the tendrils
of a draft; the old collie is at my feet
gnawing on his paw like he's
digging to the root cellar

the minutes tumble from the ceiling
as if shoved from cliffs
and they fall to the
floor between my wife and i
while the child unfolds herself
from this awfully terrible
chair that groans, i flinch

she stomps across the living
room, across all those fallen
minutes and crawls up into
the heat of my wife's body
where i would love to be,
my most wanted place

only god really knows
i tell myself in the
dark, facing the window
under assault, the chair
palsied long ago makes
me feel on the edge of
falling

i turn to my ailing side
and ignore the pinch
while i watch the baby
and her mother sleep;
i smell the baby's hair
on my pillow and watch,
watch them sleep and watch
the minutes fall between us
in this no easy chair

Read More

the moment

blind in my living
a life of fading passion
you offered access:
a touch in that old hallway
dilating these clouded eyes

Read More

a loud peace

on a walk this morning, or
maybe recently, i came to
the boundary that separates
my property from my neighbor's
and found that overnight he'd
erected an encircling wall

an exaggerated thing, made of
mud bricks from the Nile,
it rose up far enough to
strain the neck and blot
out the east-rising sun
i'd once enjoyed at this hour

it now cast a shadow out
across my pasture, driving
the beasts north to where the
sun could be felt on their
backs, and the grasses in
shade had withered to dirt

walking the breadth of the wall,
i came to a gate in the side of it
that drew open, a gate made of
iron rods topped with filials of ivory
pointing skyward. in the center
an obscure crest of arms

from behind the gate stepped
my neighbor, who nodded and
to whom i said hello with a
raised hand and he made the
sound of a bull snorting, scuffing
the dirt with the toe of his boot

he began by asking me my position
on this or that - my position,
specifically asked in an intemperate
tone, a demand to account for my
thoughts and beliefs on where i
stood on issues that lately vexed

taking my silence to be in opposition
to his own stance, and converting
that opposition to an insult of himself
and his wife, his children, his parents,
and their forebears, he braced his jaw

he let loose a nonjudicial ruling against
me, in a barrage of unfiltered acrimony, as
if such a lecture - if it did not penetrate
my intellect most surely would penetrate
my skull with the force of it - was in
and of itself the sole and single way of
believing on the matter

i may have winced in the face of the
charge, not from finding truth in
it but from the bawl. his words
were merely feral cats let loose
into a decaying barn

tell me how you feel, though,
i said to him and smiled

this and this and that, he spat at me
this and this and that, he pointed over my shoulder
this and this and that, he concluded, lifting
his chin and looking down his nose at me with
arms folded atop a rounded belly

i imagined what i might look like
to him down that long ridge, down the
straight thin line that reminded me of
a sighted rifle

to him i imagined i looked
quite small and the perfect game
for this hunt he was on,
unarmed as i was, taken by surprise
and shivering from the morning cold

have you no passion at all?
he accused
i think i must have blinked, not
really in answer to him but more
in response to the spit he flung at me,
like coals tossed from a fire

have you no conviction? he demanded
have you no faith, no beliefs, no fire
for what the important things are now?

his questions were something like
a flag wrapped around the body,
a clever shroud that tightened the
more i wriggled

why do you squirm, when it is i
who finds himself struggling
to breathe? why do you fidget
when i am the one whose fortune
has been robbed of me?

robbed, i said quietly to myself

yes! robbed! by weak people who
did not work to earn their own
keep. i've no place to live,
no place to eat, no place to
worship, no place to enjoy the
comforts of my desires and will

i looked beyond him, into his
property, with its long uprising
green lawn, his flowering fruit
trees, his bright white home
that looked in the east-rising sun
like an alabaster cathedral

i'd not robbed him that i was aware,
and i suppose my expression said as much

...not by you, perhaps, you stand for nothing,
but by people of your own mind

...people who slack and slander, who
do wicked things against reason,

whose very beliefs are counter to history
and convention, and therefore a direct hindrance

to my liberties. they rob me with
their obstructions to the long establishment

i contemplated for a moment in his
loud sigh and his hoofing of the ground
with his boots

i suppose my silence, in the face of
the violent times, in the presence of
the growing tide that erodes the under footing,
could be taken as a sort of selective
moral apoplexy. those who remain silent
consent, it has been said

i've been quite loud about my convictions, i said to him

when?

