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INITIATION
In a county of dust and freckle-red faces, a boy stands in his paWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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INITIATION
In a county of dust and freckle-red faces, a boy stands in his past, under a tall pecan tree, shouldering a Daisy pump with a bent barrel, waiting for anything to land.
Inside the dear nearby old house are family and a day’s concerns: tomatoes to peel, hallways to scurry through, cabinets to reach into.
He is outside, zeroed in on the task. In that moment, he’s a twelve-year-old, his inner life composed of equal parts patience and frustration.
The boy doesn’t see past his aim, has little save a vague sense of the millions of thoughtlets of increasing weight that will play out his future.
When the cream-soft mother dove flutters as she lights in a crotch of the tree, something in him believes she has fallen into his world. He shoots
and realizes, surprised, that he’s hit her, crooked barrel and all, and that she will squat there for a time, no longer able to rise, claws clinging to life, while his childhood flies away.
INSTINCT
If you behave like a wasp, God will broom you down since, if you were a wasp, you’d only know how to behave like a wasp and not like a human behaving like one, so you wouldn’t know that to build a spit-paper nest on God’s back porch is a bad move. Every ounce of wherewithal you have told you to build there, and it was the very wherewithal God installed.
So you already know the situation is strange, you’re already pretending the sky is a mirror, and you can’t not stare up. There’s no fun in realizing you can only be here. Next thing you’re moving 10 tons of blue stone or porphyry 150 miles upriver. You’re carving giant poses into a mountain. You don’t know foolishness from ambition. You’re brewing twisted tales in exasperation tea because you’re sure there are mysteries in your cup. Then the blind man comes to your back door selling brooms.
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REEDUCATION
We climb up a hill, carry small shovels, dig pigweeds, thorn weeWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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REEDUCATION
We climb up a hill, carry small shovels, dig pigweeds, thorn weeds, and little hogweeds filling one small basket for food. We cut tender willow flowers and leaves for salads.
We swing sickles, raze bushes, carry them on our backs to the village as firewood.
We set a trap using a wok in front of the chicken coop. A cat falls to our prayer for meat. The boys clean and cut the cat; we stir-fry. Dozen of us, a few bites each, not enough.
In the night, I dream three red dates, shining and big. Bit by bit, I savor one. Chewy, sweet, and earthy. I save the other two for the morning.
At the first ray of dawn I get up, searching for those two dates. I regret not eating them all in my one sweet dream.
MY FIRST DAY IN AMERICA
I step forward to stand on a bridge arced across this small stream.
The sun hangs high. The wind so lazy it stops.
No one walks on these streets. I hardly hear cars pass by.
To study abroad, a dream of distance. My first flight has reached so far— a continent of robins!
Only yesterday, my mother told the nanny to hide my baby, so that I would not hesitate to leave.
In slow water, I see my face twitched into a mosaic. A leaf falls in, blood red....more
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BEASTS
Alone in the steer barn, my mother forgets the rules. Squeezing betweWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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BEASTS
Alone in the steer barn, my mother forgets the rules. Squeezing between bull and board wall, she is pinned, and neither wood nor hide will give so she must. The lights buzz like bluebottle flies, spring cage ribs press her rabbit heart, and I, tadpole in the darkness, quiver in the blueshift of her blood.
Yet we didn’t end there, before my beginning. Your mercy, if that’s what it was, rolled you slow to lean instead on open air. We hung on a horn, my mother and I, in the heave of oxygen’s flush, gasping in the grace of your roughage.
Now, in the potluck days of summer, I balance my plates of vegetables, my flickering gaze that skips the plates slick with pinked fat, other people’s children little birds gaping for the animals they know how to name but not that they devour. Only I see we feast with ghosts.
But when sorrow rises in my throat like floodwater and friends’ faces loom vicious and strange, I feel you breathe my breath, your hooves soft on my shoulders, the embrace of one child for another on the killing room floor.
RIVER WALKING
Snapweed favors the wet banks of the melt stream, cutting ripe through the forest’s darker ferns and brambles, a bright pod curious legs can split along the seam of glimpsed water. Spotted orange flowers dangle from threads, bobbing for bees. Water so clear it lies. The pebbles sparkled with quartz and grass blowing in the current aren’t pressed under glass; it’s deeper than ankles, cold as nothing living, the only rushing and speaking thing among the trees walking slow as ages. I push upstream, skirting muds pits in silted pools, waterfalls and stretches of rocky rills tiered like canal locks, overgrown and boatless. Each step through green serene and blind as branches and the indifferent water’s glimmer and chatter, ceaseless refusing, as I lean down, to reflect my face. ...more
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IN THE GRAVEYARD OF VOLCANOES
Off Snee Oosh, on a farm gone ramshackle, upstaWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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IN THE GRAVEYARD OF VOLCANOES
Off Snee Oosh, on a farm gone ramshackle, upstairs in the sickbed, he listens to the rain come up island off the bay.
A specter saying to him, What do you know about farming? You got no sense for it. But that’s the way you want it. The way the wind roars here you’d think—
In the pasture the last horse, the Bashkir Curly, attacked by mange, rolls in dust turning to mud, hooves in the air, head lolled, looking for the shed, blinking out rivulets. There’s nothing to be done about it.
The first day of spring: pooling in the depressions of the earth, the unbearable darkness of rain.
