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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When God visits me he appears at first
as a citrus smell in my wife’s hair
and the next morning as a certain oppressive
yet beautiful humidity after the 3 a.m. thunderstorm.
The day after that, I’m lying on the couch
when He emanates from my belly-button
reminding me of the old days
when I used to swim in the green light
and anticipate my life like a birthday
and not like a sentence that becomes wordier as it nears its conclusion.
God waves all that aside with a gesture
of layered clouds viewed from a hammock
at 8 p.m. on a June night.
“There, there,” He coos, as He rubs
that particular place on my back
that lets me know I am loved.
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Maybe it’s that I’ve become fat and forgetful in my fifties
that I think it’s time for something newer than negative capability.
Maybe it’s that the Gulf of Mexico’s slowly being churned
into a new kind of parking lot that I grow tired of these metaphors.
My suits are getting tighter while my skin is growing slack.
Youth is wasted on the young and wisdom on the wise.
Winds on the horizon swell near shore. Between bells
the sounds of heavy shuffling, shouts of greeting and menace.
The lights go out if I’m still for longer than six minutes,
but at night I lie awake in darkness for hours.
It’s only when I wish I were an animal or tree
that I consider what a life without dreaming might be.
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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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December 19, 2009 12:23 pm
Money issues had got me down again, so I drove
to Dina’s office because she photographs well
nude in the desert. In spite of my scorn
for brokerages, I liked her building with its jungle
landscaping and Spanish colonial architecture,
and I was pleased as I walked through its dim,
cool corridors that this time I knew the way.
But her sign on the wall had been replaced,
and the entrance to her office remodeled.
Back in the parking lot I remembered, again,
she’d moved to a new location, but I’d lost
those directions, and she didn’t answer my calls.
There was a corporate shuttle on the blacktop,
so I boarded it, sat down across the aisle
from a corpulent manager thumbing through papers.
After a while, without agency, the van pulled onto the street,
and I finally spied the driver using passenger-side controls.
Up the main drag in Denver we lumbered, heading north,
twenty businessmen by then, and me. On my phone
I began again to read The Brothers Karamazov,
when it dawned on me that Dina didn’t work
for that company any more, and dawned on me again
we were no longer headed for the branch office,
but seemingly the airport, and then Toronto,
just over the border. Even if I had gotten off then,
I had no car to get me home, no passport,
lost and at the mercy of indifferent authorities.
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December 17, 2009 7:36 pm
Let’s talk about the ways we’ve been abandoned.
She, at seven days, by a mother preoccupied by
the Chevy she’d lifted from her parents,
taking it home, childless. And you, less
dramatic, but nonetheless traumatic –
the rapture threatening daily to spin
you off like a Kansas twister, vying
with the safety pin stuck safely
in your crotch to teach you
something about staying put, and
something about the distance
between your mother’s love and
yours. And mine, less urgent
of all, less wonderful – oh, I forget.
Was it something I imagined? Who
can see it? Recall? Can you? Can you? Can she?
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December 15, 2009 9:10 pm
For a while it helped to remember that I am nothing.
Nobody home.
But I am also desire.
I am that stream.
There’s no such thing as nothing.
My thoughts invade everything I touch
and when my body’s gone
it scatters into everything.
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December 14, 2009 9:31 pm
i
on the car radio yet
another jazzed version of
walking in a winter wonderland
the dj spins bitten
by a cajun bug
in disneyworld
ii
geese fly east and west
and east and west
north is lost
all their darling hatchlings
gorged by ferocious
fuzzy warm things
the polar bear is dead
except for dwindling replicated
museumed artificats
iii
before Aristotle showed
the sky was not a ceiling
but a space between
the soil and sole
revealed in walking
we grieved
at life’s brief leash
now Hade’s cave
seems a hopeful place
what we’d give
for those grey days
in eternity
iv
we’re not supposed
to write poems about politics
this is not one of them
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December 13, 2009 10:02 am
Snow compacts leaves in the front garden,
melts; a new freeze comes, thaws again.
Skin breaks from ribs: next summer’s soil.
After supper we unclip stiff
sheets from wires slung on basement joists,
fold and put away for next week’s use.