in my silent living, i explained

he spat on the ground

in my silent loving, i explained

he spat on the ground

in my silent giving, i explained

he spat once more

the words of the coward!

i shrugged

weak!

i sunk my hands into my pockets

you weaken us all with your lack of fight,
you put us all in danger for the sake of your
desire to embrace everything. you must choose!

i lifted my eyes and looked at him

even nature excludes! it excludes!

he left with the slam of his gate and marched
up the long green way to his own home
and i walked toward mine in a melancholy

away from that wall, through growing
blades. past the animals who grazed
silently. beneath my meager fence
that snagged the sleeve as i passed
beneath the barbs and gouged the
flesh of my arm

cursing, i tended to the blood
with a cold rag as i sat before
the window that looks down over my
property and toward my neighbor's
new wall

i staunched the bleeding
until the constellations on the rag
had gone from crimson to
pink and then disappeared altogether

i thought of the important things
to which he referred and i smiled

the house was a loud peace

Read More

Father

Finding the right solution to this particular
Angle, the one that has perplexed him for an hour, he
Thinks on it with his quiet resolve, his calm passion.
He is a master at steadfast patience, despite a wilting sun,
Even in the face of such wooden defiance, he surrenders not to the problems of life,
Resolving them instead with the love and grace of the carpenter's son

Read More

be anew

my brother, in the prolonged lead-up
to his death, photographed a rose,
a rose my mother planted in a narrow
garden at my parent's house, where
he'd come to live out the remainder
of his days

i would sit with him over nights, to
be a vigilant watchmen of his frail
meanderings, a guard against a sudden
stuttering fall

that morning, the morning of the rose,
we sat together on a bench on a porch,
and he leaned into me to show me his
photograph

"it's a venus flytrap," he said, and
i looked at it once more, thinking
he was being queer with me. even on a
slope toward death he was alive with
mischief

squinting, i tried to see his plant;
i tried to morph the tender pedals of the
rose into the spiny wings of the fly trap,
but failed. my vision was fixed

despite all, i could not
release from my mind the shape of it
being a rose

his brain was on fire, of course,
and i knew this - the cancer was a
restless bulb, while the drugs were
a different kind of thief
and together they had him adrift

i marveled - just briefly, and not
for the first time - at my brother's
reduction at the hands of fortune

how insignificant had the flowers in
gardens or the trees in forests or the shape
of the sound of my children's voices
had become for me

but for a man in the wake of a crushing
wave, he was now cast out and had no power
or time to make it back to everything
he'd easily dismissed in life

"it's beautiful," i assured him and
he put the photo away - it was on his
cell phone - and then told me he
couldn't talk about his daughters
"not right now"

i'd not asked, but his infected mind
had leaped from the photo to some
darker place, which was common,
and he now cried in a slump

why do we arrive at all our different
places anew, demanding that this at last
was the best, and now permanent, station?

for nothing in nature informs us of
this: the sea, the wind, the sands,
they never affix themselves forever
and their flux toward death and into renewal
is how they live

yet we cry out from our fears and
from our loathing of change and
we make blasphemers of our friends
who question our new sacred, firm place

he used to never sleep, in those last months,
from fear that closing his eyes would,
at last, tear him away from us

but after this, after the picture of the rose,
he began to sleep more, and i dismissed
it as the natural progression of the evil
that had consumed his brain

i just now recalled the rose and
how he'd seen something different,
two years since he slipped into
a new night, quiet as a closing curtain

but i see his venus flytrap now, from a new
vision: of a man resisting the solid
place onto which we all insist on staking ourselves;
a man wanting for release

he was - perhaps unconsciously from
his illness - reforming his perspective,
loosening the grasp that allowed him
to float away, renewed

