Grinding away
wheels spinning in slush
on top of ice. The weight
I tow behind me I thought
would give me traction.
Instead, maybe just weight.
I could get out and walk,
not try so hard to get somewhere,
missing the ballet
of falling snow against the pines.
If you don’t hear me
do I say a word?
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January 27, 2011 11:05 pm
Sorry, I have
no intrinsic
motivation left.
I used it
up at home
on the people
I love and my
sullen craft.
Some ex-
trinsic stuff
remains. You
may have some.
For cash.
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i.
What made him crawl down
that particular hole
I will never be able to fully
imagine.
Maybe some scent my nose
will never know
or abide, some combination
of bat shit
and vegetation.
Sulfur
minerals combining with moisture
and no light.
Or some god in the elements
I might at first
call false, until
I remember
I’ve never found a god
I could lean on
or trust
for longer than a season.
No more than I could figure
(in the Real)
what the slave-woman who butchered her children
must have felt –
that that kind of murder –
godless, but not final; sudden but
not
unimagined –
must have been
a solution
to the problem
of earthly pain.
That a half-life of shadow and unreason
could be better
than sunlight
and the scent of freedom
whipped and beaten, skull
raised
aloft
like a banner, still rooted
in animal hair, nappy,
braided:
a testament. Proclamation.
Flapping
in a kind of speech –
temple
slapped
against colonial palm –
a juba
macabre.
The victory
of abstracted love.
ii.
The pain he suffered over the years of emphysema; the reduction in the
ability to move. Dependency on the wife he’d probably cursed half his life.
Knowing the weakness was caused by his own doing – cigarettes, voluntary
conscription. Unvoiced anger. Blaming others half his life. The hatred of
anyone not himself.
The deeper hatred even of himself. Discontent. The self-loathing at little
mistakes. Not being the man his father wanted him to be, in spite of
service.
The loathing passed on to son like a virus: pride in his accomplishments, in
his rise in the real estate world, in liquor. And finally, that weakness,
water and fire. No air.
iii.
I crawl down into darkness, light
a little tallow, smear
crude mineral
on a wall I will never see clearly.
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January 23, 2011 12:21 pm
My body holds onto fear the way trees hold onto
power lines in winter or wet weather -
branches aching to sag as trained to do
by the slow and subtractive progress of time -
like dancers bowing toward the beautiful earth -
but thwarted on the steel of an intruder
both ingenious and hungry, the arced and merciless
smile of wire and the thousand volt message inside -
this muscle that binds shoulder to shoulder
a memorial to my brother’s early jealousy and ire -
his hatred of abandonment worked into me in a corner
of a dark playroom when I was three and he was four –
my first move towards repulsion only urging his thirst
for resistance against an easy enemy, and surrender –
my second ploy, fueling him with a kind of toxic delight,
panicked by his fear of his own muscle memory -
of being dropped, of our mother’s indifferent clutch.
I harden again, enough to armor myself against his blows -
innocent and momentary, but teaching me to walk
hunched against attack, reading every approach that way.
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January 22, 2011 11:35 pm
The ministerial intern invokes peace
and the wide universe, its vast mystery
viewed through double-paned glass
above her deck out back – the whitetail caught
in the floodlight, the coexistent coyote singing
in the dark woods beyond, the snow falling not
like slick, sharpened teeth, but white rose petals.
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He tucks his thumb
into his palm
since his face won’t fit.
Cocked, unlike
his brother’s tin revolver
against going off.
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I should count myself lucky, unnoticed here
in the fatty shelf somewhere below the scapula –
hard to scratch, the flesh not packed
apparently with glands and their secretions.
I feel badly for the guys who got caught
for whatever reason (bad luck or destiny)
underneath the armpits. Or between the toes, or –
but God spare us those other images (Lord knows).
Still, it’s about all I can take, the flaking
skin, the effervescence wafting up from,
well – down there. The skin itself putrescent.
Everything a matter of degree. Each one worse.
One sense gets overwhelmed. Enough! Plenty!
But add to that the clang of crude knife
against bone or other metal, the sharp cries
of one’s own kind or even anything resembling it.
I feel sorry even for the birds caught grabbing
what they thought were morsels from the corner
of its mouth. And the jangling of its purse,
purloined booty of whatever kind
from whatever kinsmen or foes.