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Outside a farmhouse in the southern exposure, where the line between pasture and lawn is obscure,
two people sit in chairs sinking in the earth. So much air in the world but not enough air to say what needs saying. Tall grass, a gate ajar, a feral cat, camouflaged, hunting cottontail.
A pair drinking coffee, coffee in throats, coffee cups breaking apart.
It’s always the leaving and never the staying.
It did not have anything to do with fists or words or heat: just an unspoken thought that came in the later part of an afternoon after a wide smile after a sly comment that revealed these two knew more of each other than any other living soul,
followed by a note, and a going. The kind of going familiar to itinerants, people of the road, people of wandering spirit, but
for those who come home to find things emptied, things hollowed out, there’s nothing except hurt, so
maybe you turn on the tap maybe reach into the ice box and set some meat out to thaw,
maybe open the cupboard and marvel at its disarray, begin to stack one can atop another, lining up the labels the pretty way like you like it....more
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THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE
We were in our old kitchen: You were you, and We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE
We were in our old kitchen: You were you, and I was the vegetable peeler. I peeled carrots for you, long strings of orange longing, but you were too distracted. I peeled cucumbers, sparing the sweet white flesh and taking only the hard, waxy rind. I wanted you to put more vinegar in the dressing. You were wearing a yellow flowered apron and singing the wrong words to “Pink Houses.” I wanted to tell you that if it had to be John Cougar Mellencamp, “Hurts so Good” was a better choice. But my lips were two razor blades angled to slice skin from bone. If I could only press my sharpest self against your lips, maybe an eyebrow. Your new girlfriend was trying to peel an apple with me. I wanted to scream. She’s an idiot, you know. She made you give up cheese. Is lactose intolerance catching? Later, I heard you two in the other room, spooning on the couch like lettuce leaves, and I wanted to hurl myself head-first down the garbage disposal. In the morning, as you tried to put me back in the drawer, I got you, took a small hunk out of your ring finger, and you bled.
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A PINECONE
Petrified artichoke; miniature pineapple; flowerless bud; raccoon’s shuttlecock; scepter of seeds; mosquitoes’ drinking cup; snout of the bear that follows you home; Fibonacci’s dreamscape; 3-D mandala; missile launched by squirrel or owl; nature’s prayer wheel hunted by children with sap-sticky fingers; many-tongued mantra; tiny phoenix opening its wings in the fire....more
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THE PEACH TREE
Because my daughter came home in tears from the birthday partWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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THE PEACH TREE
Because my daughter came home in tears from the birthday party and could not be consoled, I have taken her out to harvest what’s left of the garden, whose splendor
has begun to run to rot and squalor in the haze of August heat. Still, the beanpoles stand bound and heavy with knotted vines and here and there
a ripe tomato hangs ready for her hand to grasp it, twist, and pull it free. Why can’t I bear to ask her what it was some other innocent
did or said, or didn’t do or didn’t say? Instead, I try to keep her close and hope our work together will be enough to make the sting subside. But when I turn to look
for her she’s gone, running from me towards the young peach, halfway up the slope, where we planted it three years ago. All summer we’ve watched amazed
the swelling fruit beneath whose weight the slender branches bend, drooping at their ends. Though they’ve turned to butter and crimson, the peaches aren’t yet ripe, and I tell her
not to pick them but she pays no mind, then yelps and comes to show me how one side of the peach she holds in her hand crawls with bugs who have eaten away
half the flesh, revealing the stone at its middle. If we’re going to save them, we’ll have to harvest now, before they are ready, let them ripen the rest of the way inside.
We’ll have to lay them out on the table by the window where, when she’s finally off to bed, I’ll stand in the settling dark, watching the evening rake its black loam
over the lawn and the garden going to seed and then the solitary tree, its free, unburdened branches bowed as if still beneath that weight.
STARS
Still primitive, nosing the glade, making tracks in the trackless, riparian rough, mere mammals sussing the underbrush, suspirious, inconsiderate of desire or disaster, we starred the gulch of moist maidenhair, impressed them as we bedded down in a brown wool blanket where we twined, we mated, sure, like porcupines beneath a porch of midnight sky, siderealized and vulgar as all mythic lovers, and I, drunk on the dew of you, brackened and salt-starved, swore to myself, my first betrayal, I’d never elegize the lithe, unpunctuated arc of those first hours, would not dissect with whetted words our frowsy, fernlicked bodies, fused in a moment’s outcry, though I knew, even then I knew I lied, and just outside the light of our fire already I could hear the sibilant shiver, the hushed, anticipatory hum, of what we have, at last, become....more
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EASTER MORNING
I go outside in my bathrobe to collect colored Wiffle balls, pWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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EASTER MORNING
I go outside in my bathrobe to collect colored Wiffle balls, pick violets that stretch across the lawn, yawning satisfaction, purple and white ones my grandson ate. I told him he could. Inside it’s one step by land, ten by sea, and I’m in the bedroom— reining in Paul Revere’s mare, harvesting Mr. Potato Head’s lips and tongue, ejecting the kinged and the cornered from their playing field, crating a green dinosaur the size of a newborn— when on the floor I spy with my little eye a red die with four white pips. So much depends on luck. Now I’m vacuuming coconut from the dining room rug, gathering up yesterday’s jackets and five-fingered mittens— things people leave behind, like the ironstone turkey platter that endured an Atlantic crossing in 1858, the one with a small imperfection, a brown stain in the glaze.
PRAISE SONG
Praise the long way to the beach. The waves that stand on end like hair spiked in a barber’s chair. The dinosaur roar of breakers rearing up for shore.