Read More

shidah

destruction,
i see, is how they've mended that
city in the distant blown-up country,
and i think how the sons of abraham
have all made a mess of it and his
daughters are left weeping

i once embraced, with gaiety and without
shame, my brother, who came to live with
us when we both were greater idealists

the muslim and the christian by
the faith of our fathers,
but to hell with that on this day
just for a moment

i must remember that we've all
been fed broken conventions
but were born with the perfect
blood of adam

that what is instilled in us
is opposed to what is born
and what is collected in
time crashes against what is
there at birth

i do not deny the greatness
of certain men, but
i question the truth in any
assertions of superiority

i recall weeping on the day
my brother caught a bus to the airport,
to fly home to his distant asian
country, because he'd impacted me

but from then on we wandered separately
in our own wildernesses,
marrying and making children
in these sheltered, assigned orbits

as the world saw the collisions
of faiths and nations; peoples
in villages perished and history
folded upon itself as it always has

but in our time together we despaired
not once about our wilting differences,
our encouraged ignorance,
but loved instead, for being alive
and full of the ferocity of youth

yet today i think my brother
will agree with me that we're all to blame
for the current calamity, all of us except
shidah and her sisters

the sisters of indra, of confucius, of
lao tzu;

the sisters of the tanakh, the bible,
and the qur'an

the sisters of the primal faiths:
of the maori, of the sioux, of the bushongo,
of the pygmy, and the dayak too;

the sisters of the mythologies of the norse
and celts; the slavs and the greeks

i see them all in the face of shidah,
my brother's wife, star of the malaysian sky,
her eyes the color of the melanistic wolf,
her smile as wide as the deserts across
which our prophets once wandered

in her is the seed of the beginning,
the coursing of the begotten,
the horizons of the generations and the
origins of the spark of truth

i'd rather see her rule, and her sisters
too; and i would see the world of
men know peace at once

for i believe the answers are in the
arms of our mothers, not in the arms of
men

that rules and laws, faiths and borders,
are the constructs of the self-appointed
while the members of our race who nurture
are the true keys to the gates of heaven

my own tribe will dine on these words
of course; make a meal of my
naivete, spitting out my bones
into a chalice made of earthen clay.

after all, what am i, but a small poet in a
village of inert souls who march along
in a cold country going colder on this snowy day

i'm a recipient of good fortune,
to be sure, but the only currency i have to
make change with is word after word

and we all know that the heaviest of words
possess no weight in the hands of
those who hold the scales of power

so i plea to shidah and to her
daughters, her sisters and their
daughters: assume your thrones
and cast out the usurpers and fools

for once claim and use at will, to
correct the blunders of men, what your god
has imbued in you by nature:
the power and the joy of
creation

Read More

my passion

i tried to be as cold as the
church wanted me to be when i was
much younger and they said i
must remove the bellows that fired
the passions of the flesh

in me dwelleth no good thing,
they said, and for years i
flogged my inner yearnings
down into a loathsome pulp

and the homosexuals i knew became
stock characters, with their lisps
and flexed wrists and flash and
bright arrogances

and the girls who unfolded into flower
before me at every turn, in halls
and classrooms and on beaches,
became plastic pieces on a board

and the men and women of the
motion pictures and
the television programs who
joined the flesh of lovers
became unartful and flat

and while what was said by the church
against them was intended to brand
into my heart an impression of the
vileness of their stations
i instead made them all a craved thing

so that emerging from youth
i was something of a submerged brooder,
skulking in a corner, fearful of my mind
making offenses against my truth
and against the people of my life

my best friend, he died alone in a hotel
room, years after confiding in me that
he was gay and that he hurt from being in
the shadow of it, cast by familiar men

and my brother, he died from a tumor that
consumed his brain, months after confiding
in me that he felt he was unfairly
judged for being in life what everyone wished they
could be: unashamedly alive

free and boundless in his passions,
open and groundless in his flights
against the headwinds that buffeted me
for so long and made me hate love
and myself for wanting both

i was once overruled in every way
- as constantly as our revolution
around the sun - by the opinions
of those who had no real investment in me

i've lived a life accepting the
rejections of some and rejecting
the acceptances of others to
the disservice of my inner self