It makes me sick with grief. And then,
I feel guilty for that luxury. And then,
of course, the biliousness of guilt, swelling.
I imagine dawn, the stone rolled back, light
and oxygen filtering into the methanous swamp
of the cave – a whiff of hope. And I, too dumb
to figure out a way to vanquish the beast.
Lawyers and soldiers abound, advise me.
A king! A king! My horse for a man
who can figure out some humble ruse
to get us the Hades out of this self-made hell.
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Ten miles below my mother’s turning navel,
I swam in the green light like a thoughtless leviathan
unconscious of Tom Hayden or Tom Paxton or
Tom Harkin or Tom Reed. The world went
to its hell. Tornadoes ripped Wall Street, the seawall
wasn’t made high enough to keep Broadway
from the Flood of Twenty-Twelve.
This is the compact the world has made
with its maker, an understanding that the made thing
comes unmade on a regular basis, sand recalling
rock recalling the horrible pressure and plants
and the mad swirl of atoms spewed a moment
or two after the original idea.
In the green light I knew, but didn’t let on.
It’s not that I thought that all that destruction
was funny. Or unfunny either (which is not to say
tragic, which has more to do with comedy
as far as an order of things) –
and not to say it wasn’t those things either.
The history of terror and loss, of happiness and
perfect continuity – all these are what make
the sere light shift to green, as if to say: “Behold”
and for it to be so.
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for TK
Dust settling, I become more aware
of all the weights you carry:
burgeoning baby’s heart
tilted southwest,
goodbye to nana
and the tilting of your own,
chin up for prostrate boy-buddha’s
too-much birthday party.
If only my awareness
extended everywhere.
If only I could feel
what it feels like to be not me.
Selfish I that only sees
what it can see.
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January 16, 2011 12:31 pm
The planet’s running out of oxygen and so am I.
My house is a cage filled with crazy people,
so I run outside, but it’s crazy out there too,
lunatics driving heavy machinery faster and faster,
late for soccer practice or the latest installment
of their Massive Ego Projection situation reality show.
I fall weeping in the breakdown lane, remembering
how the last time I was kicked in the kidneys
by a big red truck with chrome piping, hoping
this time he’ll finish the job – but no, a horde
of ladies in just-above-the knee business suits
surrounds me and forces me toward salvation,
luring me with cupcakes and a semi-automatic
in the middle of my back. I don’t want to die
with my heart all exposed like that, so I step
onto their RV Coach. It smells like heaven in there,
lilac and sugar mixing with the flavors of the
toilet at the back. The bus lurches forward.
It’s too late for suicide, and the Islamic terrorists
tied up in the back row, looking uncomfortable
because the seats don’t recline, appear as panicked
as I feel. I turn to the driver – it’s Jesus,
His stigmata made nice by Estee Lauder and red ribbon.
He shrugs, mumbles something about it not being
His idea either. Night has fallen. The bus has pulled
off the freeway, rolls down vacant suburban streets
lit with a pleasant orange glow. Finally,
a wide parking lot, newly sealcoated and striped.
Not here, I pray, to a power greater than my own,
please God, don’t let me be converted here.
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January 15, 2011 10:50 pm
It may be true that all of our blossoms blew away
long ago. Remember the fruit that replaced them.
Knobby for a while, then sweet in its prime.
And the eager faces of those who reached up
to take it. My fruit! My fruit! we sang,
our branches springing up, our messages delivered.
Even the windfall that grew soft in our shadows
taken up by some happy furred and branched thing.
The blush of it rubs off in our hair now,
which grows dry and whispers like dreams.
And see, through the gaps it leaves falling,
our blossoms again, white and blue.
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One of my students
who graduated last June
came to visit today.
He could see I was busy,
knew how I keep
to myself always except
on the stage of my lesson.
He slipped out
of his bag the book
he’d mentioned two months ago
that I’d borrowed from the library
just last Saturday.
I was happy to be following
a suggestion, an offer, a promise
made by one to whom
I’d given all
that I’m able, so little;
to one who’d endured my lessons
with humor, remembered
the humanity at the core,
down under the static,
the flesh, the business.
He put it in my hand,
I slipped it into my bag,
snapped the clasps.
He knew I was busy,
danced on the threshold.
I swiveled in my chair.