We write the Christmas letter, fold and seal,
unearth the list of friends we wish were near,
peel stamps, surrender to the darkened box.
Clouds sift in, a promise of snow and sleet.
The fattened squirrels twitch in their sleep.
A few sparrows flock, seeking seeds.
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December 12, 2009 11:31 am
My legs are cold.
My blood thickens.
My twelve-page Christmas letter falls over and puts a nice crack in the garage floor.
My instinct tells me not to turn around, my desire lunges, my intelligence condemns.
My dreams abandon me daily.
My inertia slams into my entropy, but my no-fault policy seems to have no effect.
My Rolodex recounts Kepler without citations.
My Sunday surrenders, balmy.
My laundry hangs, damply.
My turtleneck from Penney’s hangs, pilly.
My pages run out.
My bed calls, guiltily.
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December 11, 2009 10:59 pm
My poem for yesterday
was lying in bed
sunlight blazing
against the curtain
some small celled thing
crawling through my system
the way I crawl home
after work
fighting through pain
for position.
My poem for yesterday
was feverish,
written by a lazy man
aching for work
drowning in anguish
and phlegm.
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December 10, 2009 7:33 pm
Beneath the August moon
the crickets churned
and flames danced on your face.*
We donned our heels to stamp them out.
Disguised in ordinary plaids
we added the remainders
and divided the unrequited lovers’
penchant for a taste of antimony.
Frolics were forgone. Deeds
were deemed superfluous. Renegade
and reggae headdresses patterned
after Antigone’s Neanderthal
ancestors flared and vanished
in the same thought. To fill
the void we invented ritual,
convention, and time-wasting devices.
* Borrowed from a 12th grade fiction submission
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December 9, 2009 11:03 pm
It’s the season of the unseasonable birth – dead winter
wherever you are, under this aspect of the sun.
Even the desert greens disguise themselves in the dun
of death. The holly and the ivy comply,
but palely. People are mean. They want to kill me.
I want the same. Jesus Christ, give it up.
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The train horn sounding its archetype
of loneliness down by the ranch houses
and their televisions and gas grills
nonetheless eases the pain.
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Before Thanksgiving at your in-laws
some voice stirs in you, says,
I’m gonna get you wasted.
Some other voice replies,
Oh no you’re not. It’s bad.
You don’t like it.
No one listens to that voice,
the first voice says.
So you scurry to the basement,
to the storeroom in the back
where the old twine, twelve oak boards,
and mildewed maple syrup
lie bearded in dust
and pack a bowl
with sticky bud,
light it up.
Through the haze
you remember now why
it might have been a bad idea.
If you could, now
you’d peel back the caul
covering up the question
you can’t remember
to ask.
You want to feel better.
That’s all.
But covering up that feeling
is some ancient anger,
punky with moisture and drought
in wrong proportions.
Or ossified, steely, or just really,
really.what? Hard.
And covering up that anger
is the present one,
just a few hours old.
And underneath them both
a little fear.
And underneath the little fear
a bigger one.
But anyway, none of what now occurs
to you occurs for very long.
Giddy with the tingle
of basement molds
and the lurid 40 watt
rainbows of the naked bulbs
you rise into the steam
and conversation
of the packed kitchen.
At dinner you make
silly conversation,
give your in-laws
one more story
to layer over
who everybody
thinks you are.
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Monday morning the main office secretary asks what’s going on in the woods out my way. “Oh, they want to open the trails to mountain bikes,” I say, tossing mail I never asked for in the bin. “Not those,” she pursues. “The Ponds.” A body found strangled and abandoned in her car among the birches that borers and leaf miners have left alone.
I don’t know, and shuck the inquiry. I don’t watch TV, mostly ignore the top half of front page’s bait. Murders and gossip aren’t news to me, though they’re hard to escape.
Next day, on the radio, between segments on Afghanistan and holiday breads, the local spot tells how the husband’s now suspect, a professor of business and media psychology. An uncontrolled holiday argument, I assume.