i used to believe that there was no
precision in passion, because it
held no good aim and struck at random
and was not a controllable thing

it was a trifle, something
like waiting for inspiration to
make one's mark on the page, so
therefore not to be taken seriously

wanting and expressing want of the
flesh was cast as a villain; that
desire was subservient to a higher
good, and therefore a dog in the gutter

but since meeting you, i understand the folly
of that: passion is received and spent
as vibrantly as allowed, when people
become people and the scripts of men are burned

and passion is where life flows
best, passion is where life loves
most, passion is where life lances
the boils of the callous cynics

i knew a man with passion who embraced
the essence of what made him feel at
peace, who shunned the preachment of
the fools whose desire was to control

they want nuance and implication when
i write about the act of lovemaking, when
neither exists in the thing itself; they want
that i be quiet with my dark thoughts

but the cock and the labia
nipple and lips are explicit
in the throes and the demand of implication
is just another forced march to church

so close your doors and click
off those lights; draw the blinds and
disrobe in your darkness with an
object-of-affection, your trapped lover

shun those who dare expose themselves
to the true natures of their beings;
tell the world how it is them
against us on our way to salvation

but i will not: my passion is naked
and raw and alive and truthful and
unashamedly in flight, accepting
of what i was naturally imbued with

because in me dwelleth all good
and in my friend
and brother
and you

Read More

light

a descent of the mind to gloom
is that slow wind-down of a senile clock,
that dull drip in a country sink,
that gray water in a pasture puddle

it tightens the jowls
and draws the heart into the stomach
and aches the legs toward a bed
where relief-in-sleep is a fool's illusion.

winter, it does not consume,
it extinguishes by bloat,
crowding my primal inner space,
suffocating it by a crawling expansion.

observe the fester of a sore,
how it begins in a spot
and advances, by dint of invasion,
overspreading with a brute passion.

that is the assault on my
primal inner space
that can come most any time
but particularly in winter.

with the bowing of the sun
to the earth's roll,
when her light ebbs away
and becomes an ineffectual flirt.

the assault
can get hold of me, and i
play the part of a mortal pulled
down by the hands of Hades himself.

i felt it for the first
time when i was old enough
to distinguish reason from the mind
and draw romance from the heart,

when associations first formed between
the material world and the
spiritual, when pain could be felt
somewhere other than the flesh.

there was a click in a moment
and i was no longer inside
myself but had stepped out
and into the sphere of others

and everything after that was
pointed to knowing, and pointed to
feeling, and pointed to the muscular
act of believing in a thing without proof.

how the descent of the sun
in the fall made the shadows of
the world something that now breathed
and made darkness a stalking menace.

it was at this same time - a time of revelation
and the bridging between the solid and the
fluid of life- when the darkness had seeped in
and begun its strangulation,

that i rode, in this gloom, in my parent's car
down main street in december, staring out
the window, feeling the breathlessness
of that choking of the soul,

when above us there passed lights on a string,
like the pulse of a beacon,
then a second, then a third, and i looked
up finally and began to count the strings

that had been strung 'cross the street
between the light posts, fat white bulbs
beaming in their fat white way hung upside
down like glowing acrobats on the circus wire.

the entire street, down its straight
way, was uniformly lit, equally and
of a perfect imperfection, a supine ladder
of lights suspended on rungs between those posts.

the town was of tall brick and short wooden businesses
shouldered together in two sentry lines on
either side of our car, the storefronts
likewise glowing, and with the lights of the cars

the scene became something of a jewel
afire, alive with an untouchable and reverent
warmth that had me sitting forward and
spectating on a brilliant miracle.

it had for me the effect
of being buoyed to a surface
after a long descent, the feeling
of a palpating heart and breath-hitch

and from that moment till now
and after now i look to the lights
at christmas as a favored thing,
a thing that holds the best of it.