There was more,
but we didn’t -
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When I’m not grading student essays and short stories and poems
I like to be on the computer or reading about being on
the computer like I am now. I usually compose in a notebook
with a nice Waterman pen with a real nib and real black ink
that flows like the Oatka Creek which I used to live near
until I moved here to this treed suburb on the other side of
the little city that I live near. This book is, as its
title promises, about the effect the Internet can have on
your brain, as you’d expect, chopping up knowledge and
experience and cooking and shootings and money and family
relationships and all that stuff into bits. The essays
are currently about slavery and consciousness, or they’re
trying to be; and the stories this week are about
anything, the assignment was open, and I got, as they say,
what I paid for on that one. I would like to think
that the reason I’ve not gotten where I wanted in life
is all the bits and pieces of ideas and misspellings
and bad syntax and the funny and frightening way they
think about what they know, or more importantly don’t,
but then again I don’t like to think about it, now
that I know that the Internet and just about everything
leaves tracks in the imprintable brain, soft like clay,
but electrical. My inclination is to blame it on them.
And where does this penchant for blame come from?
Something that will live beyond me and even, hard to
believe, the Internet, and the species; the brain
being nature’s best form of making another one. Some
will beyond my imagining that would rig up such a
detailed conduit for such a cause so crude.
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Lying on the couch
listening to the Emerson String Quartet
trying to raise the dirty ink of Mozart
into something celestial
I’m thinking I would really like a quick nap
but one part of my mind entertains the idea
I might never wake up – something
the other part says can’t happen.
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My brother shuffles the corridor for his third walk of the day.
obedient. I trail behind, as usual, pushing the IV stand,
trying not to bang his heels, add more pain to the rest:
his lower intestine split, then sliced — more pain than I could stand.
Four hours in surgery, a foot of guts sucked out through a hole
in his side — where a bag hangs now. I’m amazed he can even stand.
And what about the future? Farmer, athlete, Home Depot hand.
He grunts at the end of the lap, turns, teeth clenched, the same stand
he takes in the final quarter of lacrosse or basketball, pressing
a bull back into his pen. And me, his brother, David —
second oldest son — how will I fare when the body rebels?
He leads the way, drenched when he hits the bed, taking my hand.
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If my brain were shrunken to the size of an epitaph,
then transmigratory readings could ensue.
Take the pulse of the aftermath.
Take my ever-bearing chalice, please.
In lieu of the grape, the fox.
In media res, the politician’s dirty little war.
Forgetting the neuron’s capacity for cooling,
I bathe in hot blood, and nothing changes.
Sleep in the juniper, sweet book; ignore
ipecac’s irritating reminder, the bits, the dashes –
and if not sleep, feint.
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Squirrel at the feeder, baffled.
Gray skies for the fortieth day straight.
The twenty inches of snow that fell
three weeks ago, compacted, turned to ice,
melted into the grass and gutters
under the first thaw, frozen again.
Two folders of ungraded papers.
Third cup of coffee in the thermos waiting
for noon. Radio silent. Computer blinkered.
Only the slow moving clouds tracing
in one-toned pastel smudges
a sky (in memory) domelike and blue.
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Behind my question this morning about the usefulness of the glass cutting board that hung in the air like yesterday’s bad weather, and behind your plan to clean out the refrigerator and make a menu and the look of longing and fear of lonely disappointment in your eye when you said it, there’s the simpler and more dangerous question of whether each can love the other as much as we want to be loved.
To you, a full refrigerator means comfort, security, a kind of success. To me it means clutter and lost things going bad. And as for the cutting board, I never understood the benefit of cutting on glass, but sometimes attack of the thing looks like attack of the one who loves the thing. From this side of the microscope everything looks clear. It’s hard to remember how it feels to be under the lens,
as when you doubted the advice about soup I’d found on the Internet. “Are you questioning the experience of three seasoned chefs?” I wanted to ask, but what I meant under that unspoken question was the question, “Why don’t you trust me?” I took it to heart, locked it up, and carried it around for a day like a falsely accused prisoner, starved and in the dark,
and for the rest of the morning we tiptoed around each other’s little wounds, looking for a bit of untortured skin we could touch and say, “Hello, are you in there? What’s cooking today?” Aching for the tender and unassailable purity of onions and garlic in hot oil becoming spirit and this evening’s soup.