Praise legal fluke. The skilled knife. The copper skillet. Praise everyone’s easy side. The dog hair everywhere.
The fry of see-through shrimp that skate inside their box of glass, elbows bent behind their backs.
Praise lemon chickens dreaming on the spit. The hummingbirds that belly up to the feeder and lick the sweet stuff from the hourglass.
The dishwasher. Praise him. Praise her.
The color-coded scavenger hunters who end at the birdbath, splashes of satisfaction in their hands.
Praise the dark that comes when it is called. Praise grandchildren rapt by fireworks leaping in the yard....more
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HECTOR’S SPIRIT, WHILE ACHILLES DRAGS HIS CORPSE AROUND THE WALLS OF TROY
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HECTOR’S SPIRIT, WHILE ACHILLES DRAGS HIS CORPSE AROUND THE WALLS OF TROY
I could not face him, but ran, as a hare tries to dodge the snapping jaws of a wolf. In the end, I couldn’t run fast enough. Now as I hover above Ilium, Achilles kicks me, pierces my ankles, drags me around Troy, to desecrate me, and deny me the pyre’s oblivion.
You’d think I’d rage to escape my shameful fear. Strangely, I prefer it here: free to drift beside my wife, though I can no longer shelter her within my caressing arms. At least I can form a chrysalis mist she’ll perhaps notice and take succor in. And here’s my father and mother, sobbing. Maybe they’ll sense me and find some solace.
But wondrous, my son Astayanax reaches for my ghostly breastplate, my wraith-thin helmet. How I long to take my boy in my arms and assure him that he’ll be safe and well; then toss and catch him from the joyous air.
No, I don’t want to forget: my nostrils filled with the heavy smell of horse manure; the aromas of roasting ox and pig; the heady stench of my wife’s ecstasies; the stink of fear, when my chariot thundered, Greeks pissing terror when my sword slashed them, as Achilles played on my sulfur trembling:
the only warrior who could best me, our fates ivy strands twined onto a wall. I go on ahead, but you won’t be long in following me to the Halls of Death. But now, let me take in—for the last time— all I have loved and all who have loved me.
KALLINDROS, HECTOR’S CHARIOT DRIVER
It shames me to remember that My Lord, challenged, ran like a child from night demons. This shame will not leave me, though I take drink in a tavern; other drinkers taunt me,
“Where’s your magnificent Lord Hector now? What good was all his duty and honor when he couldn’t stand against Achilles? Any of us could’ve run from him too, but we expected better from the best man we Trojans had to throw at the Greeks.”
I stop their sneers for an instant, my dagger pinching the loudest one’s throat, then find silent respite with a whore who’d not mock My Lord.
I’ve been reassigned to drive another spearman, not nearly the fighter My Lord Hector was, but he has the look of one who knows how to stay safe; maybe we’ll make it through this war with our breath inside us,
all I hope for now; and the whores I climb each night, forgetting, if just for a moment, this war and the way My Lord Hector ran....more
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TRILLIUM IS THE FLOWER NO ONE SHOULD PICK
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TRILLIUM IS THE FLOWER NO ONE SHOULD PICK
These are the woods you have walked for years and can still get lost in. Nothing here’s solid. Where is something and where only air, which is also something? What is mass and what is space? This is the green blur of your life, all of your bliss and catastrophe. In one small flower all you know, its precise bloom a fact in the corner. But you cannot pick it, can’t take it away, without starving what you want to save. The whole plant connects underground. Petals purple as they age. This, then, is a young flower. You cannot have it.
OIL CHANGE IN MOREHEAD, KENTUCKY
The men around us work on the car, hood lifted, while we sit inside listening to public radio. There is a child’s drawing taped to the wall of the shop. The Supreme Court has just legalized gay marriage. We stare at each other and I laugh, say wow. We hold hands briefly between the seats. I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime, you say. We look out at blue sky through open wall. They check fluid levels and tire pressure. I can’t believe this happened while we were here, I say. My grandmother grew up in these deep valleys that are like another country. A few miles and weeks away, a government clerk refuses to marry two men. At the folk art museum that afternoon, we pause in front of one man’s fiery version of hell. Another man’s heaven looks exactly like the valley we have come from. ...more
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COEUR D’ALENE AV
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COEUR D’ALENE AV
Overhead, green canopy and shaded arcade, the work of tipu trees.
The trees seem tame. Don’t kid yourself: They’re unteachable beasts.
Beneath the roadbed, roots as round as human thighs knit thickets curb to curb, shallow and deep in the beachtown alluvium. Roots lift sidewalk slabs. Roots shatter curbs, heaving cement shards up and out. This is a root encroached avenue.
The city surveils these tipus. The municipal code authorizes the Bureau of Street Services to clear-cut an avenue’s shade if it gets out of hand.
Though wild and willful, the tipu is a patient tree. Months before Man’s Last Day on Earth, the Bureau’s staff will abandon their work. They’ll huddle at home with their families, awaiting the apocalyptic end.
On that day, the tipus of Coeur D’Alene will free themselves of every concrete encumbrance. They’ll break into classrooms and homes. They’ll march across Venice, an army of trunk and bough.
Hear me, O Venice: Arbor Day is coming.
WOODLAWN AV
Confident on the scaffolding, two men shroud the exterior with Jumbo Tex Fortifiber. Winter storms are months away, but this job will take time. The scrap lumber heaps up like mining slag.