the lights on trees, in lamps,
in the tall windows of shops
on the roofs and doors of homes
and strung across streets

what i think i dream of christmas,
when i do dream of that particular time,
is not of the meal, of the gifts
or of the family who partook

traditions count for something:
as markers along the short line
of our histories, fragile slips
frayed by the winds of memory

they are something enamored
and reused in a romantic way,
valuable in how they
keep us tethered to contentment,

but light acts a different part
in this primitive play;
it stands not as a marker
but as a thread of currency;

a thin potency coursing through,
pulsating within the conduit
of life, unbroken in the way
it knows how to find you wanting.

time and time over and time and again
light grows in that darkness
like searching irises and
their glow expands the inner space anew

for christmas is a time of
tradition, to be sure, but
the songs, they fall away;
the vacations from school,

the movies, the shows,
the family and the friend
the eve and the morning
and the unwrappings.

they all fall away and are hung
as markers on a line of histories
important in that form, in that
station, but different than the lights

the lights come before and remain
afterward, well after, and
have no histories or fading
inequalities, they simply remain

and in their place
come as a friendly force
to liberate that primal
place of the occupying darkness

Read More

motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More

play

someone asked me once:

why do you play like this, why

did you not leave it to children

and remember that you have a

certain elevated place now and must

put away the things of your youth?

and i could not answer him with

any honesty except with a shrug

and a blush of shame and i'm sure

my silence was the answer he wanted

or expected

the way some teachers, who question their

own life choices and are soured by them,

can turn on their students with a maligning

condescension that relieves their dismal

self loathing, at least for a bitter moment

and after some time of reflection and

reconsidering, of probing my intentions

and giving due consideration to his

inquest and feeling generally bad about myself

i went outside and breathed in the air

and i awoke day after day and kissed my wife

and embraced our children; fed our dogs and

went to work and watched television and

wept over the loss of a brother and laughed

to myself about something that was not funny

and i bled from the prick of a splinter

and i sweated when the gas tank got too low

miles from town and i called my mother to

wish her happy birthday and i got angry

and then remembered i'd forgotten something

and the world contracted upon me in a sudden

breath and i was crushed by the weight of it

until my wife said she loved me and then it all

expanded again, with a new knowledge and

with a new wonderment and with a different shade

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

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

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

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

pick it up and remove the message

why do you play like this, why

did you not leave it to children

and remember that you have a

certain elevated place now and must

put away the things of your youth?