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New moon finds me creeping
up the back stairs. A friendly
crack of light and a rush of air
follows me down a falling
where I land with a crack
of the neck, utterly robbed.
And then at play again with a flair
for the ordinary, the celebrated
blas�, a role in a suit and an income
mounted on refuse and the children
who make their living there. One day
I put the Mercedes into reverse
too soon, find myself falling again,
my parachute made of my own new skin.
This time I swear I�ll remember
whose shoulders it is I stand on.
Until the backwards music
stops again and there I am, blinded
by the new horizon. Naked. Utterly
intrepid.
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Besides his basement battles with plastic troops,
my brother dug a pit in the strip of woods
behind our house, anachronistic foxhole
for an imagined Gettysburg. The felt
hats we’d kept as keepsakes of that brawl
(in which, though one side was declared the victor,
men on both sides lost) – we wore until
the rain made blue trickle down our necks.
Then they resumed the shapes that nature favors.
Now in our new northern home, his hole
also fades into its natural form,
the soft Long Island sands foiling his
enactment of a haven where he could carry
out his war against our parents’ parting.
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An infestation of house flies in December
wakes me from a daydream in which
I have been behaving like a high school
English teacher who wished he were a poet.
The big ones are dumb, and can often
be swatted or caught mid-air. Stunned, they buzz
for a moment in the palm until crushed and tossed
into the trash from which they may have been begotten.
Mulling over these images, like a writer at his desk
trying to ignore the reflection in his computer monitor
which is, for once, not turned on, and which signals
what it was he was looking for anyway,
I’m startled by a crash, as of furniture overturned
in an upstairs room, or a fantasy of my mother
storming about some undone chore.
Heartsick, I run around the house, inspecting,
finally seeing through the kitchen window
chunks of ice broken on the back patio slate
that have slid from the roof where they’ve gathered
like vain glaciers until this New Year’s thaw.
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The mega-bank’s bold blue letters hover
but don’t hesitate above the plaza’s
still-anxious post-Christmas shoppers.
Deals and shadows of deals circulate like river-fog
or traces of scent from rotting fruit
or vermin in a cellar somewhere. Streets plowed
and salted two days ago, snow and ice
creep their fingers back out into the roadway
to say, Remember what belongs to us.
Cars poke grumpily along, contributing
in their own small ways to a predictable
and unimagined doom. Later in the day
my almost two-year niece who loves the cold
and snow, by dusk has had enough, wind
down her neck too long, little fingers
lost to sensation, a darkness at the core
that triggers long cries reminding us
of the first and last loneliness –
until the woodstove’s friendly fire and a plate
of crackers draws quiet across her tiny chest,
and ours, like some kind of blanket.
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We take ourselves seriously when we’re acting clownish (forgetting clowns’ painted evil); we bumble around when most in need of discernment. Then we see a light. But it’s a streetlight, in front of a convenience store. We go in, buying something. Soon we’re spraying the bushes with burning styrene. A pause, a brief period of industry and spending, a whirlwind, and after the clutter rots down a bit, a return. Pronounless.
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I love Uncle Vanya because
he tries so hard, and I know what that’s like.
I love Uncle Vanya because
he has handled both sheaves and accounts
and holds no enmity for any man
who knows how to turn his hand to hard work.
I love Uncle Vanya because
he can mimic the man strangling
on the lanyard of his own devising
so comically, like a fat cat choking on a fish bone,
tongue lolling, hacking, he makes you believe
he could really do even that someday.
I love Uncle Vanya because
under all that frustration and pettiness
he can soften a little, just for a few minutes.
Of course Sonya is the better person,
purer of heart, more interested in truth,
more forgiving, even if a bit Pollyanna.
One can’t argue who suffers more.
It’s not a contest. It has more to do
with style than who gets to
the finish line first.
I love Uncle Vanya not because
I have wasted my life, though I can’t say
I’ve made the best use of it either,
but only because he’s so good at what he is.
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Dear Daniel —
I’m too drunk to make sense
just now, or I’d call you
on the phone. My tongue
is clotted. My brain
temporarily bedded down.
I think
I’ve never understood your poems
until now. No, I know it,
not think.
In manuscript,
hung by clothespins from wires
in a basement in the foreskin
of Lake Michigan
I was looking
for something
I could take away from your drafts.
That kind of theft.
~ ~
From the first
you make me see.