Elsewhere on the street, iris, lantana, and bougainvillea shroud fat clapboards. How long can these wooden houses last?
Smithson, his ghost at my side, whispers:
buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built
but rather rise into ruin before they are built
ruins in reverse
Ghosts, too, are ruins-in-reverse, falling away from death’s entropy towards articulate spiritus. Some ghosts prophesy, predicting the irrational past. Eyes see. Ears hear. Dead lumber assembles itself, becoming a house even the living can haunt....more
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THE BEEKEEPER
Enter yellow light through the tunnels in the heart where the viWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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THE BEEKEEPER
Enter yellow light through the tunnels in the heart where the vital energies keep us breathing, keep us happily here on this sunny escalade towards the golden hive. I dream of honey so often that I feel my blood stick in the thin pass of arteries. All my days have been spent on the tops of ladders searching for the sweet spot between the earth and sky. The bees guard that middle kingdom, alternately fierce and beautiful, and when their weltering stings send me running across the fields, it’s like a sentence condemning me to tend the garden of my life.
HONEY PSALM
Out to my hand the limitless gold is pouring and buzzing, arriving through the early August light like a séance of bees. Contrary to belief, we are haunted by gem-like beings dispensing the music of blessings. The only ghosts are the good ghosts of the wind and rivers, the bright shadows of the other world more solid than ourselves. I step off the painted ladder and into the summer air. The pollen builds around me the shape of the faithful.
SEPTEMBER
What happens is you find something strange and ancient in the bottom of your heart. You’re not sure what it is, but your life suddenly changes and the foundation stones start to sing. Has there been music all this time right in the center? An undercurrent of grace lighting the depths? The moon arches out of nowhere and bears the estranged mind home. Someone sets down their grudges for a final time. A star crashes into the valley carrying the fossil of a god....more
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WIFE TO HER HUSBAND
I saw you as if from a distance: you were a figure materWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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WIFE TO HER HUSBAND
I saw you as if from a distance: you were a figure materialized on an endless long horizon, not yet arrived, perhaps a mirage, but all was shimmering. I confess I was afraid to believe in what was only feeling.
Yet I came forward, not only out of all I felt for you, standing solitary at the front of the church, but also because I wanted to become what the look in your eyes said you beheld in me.
ABSENT
You can hear it beneath the surface sounds of day, the scuffling of a hoe or foot, the wet flap of laundry,
persistent sawing, a whistled melody, the turn of a leaf or page,
deeper than ordinary silence whenever you stop all your bustle and are silent:
absence as counterweight to the visible world.
CONVERSION
And what if I strived to emulate the bees in closing off each amber cell?
Across the grass, the surface of threadleaf flowers, teased by the breeze, becomes a surface of sparkling. Come, golden sunbeam, red-tailed
hawk flying, deep October sky. I’ll lie back, look to the crowns of trees, the sun siphoning, the leaves transpiring, their dizzying drawing up and up.
When does the cambium cease its layering, the bark stop its thickening and begin its sloughing? What if my hands and mind could learn the faith this change requires?...more
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XVI.
I'd kill you for a cigarette. That’s what my friend said just before tWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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XVI.
I'd kill you for a cigarette. That’s what my friend said just before they put a shovel in his hands and made him dig a trench along with a few dozen other shovelers. Not very deep because the light was almost disappearing and the ground was hard. So hard. Then all at once they grabbed the shovels back and pushed them in the pit and started shooting indiscriminately. By which I mean they couldn’t be bothered to aim. Friend I could also use a smoke.
XXX.
We who are dirty would like to be clean again. But there’s a problem when the men the elders of the tribe whose matted beards smell of egg yellow garlic and spilled tea decide what makes a woman pure and when. For now the men can no longer decide. The women being practical don’t care. Our jailors and exterminators think we are the problem. Also the solution. But only if we disappear. I want to stand in a hot shower for a year.
XXXIV.
Who can trust history again? We trust each other now less than a feral cat trusts the hand that feeds it. We look each other in the eye only to challenge or surrender. We are being bred back to savagery. Those of us who manage to survive. How will we open a book again and believe the ink? Allow the paper to carry us forward on a sea of words which are not ours? I would rather you read the numbers on my arm. Count out my vertebrae with your living fingers.
XL.
I can’t help thinking what would Rilke think who taught us how to see hope and affliction and beauty and love and hopelessness with the same admiring tightly focused eye. It was exhilarating reading him and feeling at once ancient and the most modern it might be possible to be. I’m not the same reader. Despite the power I might have felt in that unchanging place the world that changed me is not Rilke’s world. If he were here he wouldn’t last an hour....more
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PINEAPPLE
A kitchen mood all over me. Having severed spiky crown, sliced RougWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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PINEAPPLE
A kitchen mood all over me. Having severed spiky crown, sliced Rough green skin, now begins the gouge (excise, a father’s voice, excise!) Of oval brown pineapple eyes, Not hurrying because there are so many eyes. Because my hand curves around Soft moist fruit as if his thigh—remember!— Because, were I to lick my palm, Heart- and life-lines would be sweet. Because the mourning doves are calling Out there in the yard, And it is too soon to feed the dogs Or start the Jericho Brown book. Because of pleasure in my paring Knife moving up and down, excising Anywhere I please, and if I wish I can Suck the juice behind each blinded eye As my pineapple turns honeycomb. Because honeycomb is kinder than All those sightless eyes— And, done with paring, next, a larger Knife must cut flesh from its core.
