my baby, she got toes

my baby, she got toes
sunk so deep in that morning
grass that she says, daddy,
i can't walk.

and i say no, i can't
pick you up, you need
to walk honey, it's just
from the dew

my baby, she got hair
blond as the sun, and it
shine in july the way the heavens
weep down on the forgiven

and i say, i love you,
and she look at the
tree with the horse
swing and she laughs

my baby, she got eyes
that consume the anxious,
fired multitude of all those
raging lovers

and adorns them with the
taffeta of her innocent
kissing lips and kindly
cooing breaths

my baby, she got a
hold on life as firm
as oak and she won't
let go for nothing

and she grasps my hand
as we walk toward home
and she whines about how
the world is too cold

my baby, she cry in her
sleep and it sound like
the release of black birds
from a consuming wood

and her momma, she wake
and stroke her head and she
whisper, home home
home baby home

                                                                                                                    i read a story in a magazine
                                                                                                                    that said a momma saved
                                                                                                                    a beach ball that was blown
                                                                                                                    up by her teen son hours

                                                                                                                    before he was killed in
                                                                                                                    a car accident and she told
                                                                                                                    the reporter, "it's all i got.
                                                                                                                    his air. it has his life in there"

my baby, she sing to me
in the back seat to the
radio and i don't
know no other nectar

that sounds sweeter
and i don't know no
better to just shut up
and listen to her

my baby, she got toes
growing clover up in
between them that make her
cry for my arms

so i pick her up
and her arm wraps
'round my neck and
together we sail home

i see the future in the
sky full of dying stars
and i feel the cleansing
of the light in that old dark

i don't care about nothing
in certain moments when
my baby wipes her grassy
feet on my shirt and giggles

Read More

shed

there is a spirit of her
in the things she wears
when she disrobes and
disarms after a long day

and she leaves a pile of
clothes in the bedroom
and with them she leaves a pile
of echoes in the
small heap of pants and
blouse, socks and bra

and she loosens her
life and unlatches her
clasp on a certain reality
outside these walls; her
release of a cold day
is the emission of
her essence particles

in the atmosphere of this
place i find her everywhere:

the favored pillow that crowds the
headboard;

the aborted sandal beneath the couch;

the worn hair tie hung on the knob
of the pantry door;

the fragile handrail that creaks with
the weight of the years;

the rim of the cup left to wait on the counter;

the heavy bracelet, adorned and
dimmed in the darkness of a shadow;

the blanket she pills in the night while she sleeps

i revel in her presence
in every moment shared
together as lovers

but feel her absence the
way i sense the waves of the sea,
how they rock the soul
when i can
hear them on the air
miles distant from me

all of these things
and every one of them
not witnessed thus far
emit a spectral ode
heard in the bones
of those future comers

who traverse the
streams of the dreamers
and are in tune
with the vibrations
made by the heartstrings
of former lovers

i believe in ghosts in
that simple way: they
haunt from the discarded
molecules of their flesh
when once they walked
and felled clothes
and touched doors
and breathed into linens

these small bits of souls
shed as easily as my
lover shed her clothes
enter their dormancy
and wait for a future
listener who will
catch them in an
unsuspecting moment

they haunt not from
a pouty rage, but as
a way to reconnect with
that of the living;

they want nothing more
than to be fleshed
again and making
love or leaving rooms
or crying into palms
or applying make up

my lover's left garments
i scoop up and pour
into a washing machine that
will spin out the dirt of
a day, but her mark
is already made

in a future,
they will smell her and
feel the heat of her and
taste the salt of her and
picture the curve of her hips
and hear her breathing at night

the way i love
to know her
she will haunt
them

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the lily, for good

i recognized the face
of the girl who passed
away recently and to
whom friends were
writing messages of love
and loss across the sterile
wires

we went to high school
together, i'm sure of it,
yet we never spoke and
today the idea of that
leaves me in an echo
chamber with my own
clanging sorrows

i sit and ponder
the face of a woman,
once fully-fleshed and
smiling, who smiles now
no more

whose flesh is forever
seized and withering
but whose soul has been
released to the eternal ether
of the breath of the Goddess
to be re-breathed some day

what changed for her?
- i wondered this -
what transpired that she
be taken now and not later?
what thin variance came
to alter her path?