Allow. Perform.
“Rhetoric enacts shapes of mind,”
she’d said.
~ ~
I’m begging for forgiveness.
I’m 51 years old.
All I’ve wanted was to sing.
Now I’m afraid I’m falling asleep.
Keep singing. Someday
I might hear it, realize
I’ve mistaken the curtain
for a wall.
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You cried over the knives because,
unsure of how to thank your boyfriend’s
parents for them, you waited for inspiration.
Days passed, your little boy’s father cut
his beautiful long hair without your permission,
you gave three free treatments, and the electric
bill was higher than ever. Do you ask
your boyfriend for more help with the rent?
You have some hours at the clinic, though
not as many as you hoped, but that’s okay
because it gives you more time with the boy
and your new man. Still, everyone’s breathing
down your neck and calculating your value
on more scales than you can possibly fill,
and all in different currencies. Admit it,
you’re more pissed than you’ve ever been
or imagined being at your boyfriend because
he downplayed the importance of the thank you
letter, and you foolishly swallowed his smooth
assurances. And after you’ve finished wiping up
the tears, and crumpling the evidence of your lost
dignity, you wander into the kitchen, where
there are fresh peaches on the counter
that you picked up yesterday, perfectly ripe.
You slide the biggest knife out of the block
and lightly slice the peach’s beautiful skin
twice. The red and yellow fruit falls
into perfect quarters on the board.
You put one in your mouth, the scented
sugary juice swirling like the waters
around your favorite desert island.
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The well is nearly dry.
At the bottom a foot or two of water.
The pipe sucks up mostly sand and dirt.
In the mirror at the bottom
my face is only a quivering shadow,
the sky behind it clear but circumscribed.
I climb down with a bucket
and scoop it a quarter full. The ladder
is hauled up. The sand grows suddenly soft.
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I hate it when people chew.
I really do.
And I hate it when they breathe.
I wish they would leave.
I like it when you clean your nails.
It never fails
to make me feel like life has a purpose.
That I’m not worthless.
I hate it when people disagree with the President
or the way our money’s spent.
If you don’t like it why don’t you move to Iraq?
And don’t come back.
I love it when everyone falls into line.
It looks so fine.
Like Flanders Fields, or Arlington.
The sign we won.
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The walls are cluttered with paper
and the chalkboard isn’t written on that much.
The smell of burnt coffee mixes with the dust
of the classics. The windows are half-blind.
In spite of it all, my pen is a pretty
kind of blue, and squishy in the middle.
I’d like to give it to my new friend
but I don’t think she’d understand.
Why do you stand up there, day after day,
killing Shakespeare over and over again?
His sonnets can barely defend themselves
and even the clock is too tired to move.
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Would you give all but food and shelter
and the rapt attention of your parents
for longer than a minute
in trade for the roar and convenience
of the gasoline engine and the irony
of smoky coal firing your illumination?
Your thumbs fly over the keypad, hungry
for confirmation that your uniqueness
is one of the greater blessings of creation.
Your garden abounds with a perfect balance
of hues and a progression of pretty-faced flowers
begging for the bees to fulfill their needs
to mate pollen with stigma, but even when the
neighbors shower compliments, your deflections
leave you missing the very thing you thirst for.
You drive to a show, hoping to see magnified
the codex of infinite affirmation, but find fault
with the action, direction, the whole premise.
Returning to your home, its superfluous rooms
lit head to toe, a beacon tossed to a universe
too infinite for the signal to be noted,
you stand in the glare of the open coldbox
stuffed with bright colors and slogans,
angry at the surplus of choices.
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In lieu of a poem I send you
my aching back, the applause
my slideshow generated at the
retirement dinner, the stigmata,
stepping between 52 conversations
and the susurrus of cheap silverware
and porcelain to seek silence, finding
none, forgetting even the name of
the restaurant when it came time
to introduce the guests of honor,
the wine, the water, the cake,
the crown of thorns, the people
I never got around to greeting,
more wine, overcooked beef
in a kind of gravy I almost
but would never really call
sauce, and plenty of carbs, plenty,
and that includes the mediocre wine,
and the inevitable feeling of betrayal,
mine, of them, and a kind of acceptance
too, theirs, of me, and my bumbling,
and nothing unusual, in fact.