I will miss you, Pineapple, Companion of my kitchen afternoon Turned bite-sized in his mother’s cut-glass bowl. Absent skin and eyes and crown and core, Nothing like you grew warm and wet, Rising as a pink cone Nestled in a sharp-leafed shrub, Your blue blossoms folding into berries Ripening into who you are, Pineapple— Tough and spiked, all eyes— How far you’ve come in air miles To end up here with me, the one Who carves your insides out, all civilized. Until the last few years, Pineapple, I have not lived alone.
BLIZZARD
The old pony whinnies, Snowbound where she stands. Half-blind. Arthritic. Almost toothless. Icicles fringe her coat. Her skin is blue. Climbing drifts, Beating her a path, I lead her To a stall where she walks Into its walls. To walk In childhood’s snow globe Beside white-flocked evergreens— Flakes swirl as if the world is shaken. Which it is. Classroom chalk Clapped from blackboard erasers— Such a fine snow. Another white word Out there in languages I do not know. Week on week, We stood to speak under God, Indivisible. Cat tracks In the snow, an almost-straight line. Before the feature came The March of Time: Rows of sepia soldiers. The same Deep voice-over. Sunset is a pink eraser At the bottom of a gray-smudged page. It has been a while, But I think the under God Got taken out. Or maybe it was the indivisible....more
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IT STARTS
It’s in the whistling of the kettle: a wordless whisper I feel moreWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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IT STARTS
It’s in the whistling of the kettle: a wordless whisper I feel more than hear, that has me steel myself while bending. I straighten up and soften, walk through solids hollow and cross my heart and three swift rivers. I shield my eyes in sugar towns where neighbors drill through neighbors’ walls and work my way to comfort zones in olive grove casinos. I play the game of Silence Is Golden in open-carry colonies and bury treasure in oblong boxes labeled “silence = death.” I read the signs while bending. I soften up and straighten. I harden when I’m bent and bending gets me through.
I WENT TO A SMALL ISLAND
in the Aegean where flightless birds navigate rivers and streams like penguins but with three times the number of nerve endings and capillaries in their fins. They communicate while swimming: a cross between signing and telepathy. You never hear them coming. They’re just there putting thoughts in your head. I heard they could help break negative habits. Help you quit blaming yourself for big and little flaws. I heard people quit smoking after swimming with a bird that flapped its fins at a rate that mirrored the echo of the human heartbeat. I spent a month hoping they’d fill me with endless cheer....more
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ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
No atheists in foxholes nor near the flames of infant We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
No atheists in foxholes nor near the flames of infant fevers. Guardian angels around my bed sang Mario Lanza (written by Harpo Marx!) on an old black, shellac 78.
Only a fool would still believe in those old wives’ tales, but, growing up in a Holy Ghost-haunted house, how to outgrow them? No more kneeling by the bedside, no Brahms lullaby, no Welsh grandfather singing sleep my child and peace attend thee, all through the night.
But how I miss those lilies of the field, hairs numbered, sparrows falling.
Now, my daughter sleeping in the next room, I’d give the rest of my life, even sell my soul to some devil or other, for—round her bed, wielding swords, all of them flaming—legions of the angels I don’t believe in.
BLIND PASS
“They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit ling’ring here…” —Henry Vaughan
Back about a thousand years ago, everyone in the family thought I’d be the first to go, the rake and ramblin’ boy, now the only one left, Ishmael, the messenger come to tell Job his family, too, were all dead: “I only am escaped to tell thee.”
Another morning alive with no virtues to thank for it, only vices, and hungover as usual, I cast into the moon’s silver sunrise pathway on the sea, then toward its setting in a pink and violet haze.
My brother long dead by a head-on drunk, I ask the universe, Why me? The sea answers as it always does with only what it drowns, never what it saves, my rod tip nodding, nodding at the endless waves....more
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ENOUGH
Too many streets in this city, with their spines drawn white, their pWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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ENOUGH
Too many streets in this city, with their spines drawn white, their paving black as loss. As many as the branches of winterbare sycamores leading away from home. As many as the veins that trace their course through our bodies. Central Avenue, broad and straight, leads directly to the beating heart of downtown. Sunset Drive takes you to the aging painted ladies and their scrolls of gingerbread trim. There’s the avenue of cancer, the boulevard of diabetes, the irregular lane following fibrillation of the heart, the wandering way of dementia with its bridge broken over the river of self.
THE NOMENCLATURE OF DESIRE
The name of the lily is the name I had before I was born. Before white, before red, before the moon carved itself into one thin hair. The name of the sea is salt and spray and flat blue under pale. My lover’s name is written on my palm. The name of the grass is always.
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WATERSLIDE HERO
The father plops down at the top and parts the water with hiWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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WATERSLIDE HERO
The father plops down at the top and parts the water with his thighs to carve out a cove for his skittery son— three years old, wetting his feet like a kitten, shoulders bulked by a royal blue life vest, top strap masking the quivery lower lip.
The boy squats in the shelter of the lap as the voice of experience coaches with clipped commands then tucks the child to his body like a quarterback taking a snap, or a goalie clapping a block-fingered glove over the puck, a prizefighter with his left up to keep the swollen eye from gushing blood.
In tandem this way, they shove off, game faces on, wending down the slick ribbon, sluggish at first, bob and wobble till gravity forces acceleration through the lower loop. The boy stiff-arms the wall to blunt the swoon of their descent, mom and sister cheering from the side.