outside our living room
window stands a congregation
of gilded lilies, weighted
down by a spritz of raindrops
that fell the night before

i imagine the droplets
as souls sent on a call from a
god made caustic for having to
release his children to their
deaths in the name of sacrifice

and they all fell
freely in that darkness,
millions of them across
my small universe

and came to rest
on blades, petals and paths;
steal, rock, and the wool
of the animals in our
pasture

no prescription given,
no forthright agenda
but to descend in earnest
to us here and make whatever
change was open to their
impact

each of them
willing participants
in a ritual of
enlightened
love-offering

their cause known
to no one, no thing,
no beast, not even
to each other

i believe that
my lover, my most
sacred familiar,
is opening

the warmth of
a newly discovered sun
perhaps or the nutrients of
a freshly tilled
earth are pushing
her to flower
anew

without my hand
so much this time
and i stay awake
in reverie of her
new growth
but fearful of my
own waning
influence

i observed the
petals of a particular
lily in our garden
whose flesh was now
dotted with these
felled jewels

and my eye caught
one single droplet
clinging to the lip
of the lily's petal
and i stayed it with
the shutter of my
camera

i've since returned
to my writing and
wonder now what
would become of that
single crystal bead
whose passage began
in the dark with a single
mission and ended in that
precarious hang

will it have fallen
to the grass below
and nurtured something
there, leaving the
lily to her other
agents? and will that
reduce her chances
of flower? will it ruin her?

i think too of the girl
now gone, and wonder
what element might have
collided and clung to her
then fallen away and taken
with it a different fate

and whether had i spoken
to her in a long-ago
past might have favored
her and her own glassy
droplet of life in some way

or if i take a
picture of my lover
i can arrest her
in her frame and
preserve what i think
she is ought to be

and then i'm
reminded:

i must not indulge
fantastic thoughts
about the power of
my own influence
over the cosmic
and the chaotic

the wind blows
and the rain comes
after all, no matter
how i wave my hands

and that i am
not outside of this
but deep within

and the girl is changed
and the lily is
and my lover too

and me

yes. yes of course

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love is curtains toward a view

i'm waiting for my turn
on the stage with
the seashell footlights
shining silhouettes
against a cream-colored
scrim

i'm waiting my spotlight -
how can it be so
not simple?

i sit in a bedroom
with white curtains,
a fan oscillating on
a desk, cooling my fever
while behind me is the
bed in which we
made love last night

i can't make my art today
for the humidity and
the brawling children who
are hateful with the heat

you can go,
she says - go
upstairs, you can
go - write

if i were a play's
hero-character today
i would be the one
who left his dreams
for a lover who
hated the lips of life
and sucked from him
passion

until he found the
love in the light of
a caress in the dim
hallway of a theater
playhouse, his
breath stopped
for the sake of
renewal then

my lover told me
recently she might
take up smoking
as a way to lose weight
and my first impression
was how sexy it would
be to watch her purse her
lips around the end
of a cigarette and take
seductive draws

the way women used to
look to me in the movies
of the 40s when
i feigned sickness in
order to skip school
to watch classic movies
on my grandmother's
cable television

behind the white curtains,
out an old screened
window, across a variable
way, is a barn standing fast:
an empty assertion of age
and history

in the leading man
of a show i would make
them all laugh and cry
and they'd send me telegrams
by the fistfuls
if we're following this
sort of nostalgic current

the barn was painted
last year for the old
man who lives there,
who looks out his
window frequently toward
our house, i wonder if he
feels a pull in the
heart when he watches us
making love, missing
his own life-love lost years
ago

the idea makes
me sad and watching
the curtains float
makes me want to
curl beneath the
sheets behind me
and smell her

sometimes love
is curtains toward a
view we're afraid
to see, waving -
sadly parting,
while a fan manufactures
a breeze that we can't feel

that's not true,
i'm being moody
and infatuated with
pity as i sit here

the curtains are
irrelevant

we'll make love
again tonight
and tomorrow
and in a dream,
afterward, i'll
give my monologue
in the dark to
great applause while
she smokes