it accused me once more

and pocketing the question i went for a

walk and tread upon dirt roads and paved

roads in the rain and snow, the wind in my

face and at my back, the swell of a storm

that pushed me into the woods

i found a structure, a form, made of you

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

each other in such a way that felt familiar

a form, this structure, of a power and understanding

that willed me to rejoin

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

felt real. you and your faces and your lives

and your work and your children and your pets

and your schooling and your tears and your fears

and your bleeding and your laughing

you and you all, like me and with me,

knowing that i do this as you do this,

not for a way to run toward youth again

and leave behind life but rather to

face life head on and seek truth

the form we make in this place

in this dark room with its lights

and its make believe and with our

voices not our own in costume

is a way that we understand

i play

because

i live

Read More

coins in a Ball jar

coins touched by the hands of a

thousand now come to rest in a Ball

jar that sits on the edge of our kitchen

counter

it was the precarious position

i found it in – on the ledge like that -

that got me thinking of the man whose

face was the first i saw in this world

something of glass so close to falling,

so close to tumbling that i could feel

the descent of it in my lungs and i

could hear the shatter of it as it

struck the floor and i could feel the prick

of the shards on my fingertips and i could

smell the copper of the pennies and the

nickels and the quarters that rolled about

i don't know

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

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

i hate the idea of the fall, knowing that

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

come to too many of those i've known

in my life

it's that feeling of the dark figure that

descends, of a soul slipping downward

toward an ending, that has had me flailing

in my sleep lately

who would be so foolish as to place

a Ball jar on the edge like that? a child

i'm guessing, who went fishing for coin

and left it in that poised way, ready

the man who passed on yesterday was a

doctor and like i already told you, his was

the first face i ever saw in this world

when i emerged startled and blinking

once when i was 10 or so he had kids

take jubilant turns sitting atop an old

hand-crank ice cream maker at a church

fellowship lunch at their house in july

how the men filled 'round the canister

ice and salt while we took turns sitting

and laughing at the vibration of the crank

and the doctor sang hymns and laughed in kind

and that was a coin

or how he was the only man of god who

assured me that my sister was no pariah

when she got pregnant as a teenager while

the other men stood with cold stones in hand

and that was a coin

or how deftly he slipped the cord from around

my daughter's neck when she emerged

in a slick of blood, naked and pissing

everywhere, but scowling and full-throated

and that was a coin

i came outside on this november morning

to write a poem in the cool air but

this is no poem, so i went back to the

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

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

the coins a dense gravity and my fingers tingling

with the sense of an impending fall that did not come

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

it always will

Read More

let's be friends of a thing in its spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More

sonnet for the bird with the hollow song

i care no more for your enthralling song
your recitals i refuse to attend
those once-beloved lyrics now all but gone
with that performance, i cannot pretend

i am left more cautious since i have heard
your siren sound tempting my ships to harm
how you caroled us with your cloying words
and burned us with the bitters of your charm

now you've flown to feed upon new goodness
to trill your story for another soul
with fresh audience, no need to confess
to the deceit that exacted this toll

you flew alone by force of your own wing
from a cause you invented, did you sing

Read More

three leaves

these last days of autumn

shimmer down to something
close to the moment before
sleep, when the world outside
contracts into darkness and
the ether of dreams comes
drifting

out a dining room window
of our simple maine farmhouse
a red maple stands with half his leaves
still blazing, still clinging
to branch, while two thousand miles
away they eulogize my uncle

who was my father's best
friend, chumming together in a
small maine town in the 1950s and
who married my father's sister,
thus becoming family, and who,
like that indomitable maple, let fly
a thousand brilliant souls each year

there is a launching in a death
a love in a passing on
a joy in a giving forward
a strength in a receiving
an awakening in a faith
a salt in a sweat of real toil

i look at my shedding maple
while a northeastern rain tamps
down a landscape that has become
a watercolor painting while on
the radio simon and garfunkel
carol about bookends

i love jack's youngest boy
like a brother, more than i
loved jack i suppose
but only because i knew the boy
more than i knew the father;
we were chums of a different
age while our fathers looked on

a physical relationship
made fallow by the circumstance
of distance but a love and
kindredness bonded by a conjuring
unknown to either; our affection
a hit-or-miss lesson found in the
mysteries of tornadoes and falling stars

jack left maine years ago, took
his wife and their children across
the wide world, to build bridges
between men and god; to sing of
a savior to whom he devoted his
life; to pray; to prostrate himself

there is distance in time
and in space but not
in blood, so this poet calls
across the separating miles
while he stands at the trunk
of his dripping maple to
ponder the fallen at his feet

to find three leaves in
communion among a thousand
in a placid congregation.
how my eyes fell on these three
is a question for the interpreter of
fortuity; all i care about is
that i am here, awake

jack was an orphaned irish baby
from boston who came to maine
in youth and who played baseball
and basketball and ran track with
my father - that's history
i've seen all the black-and-whites

two men hatched in poverty
but rich in something else,
something made of the iron
of will and fortitude of soul;
how they both bled from their
flesh and cried from it to
no one but their own hearts

there is nothing more
eloquent about the men
of that generation than how
their graciousness in maturity
was informed by the tribulations
in their youth

i believe in the lesson there,
i'm attracted to the value of
their constructs: how, brick
by brick, they fashioned a life
for their families in the form
of a thousand selfless decisions

my brother daniel and his siblings,
progeny of the felled man,
is living my foremost fear
as they now are witness to the
coming of an age in which
the foundation of their lives
has been smashed

i took a picture of the three
leaves at the base of the tree because,
of all those countless gifts,
these three measured the most
and blazed most brilliantly
and came to rest in a certain
embrace at the feet of their
beloved giver

all great good men
stand for something
larger than themselves by
the exquisiteness of
their humility. the
shadow they cast is thrown across
time and space, no impediment

and while his generosity was spread
and spread wide, his gift of fatherly
charity coursed through his limbs
and infused into the hearts of all
those receivers, i believe
it lingers most in the
blood of his children to whom i
bow as i do to these
three leaves