Where the water rolls into the shimmering field of turquoise, the father hoists his boy aloft like the Lombardy trophy, the Stanley Cup, the heavyweight title belt. Small toes skim the surface of victory as the new world champion slips under, completely and gloriously submerged.
VACATION DAD RIDES AGAIN
He emerges from exile early in the trip, unshaved, bedhead, cargo shorts, flip-flops, T-shirt, and a half-cracked smile. Loose behind the wheel, he uncorks a bawdy joke involving the tailpipe of the slow driver ahead. Freed two weeks from the masks—budget overlord, enforcer of curfews, master of developing young lives. Freed from the boss’s expectations—slacks and wingtips and Windsor knots, suffocations and supplications. On board the plane, he tests the power of the ask—extra nuts, the whole can of Coke, an aisle seat for himself, windows for the kids. On the restaurant patio, he sends warm beer back with the lightly chastened server and insists on more fries for his sparsely populated platter. Wayfarers propped like a crown on his brow, he sits back, benevolent, satisfied, gazes upon his family—one daughter, one son, one wife. What a life. Back at home he asks so little they often forget he is with them. Almost a god, he retreats to his cave. Hibernating in the death mask again, his constant eye roves the world, keeping honest the bosses, the airlines, the corporate chains who will try to skimp any way they can....more
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IN ONE THOUSAND YEARS
after the nuclear accelerator at CERN is dug up by arcWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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IN ONE THOUSAND YEARS
after the nuclear accelerator at CERN is dug up by archaeologists, will they surmise those monstrous circular tunnels were cathedrals to the Sun God, their gas canisters sacrificial offerings of fire to draw His rays toward Earth? What of the electromagnets carrying enough current to toast a city through a cable the width of a finger? A sacrifice against monsters? Never mind the liters of liquid helium cycling, cycling, to keep it all colder than interstellar space. No bones buried in these underground chambers to tell a story—only steel, magnets, knobs and wires, their color coding faded like cave paintings, and the numbers that were created, everywhere, floating in space, invisibly.
DARK MATTER
You know that thing you can only see slant, shadowy in the corner of your eye. That thing belongs to elves, to witchcraft and God, a mystical vision of hot light, and passion that burns in nuns.
It’s like a childhood memory of nearly drowning that your mother insists didn’t happen, or a conspiracy theorist’s imaginary Armageddon while men lie sleeping on Chicago’s snowy sidewalks.
It’s the invisible bird singing from the woods, the footstep in your dream that wakes you, like your father’s ghost haunting you before his death. At least imaginary numbers are made material through their applications.
So we manufacture stronger eyes to observe the veiled, look out our windows at spring and rejoice that the leaves, ghostly only last week, are now lacy and green....more
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THE INCIDENT AT DIKE BRIDGE
It’s easy to forget her face, their final frisWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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THE INCIDENT AT DIKE BRIDGE
It’s easy to forget her face, their final frisk before the free-fall— no one out on the bridge that night, no noise, the old 88 edged up and revving water. It doesn’t add up: the blood on her blouse, her purse back at the party, no panties when the divers dragged her up at daybreak and called her mother on the mainland. Perhaps it took hours to gasp up her pocket of air, her ringless fingers fumbling for the front-door lock, while her lover wandered the Vineyard collecting hotel keys, crawling off liquor. Tonight, her hair surges like seaweed, singing her secret. Put your ear-bones to the bridge, hear her hissing in the low reeds: There’s no telling if he really braved back into the brackish water and saw her pale cheek pressed to the passenger window—no counting the lit homes he lumbered past on that dirt road at midnight, drenched and dripping, or the telephones he never touched.
LESSON
In the end, what we were given was not only violence. Take, for example, my collection of dried peonies, the thumbed buttons sewn back to my blouse, the top drawer filled with rings. I sometimes idle in the remote memory of their Adam’s apples, their waggling tongues. After all, there is still what came before—that pleasure; there are still the places that dress, that hair, that toothy smile took me. This before all the doorknobs began to loosen themselves inexplicably—before they fell off into my hands.
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Excerpts:
HITTING THE DEER
This isn’t about hitting the deer or pulling the car over alWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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HITTING THE DEER
This isn’t about hitting the deer or pulling the car over along a dark shoulder of road to check the bumper while a few feet away you hear the deer’s alien gasp for air, notice the sudden rise and fall of its belly.
This is about perspective, about seeing the forest for the thin vein of asphalt you had laid claim to. It is about how far you have strayed from the circle and the boxes you have taken shelter in.
This is about scarcity and abundance, how you could live a day, a lifetime, without having one authentic moment, how you have gone and surrounded yourself with every fake thing.
The eye of the deer holds everything you haven’t considered— the vast aloneness of birth, the frailty of belief, the varying distances of stars against the flat canvas of night.
This is about what could have become of you had you avoided the deer. Another constellation slipping from memory. Leaves falling into sameness around a common tree. Green fading into blue.
AUTOTOMY
For their wedding anniversary she asked for a door— forest green, with a window to let the light in and to warm the dog curled in the foyer.
After he installed it—forest green, a window, just as she had asked— a man came knocking. He extended a tract to her and asked where she finds comfort. She looked beyond him and pointed to an anole sunning itself on a railing. She slid the tract from his fingers because she was kind.