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The pillory of my sinuses and throat
The cage of my breast
suspended above hot coals
The gutter of my entrails
The oubliette of my sex
The portcullis of my escape
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My students want to know why poetry’s
so difficult. The old stuff reeks of death
and flowers, drowned in synonyms so Greek
they ossify your brain and stink your breath.
And modern verse, if you can call it that,
halts and undermines itself and trips
more than it turns, or turns too fast, falls flat
or just into the thing it fears — the crypt.
An upstart, cranky singing, clever, coy,
anaesthetizing grief with distance, grieved
to feel alone, and proud to prove that joy
cannot be proved, believing disbelief,
cries, “I want to cry. I feel broken.”
Too ironied to feel its heart break open.
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Almost always good enough
but not great
I left my gold by the roadside
hoping someone else would pick it up
I sat all day in the bazaar
trading tangles I hadn’t yet made
reveal themselves to me for
drafts of temporary consolation.
Atonement – a clever pun
when you break it down
and make it fit your ideology
But not so funny in the end.
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One day God puts on human cloth,
finds dire pettiness, wonders,
Discovery? Or invention?
This mixing of higher mind and hunger.
Something itches just below
the level of skin. Lost
in the fog, unable to scratch,
He crushes the bug,
shakes the baby, tickles
the trigger that propels
the pellet that slays
the infidel who falls
into silence beyond
even His reach.
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The first time I felt myself disappearing
the doctor’s harsh hand on my backside
brought me howling back to shocked attention.
It was my mother’s turning her gaze away,
withholding the thing I felt I was born for
that made me bury myself a second time, slowly.
Tonight I let myself fall into the emptiness I fear.
I inhale oceans of it. Pain and joy, mine, yours:
I drown in them. I swell. I vanish into everything.
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Overly shiny shoes
A string of sunny days, daytime temps in the upper 70s, and nights inside in front of the TV
A disregard for authority
A disregard for poverty
A diet high in saturated fats and fried foods
A confusion of asking with begging
Taxidermy
Keeping one’s nose to the grindstone
The wrong kind of indolence
A collection of small glass animals sequestered in a glass corner cabinet,
while across the room three acres of glass pastures lie dustless and vacant
except for a triad of Chinese willow-ware vases
Thought. Precision. A problem-solving attitude
Indignation with no tangible target. Bereavement with no discernible source
Careless proofreading
Overt acts of kindness on sanctioned occasions, except for oneself
The fact that, by reason, He has disproved his existence
Numerology. Kant. The Bible
A surplus of answers, and only facile questions
Anticipation. Memory. Ambition. Faith
Nothing to wear
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light pink
and lavender
ribs
after rain
fading
light through
the study
windows
in the new
house
old dust
in the carpet
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After my longest teaching day of the week
after what feels like the longest year
of my teaching careerI stop at 303 Red Oak Way
to lay down twenty dollars for the faded
used picnic umbrella for our stone patio
which bakes us all summer.
At home I pull out the lawn mower
to re-enact the most useless ritual
of my career as a homeowner,
remember I’m out of gas, drive
to Sunoco to fill the little red can,
mow the lawn. Stripes up, stripes down.
The optimists of doom have called happily
for drought, so I water the garden. I shower,
I drink, I hope to watch a half hour of the latest
worst disaster, until I’m called to set chicken
on the grill. Maybe tonight after grading papers
and answering email I’ll write that poem.
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I won’t tell you where I’ve been. I’m afraid
in an effort to kick sand over my usually
mournful or authentic self I’ll become clever.
I’m afraid I’ll employ metaphors like a set
of good German knives made in China
so no matter how good you are
with a stone they still slice knuckles
rather raggedly. See, it’s happening already.
I’m afraid I’m old, and BOOM
it happens, I’m old, just like that.
One day I forget how it happens.
Day two it won’t matter.
Forgetting you’ve lost everything
is still better than whatever
happens after you lose everything.
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December 30, 2009 8:11 am
Swimming away from the green horizon,
I didn’t know quite what to expect, although
I had an inkling of desiccation and light.
I sensed there would also be flowers,
a kind of spiral dancing among lavender
and apple blossoms I’d later equate with sex.
But all I knew then was a fluttering in my belly,
a rush of water and the quiet world twisting
and heaving in a way that was both monstrous
and fun. A new sensation in my belly
I’d call fear. Some form of tremendous love
pressed down on my sun-shaped face.