Read More

be present

how do i approach the edge
of my everything and leap with the
conviction of a man in search
of a fickle faith?

i am the promises
and the comfort of things
i offer to a select few,
but beyond that i am
mostly deferred by the
dead and living among me

who dog me
as spirits chase the
frenzied man
into corners of
vacated houses

i want that i should
go sightless into that abyss
like a sea captain commands
his ship into the night gale;
his is the power of a
man twice possessed

to leap is to say yes
and to say yes is to bow
to it all; the fear of it
consuming you is what holds
me fast to my line

i know
i know...
tell me though again
with your lips to my ear
and i will leap

faith is a chemical
reaction in the fiber of
the soul, breaking you
down as rain does to
wood left in a pile in a
fallow field

it lulls everything to
earth, founders the erect,
breaks your cells down so
that in time
you are absorbed into a
magnificence made of the
minerals of life

i'm open to it
because i know the
truth of you is in its germ;

because the future
lingers there with you
and just how spectacular
this horizon is when your
arms remain wide to my
reception!

faith is listening to
the flower suckle
the rain

it is tasting the
crimson blood of
the virgin

it is smelling the
air after a storm
has prowled the land

it is touching the
fertile moss hidden in the
hollow of a fallen tree

it is seeing
you when you are
not in front of me

spirit me here
to my right place! and be
present and repeat
in my ear
the story with
your fine faithful
breath

any story

i don't care

Read More

the soul is the master of itself

he frets:

what passion is this that

comes dawning over my horizon

like a prowling feline?

i am unawares

and ill-prepared, my

heart now inflated,

my mind thrown into flux

make it stop!

(but stop it slow)

make it cease!

(but fill me first)

i'd say to him: consider

every new love is an 

exercise in delicate variations

of chaos, its violence truth to the core

he paces in a stir and says

to the muse who brought him

here: i don't know but i'm alive

it's you! it's you! blesséd you!

but i'm torn, have i gone too far?

but maybe not far enough? i've been

struck by this and it's sent me into

undulating fits of joy and fear

i'd suggest to him: you see,

you want to master

the reigns to something

God set wild in The Beginning

you desire to be

transported just deep enough

then halt at the line you've

heeled in the sands of your heart

yet the soul is the master

of itself, boundless, and

it holds what it holds and gives

back to the universe unbound

and it humors none who'd

be its champion, beguiles

those who would attempt

to beguile it with reason

so know that if you leaped

(and you leaped, you leaped)

you did so with the wonderment

of a man soul-seduced

and while a breathless descent is the

expectation: a short, furious

fall ended by the impact of

colliding stars,

if you listen, open your

eyes, breathe, and feel

the pull from without

and the heat from within

you will realize that

the world leaped from you

in the moment this passion

came to play

you have the lover

now in an airy sway above

the cosmos, so dance

with her

and leave love to its

uncontrollable devices

Read More

little. league

i remember matty
from little league who'd
broken his arm from
elbow to wrist
while going after a
sharp grounder to short,
how he wailed in the
dust of the infield while
we players all looked on

i stood absently in left
field watching the chaos
of running grown ups
and seeing the faces
go white as the boy was
carried off the field
by his father, who let
a cigarette dangle between
his lips, the smoke slipping
soundlessly across his son's
pinched face

a week later the cast
was already covered with
the scrawled names of matty's
favorite teammates and girls
from school and it was the color of
dirt and the left field grass where
he'd been relegated

his father
fired obscenities at the
coach as much as the ump
in that game, don't think
he didn't