It makes one reflect on the fragility of our natures, one’s unassuming neighbors, what’s ticking inside. Then quickly return to troubles of our own: rude drivers, the question of the perfect present for my wife, my own piles of papers to be graded. Every year this season grows less and less forgivable. “Let’s stop giving and getting,” I silently wish. “Let’s do something meaningful, help a family in need, write poems for each other, plant a tree.”
On Thursday, not a word, all is still on the matter.
Today, driving home, for the first time I hear the murdered wife’s name. I knew her, a photographer, an adjunct at the same college as he, but known better as wilderness defender, fighting fiercely to save the same woods where her mate delivered his final irony.
I stop at the Christmas Fair where the alternative groups sell Peruvian caps, handmade soaps, Tibetan scarves. Declaring self-reliance, fair trade, peace. The table where she would have sat selling gel prints of the Ponds in all seasons now inhabited by a sculptor who has risen from the waiting-list, peddling his coffee-can characters.
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Her greatest fear, she said,
was that she’d come home
to herself, and there’d be
no one there.
I took
that on, and the door
of my cell swung open.
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“you can’t turn feelings off like a water faucet…”
Jenn Adams, Facebook status post
Sometimes you come home and you realize you left your feelings running and the whole first floor is flooded with feelings and you rush upstairs to turn the feelings off but you slip on the stairs and there you are, drowning in all the feelings on the first floor again, until you grab onto the tv that’s floating around in them and you catch your breath and get back on your feet, and then it’s back up the stairs, more carefully this time, and you finally get the feelings shut off. “Oh jeez,” you realize, “my feelings bill is going to be through the roof this month!” Good thing it wasn’t the hot feelings tap, you think, trying to look on the bright side.
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The body struggles against the obvious
conclusion that the mind readily grasps
and wields like a small machete
against the soft belief and prayer
and buried memory of the body’s hope
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December 2, 2009 11:02 pm
Monday, the day of our birth,
we loved and grieved without anticipation
the scented aura and ample music
of everything within our blurred universe.
Tuesday we beheld the beauty
of actual trees and rocks, palms
and fingers, voices, eyes.
Learned to guard against their pricks.
Wednesday we invented a fire
swaddled in mouth shapes. A pride
swelled within and was crushed. Some
chose a salve of sadness, some dominion.
On Thursday the mirror cracked.
Our trees withered or drowned.
We nevertheless denied more
than a passing interest.
By Friday we knew better. Some
lived in surrender. Some in shame only.
Some in resignation that still was blind.
Each an anchor weighing on the next.
Saturday. Did we wonder if grey skies
would part as a matter of course
or faith? Did we confuse the Sunday
of our first bliss with our last?
December 2, 2009
Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
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for Jim
That’s the truth of it. At least when you really
need them. The other truth is that most days
there are plenty. Copying wrong answers,
sending pictures of their naked girlfriends
to all the guys on the team, and then some,
until her ultimate act of affection
is known from here to Naples, Fla.
Or swatting each other with hats because
that’s how guys say they love each other,
and besides, it really pisses you off.
Or stealing cash from the Senior Class
cash box, candy from the weak kid, or any
of the other idiocies of adolescence.
But when you really need them,
they’re quiet as ghosts in November.
In March your ex serves you up
with new papers, just before
the custody settlement’s complete,
just as you’re signing on a house,
just when your investments finally tank.
In April your mother goes for surgery
and comes out locked up like a budgie
in a vise – backed up, unconscious
for two days, then cranky and alien
for seven. Almost not your mother.
Then the clock rolls around to May
and you’re wondering, What next?
Why me? and Who made this big mess?
And you can’t stop wondering because
all of a sudden the knuckleheads have gone
silent. They look only at their own papers,
and keep their cell phones in their pants.
The till comes up even on Friday.
You stand there at the front of the room
almost crushed by the quiet,
the obedience. You want some chaos
to break out, the sweet distraction
of boyish mayhem that you can still
with a certain slant of eyebrow,
or a pen and report in triplicate
at worst. But they’re quiet, as though
they know something’s up,
something big. They’re like animals
in that way – wily and sweet at once,
and sometimes you wish you could
sock them in the arm, just a little.
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everything would be as simple
as splitting a big pile of wood.