I came to know deformity. I learned
the perfect grief of leaving some perfect part
of myself behind forever.
What I didn’t reckon with was the shouting,
the fire-tipped calipers, the rigid god
who drew me into air like an aborted sacrifice.
My final learning was of hate, and it wrapped
its rubber hand around me like a net,
dangled me above the crowd, inverted
and shrieking for everyone to witness,
the ridicule and pity in their howls
a rasp against my brand new skin.
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December 28, 2009 11:13 am
It’s not that I ever got over my fear of death.
I just became too busy to remember.
In that way also I avoided an intimacy with strangers
which was really all I wanted.
I had studied the plastic breastplate
and the plastic sword I’d begged for as a child,
made them stronger with a collection
of daily insults. The imagined ones were best.
I erased the memories of fear and pain,
then erased the erasures. I bleached
the unsoiled linens, forgave the forgiven,
skirted the camouflage cover of moss and sticks
I’d built above the vertiginous void
which was my origin and my salvation.
And in the order of my ink and clips and paper
announced my arrival at my arctic bliss.
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December 27, 2009 11:31 am
I pour the coffee into the cream
and all the faces I want to put my hand to
float up from my diaphragm, clotting.
I open the red curtains fearing
to fade old engravings and photographs
of relatives taken by relatives.
That’s how much I crave sun.
And fearing to ask questions
not because I don’t love answers,
but that something in the teletype
part of my brain can only ask questions,
I let them instead dissolve
into today’s anatomy of distractions.
Near the end, stomach swollen
with pizza (fatal antidote) and beer
(muse of poets, bringer of daylight dreams
and a sudden nap on the couch)
I wake in time for the anchor
to announce my mother did love me
once, but at the moment I was too busy
crying to notice.
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December 26, 2009 5:22 pm
It’s hard to write a poem
the day after Christmas
with guests in the house
reading in the living room
to music you won’t hear
for another year, their baby
in the guest room swaddled
in coats. Easier after
a heart-slicing argument
with the wife, seeing a tsunami
swamp an island, or hearing
all about the new Macbeth.
The medieval carols swell
like crystalline bells, like wind
in a belfry, or children sighing.
Pages rustle slowly, like a hand
around a shoulder, and I open
a book, its ink still sweet.
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December 25, 2009 9:17 am
December 19: Small Miracle
Saturday. The calendars says
Hanukkah ends. Goyim
timekeeping. But that’s okay,
I’m half-goy myself
and my wife is full-blooded.
We light the last candles late
again, too busy or forgetful
on Thursday and Friday.
Every few years we have enough
left over to skip buying a box
entirely. Small miracle.
December 20: Agley
The best laid plans
take a back seat again
to urgencies of the season.
Three short errands
become an afternoon -
collecting the long-neglected
Goodwill donation,
the last few stocking stuffers
(decisions as weighty
as the boxes under the tree),
the grocery list that swells
from three to twelve.
Folders of ungraded papers
get demoted to a chair
from the top of the kitchen table.
December 21: Teaching Tolerance
A three-day week at the high school
between Hanukkah and Christmas
is a series of hours that teaches us
the limits of our seasonal imperatives.
December 22: Haiku
Forgive them, for they
have not done their homework, as
I haven’t either.
December 23:Ho Ho Whatever
I have my principles. I shall not
show The Grinch all day to my classes.
If they bothered to come to school
I shall reward them with meaningful activities.
Until today. Maybe a sign of kindness,
or of increasing age and indifference.
Go ahead, forget the research paper.
Play your Internet puzzles and games.
December 24: Another Kind of Ritual
Out of my son’s homecoming at almost every holiday
I have made a new ritual: improvise a sumptuous supper,
share a meaningful movie, drink and smoke too much
but deny it, until the next day which I spend
entirely in bed, missing the party downstairs
with ever-growing and ever more beloved relatives.
My son cooks gumbo, does dishes, entertains.
I make three ghostly appearances, pale or green,
attempting to be well, failing. My body knows better,
sends me back to bed. I resolve to be as smart
as it someday.
December 25: Risen
Rising early, purged
and ashamed, I finish
the final wrappings. Prepare
for twelve hangover jokes
and ribbings, one hug.
That done, pray for clarity,
forbearance, and love.
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