'for christ's sake paul,
he can still play,
it's his glove hand,
he can squeeze it -
squeeze the glove, matty! -
why is he out there
in the fucking reeds,
paul?' and later, he told the
plate ump he was
a blind piece of shit

matty had replaced me
in left, so now i was
out of the lineup altogether
and that was okay with
me, i couldn't hit
and the coach never
looked at me without a
scowl

so
i sat the bench and watched
the drinking-buddy
fathers of the team's most
favored kids strain the third base
line chain-link fence and
smoke and bark at their boys and
slap the asses of their wives

later
we marched in the
memorial day parade, the
favored boys in a rowdy boast
in the front led by matty while
i hung back, told the shortest always
carries the team banner alone

the baking heat bore down
on the bills of our caps and on
our necks while a gangling high school
senior played taps and my father
took a picture of me with his
instamatic and waved

after the reading of
Flanders Fields and the
jolting fire of the rifles and the
inaudible prayers by clergy we
ate ice cream from round cups while
matty thumped his cast against the
porch railing of the vfw

'it don't hurt,' he said to
us, swinging the arm down
and letting the cast bounce off
'i could hit you in the
head, Turner, and it would only
hurt you, not me at all,' and the other
boys laughed, their faces
turned to see if i would say
anything: mount a defense

that was the defenseless summer
when matty's boys looked at
me and laughed most days
and i did not tell my own father how
i hated baseball, my father who stood
apart, on the first base side, away from
what he called the smoking drunks.
i sat in the dugout ashamed at myself
too much to look at him

'how come he doesn't play
you?' he once asked and i
shrugged. 'would you like
me to say something?'
no
no
god no

at the vfw
i did not say anything and matty
said 'pff' and dismissed me with the
casted arm and the
boys laughed, goaded by
a bloating sun

i walked the mile and a half
home alone in my Norway
Cardinals baseball jersey so that my father
did not have to wait with my mother
in the heat while i had ice cream

and as i walked i wished
i had a harder face turned toward life,
hard as a smoking drunk or a boy
with the bravura of a fearless bull

i wished i had a broken arm in a cast
and not such a broken head

Read More

i yearn for the unveiling release

i yearn for the unveiling release
of the artist who can open life
with the stroke of
the brush against canvas

she paints with blood,
and each approach is the
forfeit of her virginity
again and again

such an artist longs for
an appreciation of her
existence and must stand
naked before the canvas,
ready to give birth -
a rendering on the weave
of her pale womb

and the pains of it are
tidal, each stroke
a violent lashing
against the quay
built with chaos

i have an image of her
in her flesh holding the
instrument of her art
while i burn in my place

i consume her
while she stands
there, devour her
with hungry teeth
sunk slowly

if i truly risked it i
would press against her,
in her nakedness, and
beg to feel the pulse
of it in the skin

her head tilted, hair pulled up,
neck serene, the flesh
risen to the touch
of each purgative stroke
of the hand

how the hips stay square,
the feet apart, the shoulder
of the working arm tense,
the bicep and forearm
taut, and from heel
to finger tip a shuddering

and all of her everything
transferred at once to the
flat canvas now made round,
made deep, made open
by her deliberate pressure

i would beg to feel that
energy as a hand searches
for the heat of the
sun-bathed stone after
a cold swim

she paints not what
she sees, if she is being
true, but what she feels in
the rhythms of her
surrender: life beneath the life

i am jealous of
such an artist, clothed
as i am and remaining
clothed as long as i
drown in my fear