Read More

blur

we were married in a sage masonic 
meetinghouse during our descent,
on the stage of that stoic hall, as
part of a late september day dressed 
with mist and autumn removals

it was a fine place, yet what is a 
place but a context into which
we rain our droplets of time 
that we manage to 
stir into something like a life

my brother took pictures for us, do you 
remember this? and nearly none of the prints 
came out, those vague images now - in looking on 
them today - a reminder of how nostalgia is 
really just a meander through a flustering fog

let us, you and i, go back for a bit right
here, through that narrow aperture of memory, 
and think on the day with the vision of two lovers
who are bowed against a headwind that
seems always to shoulder against us

and recall how it was all an ambition
toward gaining a certain quarter that we've not
ever been given, not really, but let's
not forget the moment or pretend
that we received our desired acceptances

i want nothing more now than what that
would feel like for you, whose 
blessings were lost in the smirking
visages of all those foreigners who claimed to
be in the blood, saints abroad indeed

i know the pithy insults and where they
were aimed, and i know that they struck you
with a velocity and were tipped with a poison
meant to topple you, to bring your towers back
down to this earth in a smoulder

it was a rebuke from a loveless crowd,
a riot of the yearning, whose tongues 
wielded a lash of resentment against the
bride and her joys with their eyes turned
away from their own hands

regardless

think on this day with me and recall the
table rows with their wood-slatted chairs
and the picket fencing we set against the
front of the stage encurled by white christmas
lights, and think on the bales of hay we brought in

the cornstalks we stood about and the baskets
we filled with gourds of the season; the 
tables we laid with country favors; the
dress made by my niece and the children
standing as the truest of witnesses

how you wanted so much to host it in the back
yard of our village farm, where the landscape 
was framed by the rows of maples and pines
and what small pasture we had sloped down to a 
pond overspread with the discarded colors of fall

the weather conspired and turned us out and 
sent us inside, but thinking on it now i wish 
we had forced the pharisees to stand 
outside with us to feel the same palsying 
cold from the rain that we felt from their carping

no i don't
in fact i don't
i know i don't 
i'd not join their
ranks for gold

after all

we cannot change
the hearts of the vile 
anymore than we can
change the whip of the wind
or history in its watery hold

but how i fight against the
wishing and the wanting; how i
push against the yearning for a
salvation from my sins, a confession
that once went out to my beloved

as if they are the stewards
the keepers the guarantors
the angels the founders
the givers the makers the 
healers and the true

all of it nonsense

the truth of the present hurt is in the
way in which we stand before the mirror
now and consult not the confidences
in our passion, but the braying echoes
from past jurors

whose evidences against us were 
smaller than the incrimination
we laid against ourselves,
and the sentence we administered
was self-inflicted 

because where are the judges now?
in their hovels again, waiting to
spring on another so-and-so
whose tumble will set their tongues 
wagging once again

there is a reason why we see the dark 
whenever there is light all around,
why we paddle against each other
in an endless round when we're sharing the
same shuttle on the same intrepid sea

i want our photos be left to 
blur and seen not as an omen to the
vex that we felt came from fate
but as a symbol for our real passion

that leaves all the gallery scowling
as they squint at us in their
frustration for not being able to quite make
us out; quite make us clear no matter how 
hard they look or demand our focus

i'm a poet in a mood on this october day
and i spy a single maple with two different
plumes of color; two crowns for a single
tree as if two lovers conjoined sinfully in
a violence of passion

it looks like mist is coming this way
and i'm casting across time for you
and for me with its warps and its
evaporations until we stand, again
in that hall, happily blurred

Read More

cicada bottle summer

the kids just last week presented to me a
trim, stunted bottle unearthed by the rooting snouts of the
piglets in our garden bed out back
where the soil is still a rich virgin black.