The next Saturday, the man knocked again. She watched him through the window. There had been a steady rain and he had no hat or umbrella. He waved a bible in front of her like an indulgence and said he wanted to talk about how she could grow closer to God.
She smiled as if to pity him, Did you know anoles have autotomic tails?
He looked at her, perplexed.
Their tails fall off when they’re attacked, she explained, and then they grow new ones.
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PHYSICAL
First we own them, skin and sinew, as if extended from our limbs—whoWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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PHYSICAL
First we own them, skin and sinew, as if extended from our limbs—whorls of new silk on the warm scalp under our soapy hands, oiled creases, neat padded packages in taped diapers trundled into snap-up sleepers, plump feet fitted to our palms.
And they own the willing us, giggling fingers prodding our mouths, then our cheeks squeezed, our lips made fishy by the flats of small hands, our jaws pried open, “to check for cavities,” our hair “styled”— straight up as I let my daughter comb mine, making my scalp wince, or straight out at the sides, Einstein-fashion, as my benign father, motionless as a model, let me brush his.
And then the tangible years evaporate, as they must, and it’s as if we’ve been loosed, have drifted into the dilating voids of space, into an emptiness where nothing ever touches, our stories more and more remote, impossible to access— like the generation’s before us—except when memory flies us back, quicker than light, to being Mom and Dad or dreams our parents up.
GOING DOWNHILL
He was really going downhill these last few years, outsiders often pronounce, with hindsight, when friends or relatives flatline. But, inside, by the cozy hearth of our own souls, when we’re wrapped in fleece, book in one hand, whiskey in the other, to sit out a bad cold—though we’re born with dual citizenship in the countries of the sick and hale— home is always feeling well, and down means coming up again—not death’s greased skids—until we’re breathless, bottomed out of hope in hospice.
How some of us guard against even a whisper of helplessness! Like my always sturdy spouse, who went down with a clatter this morning in the shower, thrown off balance while squatting to squeegee the bottom of the glass door, and punched a hole in the fiberglass wall, and bloodied his knee, but got up painfully again, saying NoNoNo to my outstretched hand.
My brother-in-law went downhill quite fast this year, after his cancer was diagnosed, as he tried to balance hope for more with gratitude for his life, resignation folded up in a back pocket.
A klutz with crap for knees, I couldn’t balance at all when, long ago, he took our family on a first-time skiing trip. The last of our group to get on the lift (the bunny hill closed, husband and kids somewhere ahead), I fell rather than stepped off at the top—into a drift. Shaken and cold, bug-helpless on my back, legs twisted, face hot, snow fluttering from a gray sky, temperature dropping, the terrifying downhill slope falling away abruptly below me— that’s when this kind man appeared, assessed the scene, helped me out of my skis and up, then into them again, and never once laughed. And I grasped the ski poles he held out behind his back as he schussed straight down, gifting me the ride of my life.
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Excerpts:
WALT WHITMAN AMONG THE REACHING HANDS
Walt is between the army cots in a fiWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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WALT WHITMAN AMONG THE REACHING HANDS
Walt is between the army cots in a field tent. Soldiers are passing from one life to another. The tent fills with sawing to the bone. He holds a bloody bandage and kisses it tenderly. He opens the tent flaps, sits on an amputated tree stump. A drummer boy watches Walt make a piece of grass whistle. The boy points to the battle: “What can you do about that?” The boy straps on a drum as he races to the front lines.
Walt cannot do anything about war. Morning is cold bullets. Walt hears the drumming of a woodpecker on a dead tree. There is nothing Walt can do about the cut timber and bone.
Walt wants to return to the outstretched hands. He notices the dead field mouse curled into a comma. What can he do about that? Crosses are a line of type he could set piece by piece until they are pebbles in clear water. He felt a man die at sunrise, and now his hands are useless to do much about what is happening.
Walt removes his leather boots and thick woolen socks, plunges his feet into mud as if taking root. This is what he can do!
For a moment, all is still— the kind of quiet that makes a deer notice. Even the boy dying on the red blanket of grass notices.
MEDIC IN RAIN OR SHINE
When the winds come from the hills, I do not mind if they bring the rains along for the ride. The sky is reflective— black as the Vietnam Memorial Wall where my face, mirrored, has names written on it, though my name, thankfully, is not present. It could have been engraved. I check—twice. I was that close. Life and death are inches apart.
A person could have been rubbing my name. I’ve seen them do it. Someone asked if I knew anyone there, pointing to the massive list. I heard bullets and rain, almost the same, with red skies exploding. I pulled out many of those names, feeling failure because they died....more
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HORSE IN THE LANDSCAPE
I was given the power to gaze and ears pricked to heaWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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HORSE IN THE LANDSCAPE
I was given the power to gaze and ears pricked to hear across the mustard-yellow distance. I wait and listen.
I was created before Franz Marc ever marched into a trench, created because he yearned for the opposite of movement.
I gaze out to a slice of water, to the stillness of the future, its impenetrable line. Think of all the other horses he never painted during the years he never had.
Surely beauty, for young Franz, lived only in the present tense, in the twitch of an ear, color splashed on canvas, confirming the impulse to be.
I sport a bold red coat and blue mane, more than a century of perception behind me. My heart taps out on its old chest a staccato that just might make the landscape tremble.
THE ART OF FALLING
Come off a horse enough times, and you learn how to fall— as it is with snow, rain or love, all goose-down, no elbows.