Read More

her smile is the thing

my mama, she holds the puppy

in one of her black and white histories

and her smile is the thing

a bare-footed gypsy in the 

early years of her epoch,

building up those resistances

i think i might believe that 

that smile is for me-in-waiting, 

because i called for her even then

her youngest child, who

would be heir to her runty,

her lush lips and lank

and i would be picked on for it

during the early school years,

but she loved the hell out of me

the best way she knew how,

with her little body and 

deep well of blood-fever passions

there is everything in that 

picture that needs to be to 

tell her future

the uncomely summer dress,

whose hem is soiled by the

daily drag on the ground,

gives voice to a life in the 

shade of a forced frugality

on a teacher's salary

the toes in the dirt sing to

a future of days treading an

eternal path of stones and ruts

the arms, in a desperate clutch,

cry to a soul made out of the

effusion of a heart's radical charity

but her smile is the thing,

the beacon for so many of

life's migratory love-makers

who will find themselves

on a reckless sea, thrown and

imperiled, raging and raw

her smile will cast out and

in that sweep, capture them and

hold them fast for a better port

i know this as much

as i know those small hands

and tranquil, sufficient lips

my mama, who played

in the dirt with her bare

feet and hands and who

grew up wanting me in

her womb and loving me

in her wondrous way

felt no poverty but that

which was poorly placed

at her feet by others

i have her smile

i have her smile

Read More

lost joy found

i see in you a flicker of the joy

that hides now in the well of this grown man

a flame lit when he was an active boy

a prince of all the fields in which he ran

a certain seed was planted in the rows

within the hallowed virtues of his youth

it is with love and life that something sows

to bring to fruit the wellspring of his truth

and in a time he sees the goodness drowned

by all the labors of the evil kind

who whisper death to joy without a sound

and swallow all the passions of the mind

but now i've found the courage to be brave

and rescue this: a flame from certain grave

Read More

the love of many

i'd wish for you a second lover's lips

to sing the praise of your passion's passion,

for the largess of your engulfing love,

how it spills from founts to

overtake the seas

love is not a bound volume, to be spent

judiciously or loaned with the frugality of

the moneylenders, but a thing refreshed by

the vitality and desire of the giver, who cannot

stem the tide any more than cease her heart

i'd wish for you a third lover's lips

to suckle at the bosom of your

engorged wants and soothe

the oppression of the constricting

vestments of the prepossessed

drowning those who would march in arms

against the native urges and authentic

conscience transfused to us from the

Original Mother, yet suppressed in the name

of a specious piety

and i will remain your first lover,

your primary, lips uttering a prayer

to the Goddess of the Divine Universe,

asking for Her blessings on us on

the eve of this embarkation

to entreat her with a question: how

does one divorce oneself from the

flock of the sedated, and approach

the true divine, the epic universe whose

manifold nature is the model for love?

for there is no sin in the love of many

so long as the lovers partake in a feast of

harmony with their eyes equal to the

same horizon and the sun, at her zenith,

illuminating all

there is a moral chisel against convention,

a subterranean river that cuts through

the hard rock as veins beneath the

surface of the skin, pulsating with the

genuine power of the soul

the heart has more than one chamber,

after all, and a multitude of ways

in which one approaches her and leaves

her, bringing life to her and carrying life from

her, and her strength is in the love of many

i'd wish for you a life of lovers, on a

migration toward the source of light,

gifting what you have in abundance,

to unlock all the gates so that it will

flow openly as it was meant to be

Read More

no pyre

i'm minding the folly
of my own conceit
that burns in my
breast for men whose
art i envy

in life's balance the
gifts of the creators
are pyres set upon
their mountains
and lit for all

burning the corpses
of their creations
to let the ash rain
down upon the heads
of all receivers

in my darkest
i have fallen into
a valley and the
summits rise up to
cast me in their shade

and urged by malcontent
i scale their jagged
slopes to gain the
peaks and douse the
flames that burn me

such is the blindness that
befalls a man who loses the
sight of his own vistas and
comes to rely only on his
feet to move

a man whose jealousy
has embalmed the
spirit of his creator and
wrapped him in the swathe
of self righteousness

and on the last scaled mount,
turning 'round to check my
progress, i see the fires are lit
anew and sending up great
plumes once again

except mine, which stands alone,
unfired and distant, cold and cast
in the clouds of neglect and
wanting the return of its master
to bring the fire back

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one hundred thousand thousand and one