i placed the vial on the sill of our kitchen window
above the sink and it still held the earth in it;
so besodded that the light outside labored against
an obscure passage through its thick glass:
the random specks of dirt constellations in an
unfocused universe

and so it is with memory, which is constantly
strained through the gauze of time,
filtered and abridged to the point of it all approaching
mere romance when it comes calling to the fore on
some trigger

like it did when i considered the bottle on its
new perch, with the world of light outside
peering back through it to me as i peered at
the world through the vial and in a moment i was
reminded of the cicadas and one summer day

(i am told to avoid the sentimental by sticking to
the showing of things and not the telling and by turning
the hand to the figurative and leaving the abstract out
in the withering cold - so i will attempt to here, but in truth i
am in love with this memory, all joy)

how my brother took me digging for bottles in august
one year when i was - perhaps - 10? that sounds about
right because i ached differently at 10 than i did at
13 when he was 20 and no longer at home

what lived inside of our conversation that day i do not
know, but i pretend to know by assigning this broader truth:
we said little, the way the mature and the immature
say little of substance to each other because of the
gap in age and understanding; especially brothers

this half-fiction, therefore, would have other voices in it:
namely the creak of the metal bucket that swung in one
of his hands while the other gripped the short handle
of our father's spade that my brother bore on a broad shoulder,
twirling the metal of the spade like a boat's propeller

or the flop of his Converses onto tar in our perspiry push
up hill against invisible wave on wave of swelter; how
our eyes stung against it and our lungs were filled with
the density of haze

or the cry of the dog day cicadas stuck in the limbs of
leafy ash and sugar maples and birches that stood
on either side in their own dense congregations; how
their everlasting saw was a hymnal to some prevailing dream echoing
a song of end-of-summer longing that hummed in my own heart

my brother borrowed the idea of bottle hunting from our
uncle, who scavenged for them as well, unearthing such
colorful curiosities of medicine glass that he would clean
and sell to various collectors

and my brother took it up and was adept at their discovery;
mining his own modest collections of blues and greens,
rounded and squared, long-necked and snub-nosed
that he too scrubbed, but that he kept for himself

posting his finds on window sills in his own bedroom
or upon the sills around our home. i marveled at their
altered optics, how staring through the antique glassware
was a lull toward divergent moods

the lighter colored bottles had me thinking of the
weightlessness of clouds observed from one's back in
a pasture; the darker colors of the fate of fallen leaves
into an autumn brook and how they could never resist the pull

he stopped at the top of the hill in front of a house and
he said he had been told it used to all be
farmland up here and how farmland was perfect for the
burial places of back-in-the-day houses and outbuildings

that all that was left were usually field stone foundations filled
in by the collapsed wooden bones of buildings,
piled upon by time with earth and leaves; that hidden beneath
that, with the point of the driven spade, could be found the bottles

i was a mere page to the leader of a great enterprise; on an
exploration led by a man knowing of the unknown world;
i marveled much less at the landscape than i did the shadow
that he cast across it, as younger brothers are apt to do of the older

all that needed to happen, he said, was permission from the
owner to allow us behind his property, down a hill to a place
i could barely make out as a thin line of a stone
wall at the edge of woods that, i imagined, once was miles of pasture

my brother rapped on the owner's door and we waited in the heat until a man
emerged daunted. looked my brother over. my brother in a pair of cut-off Levi's
with the bottoms of the pockets dog-panting out from beneath; my brother
with the long hair and a muscle shirt and shouldering a spade

he asked us what. said no to my brother's request. said no to my brother's plea.
come on, man. my little brother with me. just bottles. and then watched us
in a scowl as we walked away back toward home, my brother swearing over
his shoulder at him while i trailed. i was always trailing and looking back

he cursed the way home and spat on about how some people can be
this and some people that and don't tell mom and dad we did this
and here, carry the spade and how he should have just gone to the lake
it was too hot to dig for bottles on a day like this

i carried the spade over my shoulder for a length of the walk, then switched
it to the other side, then let it drag behind me in the dirt shoulder
while the dog day cicadas wound up in their trees and i listened
wondering about what bottles we had left unearthed in the old man's field

i look at the bottle my children gave to me
and to say what i would say would be
sentimental after all and i see the light seeing
me from the outside and i hear cicadas

Read More