The horse spooks at a leaf, knocking you sideways, saddle slipping— and, well, you’re going down again. Relax, you’ll get used to it.
Relax, you say to the lobster, just before plopping him into the roiling pot. Relax, you say to a friend
on the eve of another bender. You say it to yourself when falling off a barn ledge onto the concrete shed row.
It’s easy to imagine a soft landing.
But when your mother sinks into her pillow, she knows she’s not falling with grace. Blah, blah, blah, she mouths,
flicking the back of her needle-bruised hand, as if brushing away a gnat, as the priest lowers his head
to trace the thumbprint of oil, first up and down, then sideways on her glistening forehead....more
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A WALK IN THE WORLD
Perhaps she has insulted God too often with questions, coWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
Excerpts:
A WALK IN THE WORLD
Perhaps she has insulted God too often with questions, complaints, and mistrust. She feels flawless in the mosaic of life. There are no enemies, even in the stark absence of scent and music. Yearning is not wrong. It simply is. A sort of wrestling match with slick angels who elude her touch. Perhaps she was not chosen simply because she never heard a call. God didn’t make things clear. She makes a melody from hollow bones. If it is all a fairy tale, why not make it a beauty? With hunger and hope she stops to admire the plants that stand without anger or pain. Now and again a whisper from God: Are wild roses not good enough for you? She walks the moody bread scent of the city with nirvana on her mind, the merciless indifference, a fiction without merit. Desire is what scents the world. She reaches for the swing of the trapeze of samsara, even if she falls. Things will go on with her or without. Canyon wrens will sing. She chooses everything, especially compassion. She wishes she were a river now. It is lonely to walk in the cage of her body. The purpose of life is life, not profit, not eternity. It doesn’t matter, really, whether she trusts the sun to rise again or not. Sometimes she still aches when she can’t get what she doesn’t even want.
EMERGENCY
He carelessly stabs, then rushes her to the emergency room. He sits for hours by her side, hoping when the wound is stitched he will have a brand-new love in his arms as though nothing has happened.
He is innocent. He feels it. But he is also disappointed she is crippled now. She is disappointed, too....more
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A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN
requires us to consider that a power that’s neverWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN
requires us to consider that a power that’s never left us might
although we know it’s just a two minute, forty second night.
THE LANGUAGE OF FLAGS
A lopping wind sock on a rusty staff does not lift a grommet, does not clank the iron, does not wake the air traffic controller in his single-wide to clear a visitor down to the desert because there is no visitor; sunrise to sundown, the sun revolves around a quiescent flag.
A jot west at the sunbelt metro hub, checkers of five orange and four white squares reel unflaggingly every degree of azimuths on a spindly stick-pole from perpetual prop blasts, turbo blowbacks, and the wind itself. Its herky-jerky says yes, construction of the new 10R/28L is in a rush, opening soon to sprawl the sprawl—more planes, more.
Downtown, a mammoth new Old Glory from its dickey box atop the bank tower coachwhips the city below, driving the future. Don’t stop, don’t rest, don’t eat, don’t be European.
And at Base Camp before the Khumbu Icefall, wind horses strung from poles to cairns try to say you should not be here but, if you insist, then listen to the language of flags: hear and see here, up there see, then breathe, then nothing at all. ...more
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WHAT THEY IMPLY BY DEPICTING A VULTURE
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WHAT THEY IMPLY BY DEPICTING A VULTURE
…because in this race of creatures/there is no male. —Hieroglyphics of Horapollo
In the beginning, all was female. Bird begat bird begat bird, each impregnated by the wind, which
was also female. In the beginning, vulture was goddess. For 120 days she was pregnant and for
120 days she cared for her young and for 120 days she cared for herself, preparing to ride the wind
for the five remaining days of her year. Imagine being cradled by the breath of the world, levitating
through lovemaking—oh, imagine! In the beginning we were worshiped, and in the beginning we could fly,
and in the beginning we were loved by the air itself. In the beginning we created, and in the beginning
Sky bowed to us, and in the beginning Earth reached for us and, oh, in the beginning we were holy, we were
holy in the beginning, and can you imagine that, in the beginning, we were holy, we were whole?
HOW HISTORY HELPS US SURVIVE: HOATZIN
When the nestling spies the viper, letting go becomes a kind of grace. God is the ghost of every feathered thing that ever dreamed of drawing breath. God surrounds us. And it's not the splash of the river that tells us we've been saved. It's the sound of what swims toward us. The new danger. The ongoing need to survive. History is older than hope. Newly doused and still missing muscle, the nestling knows this: how to open his wings. How to claw his way back to where he belongs....more
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AND THE SUMMER WAS UPON US
And summer was upon us with its cherry willows andWe are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us.
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AND THE SUMMER WAS UPON US
And summer was upon us with its cherry willows and honeysuckle swarming and its grass and its bees and its lovers in the parks of August, the air soaked with the sweat of animals. Yes, summer was upon us in its aprons of haze.
We huddled and sang and spat and made love and sucked in the dregs of days that faltered only after the world had been born a thousand times, days slouching gently toward oblivion like old men who recall the peak of their game. Yes, summer was upon us.
YOU
Acacia bleeding into the night.
A white face pulled through the mud of generations—
you are here now, breathing into the crook of my arm, you tabernacle beast,
lolling in ponds of glistening steel, so deliciously close to the edge you are
a lash tied to the tail of a tiger. My satyr,
my offspring with fingers waggling blindly in my face,
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