every moment now is past

and therefore marked and

the names for each are etched

onto melodic strands that

you drop into a jar

one hundred thousand

thousand and one marked

moments that make the jar

a perfect measure

of the virtuous time

and pleasant peace

and tidal epic that you

once shared

the jar a wide-mouthed

ewer of crystal that you

place upon the window sill

of your aggrieved mind

and when you reach into

that blessed chamber

you swirl, with a child's

fingers, the dowry within

because a good man gifts

a daughter a certain trove

of one hundred thousand

thousand and one blessings

that no other can read

or attain or approach

or wash away or believe in

or dispel or ruin

what is yours is the memory

fashioned between the two

of you singly and without

the authority of others

and in a day, any day, most

nearly every day, you will

hear the words singing to you

as echoes in a deep wood

you will reach into your glassy 

globe, your crystal keep,

and swirl the subjects with

a child's devoted fervency

and let a word come to

your hand in a magical

fortuity and pull it out

to give it renewed breath

one of a one hundred

thousand thousand and one

wonders will sing in your palm

once again

as if you were back there

in the moment it was born

and he will be there as if

sitting beside you

and you will feel as

if the time has not fleeted,

has not been spent, has not

rolled on, but rather has hesitated

hovering in a small place

just for you in this conceding

luminescence in which God has 

allowed you to once again bask

before replacing the thing,

the gift, back into that

place in your jar

on the sill of your mind

i knew not the man,

or the name of the far-sighted

sprite that you birthed

together, father and daughter

but that is why it is yours alone,

your one of one hundred thousand

thousand and one time-woven

remnants of life's labors together

Read More

jennifer's sonnet

i sit to write a psalm of spring and love
when morning sun has made her light be shone
through frames of glass and cast from up above
this violent view has left me all alone

a crooked thing that bleeds into my room
was once the purest form of all that's true
the sun, a bride, and life her lovely groom
are separate now in time and rent askew

a friend whose sister's breath was taken fast
is witness to the evil of the game
that slants the light and life when giving pass
and takes its toll when filtered through the frame

the pain of death is how it foils the heart
by taking light and breaking her apart

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body in the river

it was the beginning of april
and the local river had glutted her
banks and shouldered away a man
who'd jumped from the bridge.

when i met a lover who
was a poet and who told me
she was put on this earth
only to change people.

she had full lips,
which is all i
cared to know
about at the time.

she believed also in past lives
and claimed that her prima persona
had originated in 19th
century eastern europe.

i told her, when she asked
what moved me, that i mostly
loved the Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel,
and much of the Dead.

so she wrote a poem
for me that claimed
we'd met on a battlefield
of vietnam as medics, lovers.

it called me, the way an open
door at the end of a dark hallway
calls to a child sprung
from the throes of a nightmare

so i leaped

she smoked a lot and had
experimented with drugs while
attending an ivy league
college and she was an impatient lover.

her mouth was too big
for her face, i thought, and
she said she distrusted men who
spent too much time on foreplay.

but we played it out
all the same, met and
engaged, pitched forward
and back fully.

the snow had been
rained down to weak,
fallow patches in various
spots along the road.

every walk alone outside
smelled like overturned
soil and the renewal
of past conversations.

i found myself walking
a lot those days
and not bothering
to wear a coat

because i wanted to
feel the bite of
the spring wind in
my feverish bones.

the kind of jarring waking
up that comes with
the hard resetting
of a runaway furnace.

or like the plunge in
december waters after an
immersion in the purity
burn of hot springs.

i told her i cared about her,
but i didn't really;
i agreed with her that
we should run away,

but told myself: only to a field
in vietnam, or the capital
city of lithuania before its
fall to the imperial russians;

a long-off escape
in a distant separation
with that cold wind
i felt now stinging the eyes;

to some place
just enough out of the
reach of my own
feeble, dying imagination;

to convince myself that she
was as romantic and
as important to me
as she was to herself.

she didn't love me -
i knew that;
she loved how
the smoking bothered me

but that i didn't complain;
that i had not been to europe
like her; that she had a degree,
unlike me;

that she had expansive stories
and an exotic history
and a resume written
at the knee of the literati.

she teased me about
my unimaginative domesticity,
my narrow, provincial reference,
my impairing lack.

and after that brief
fire, when june came,
she was gone in a
bland ceremony.

against our wills, somewhat,
but not really, and for the best;
i walked the banks of the river
afterwards, from the opposite way.

the cold wind was
gone, the blood back
down to a reasonable
temperature.

they found the body of the
man in a downriver town, bloated
and bobbing, run aground among driftwood.
changed.

i can't listen to the
Byrds anymore;
the Doors, the Stones -
without feeling transposed

i heard years later that
she had a husband and children,
lived in some city as a wife
and no longer writes poetry

i do

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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