Even the big pieces from the trunk
that I couldn’t manage to get a wedge in.
When Andy came to get the part of the pile
I’d promised him, I was out on an errand.
When I got back, he had split it all, even
the big ones. That was okay. Maybe I had
inadequate tools. Or maybe it was me.
It didn’t really matter. I had done what I could,
and so had he. We shook hands, and he left.
It was so much easier than love.
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White cat is on the prowl again, stepping through the jungle of the backyard, territorializing. Cautious, and a little baggy in the brisket, I had thought he was a she. When I finally met the back neighbors, they told me he regularly beats up our next-door neighbor’s black cat, Simba.
Beloved Simba. Muscled, friendly as a fourth grader. Whereas the white cat remains aloof, seemingly timid, watchful.
Last night at the amateur film festival, we met our acquaintance, Rich. Zen Rich. Serene Rich. I’d met him at a bookstore reciting Eliot. Next at a campsite at a poetry festival, on to Pound.
He was just parking his motorcycle. I wouldn’t have thought he was the type, but then, I’m not sure what type he should have been. Toyota Tercel, Dodge Ram, BMW – nothing seems to fit.
In the fourth film there he was, leathered-up, evil goatee, raging at one of the peep show girls, complicating the plot. After, he told me he was also the abusive boyfriend in the pickup waling on the star. The hostility seemed foreign to me, yet available.
White cat stalks a squirrel. Simba, nowhere to be seen.
Categories: Poems
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In the wall of your fortress
you open a narrow breach and fire
arrow after arrow at me.
Each one enters, bites. I feel
the hot fury of your hatred and hurt.
I see you on the height, raging.
When you are exhausted I let go
the bird to fly through the wound
you have opened in your defenses.
Categories: Poems
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So I had taken some stuff down to the basement and saw the rack with jeans and shorts and socks drying on it, still a little damp and it getting on in the evening so I scooped the lighter stuff into a basket to dry and left the jeans there, thinking maybe this was one of those Bill Lavender or Sarah Freligh moments of simplicity that could be turned into poetry or language at least. Damp socks and jeans. Well, it was worth a shot, and the thing I care about is good language, as I said earlier today to Jake, who for all his anarchistic ideas surprised me by saying he loved Godot because of its good language, and I thought, “Yeah, what else is there to like about it?” but said, “Most kids hated that play,” with a little chuckle, which I suppose suggested the dark thread running through me.
At the Bill Lavender reading I challenged a bunch of them to come to my house Saturday night for a party, Sonja and the others I didn’t know, Allan, whom I had at least met before, and Greg, who looked familiar but whom I couldn’t place, and Eileen, whom I insulted with a comment that was meant to be a joke but I’m pretty sure remained an insult. Sonja had introduced me to her and said something like, she’s not a poet or a novelist or anything, and I said something like, well, as long as she’s not stupid or boring it’s okay. Even now I think it was a funny thing to say, but it didn’t really go over well. People that don’t know me don’t get my sense of humor all the time, how dry it is. Additionally, I can be kind of transparent, emotionally, and people can see the anger lurking just below the surface, and think it’s intended for them. No, I would tell them, if I could, it’s just pretty much there all the time.
I just want to clear up what I said about Godot, though there’s the danger that it might get a lot more complicated than I want. I didn’t mean to say there wasn’t more to like about it, but after trying to figure out what it’s about for 20 years, you come to the conclusion that it’s really, really obvious what it’s about, or else it’s really, really obscure, but either way, any of the interpretations you might arrive at based on either conclusion isn’t as interesting as the language itself, the repartee that paints itself into a corner, the borrowed eloquence that shows how truly beautiful simplicity is, and the way simplicity is pantsed by nihilism.
See, I told you. Anyway, I was glad Jake liked it for that reason, and rattled off a lot of movies he should watch, and forgot to mention a raft of others. None of them anarchist or political, not because I don’t believe in those things, but I’ve just never seen a good movie made by or about them. Maybe with the exception of Algiers.
The buzzer on the dryer just went off. So whatever happened to Bill Lavender? Someday I’ll get back into his book about Katrina. The bastards. Not the ones who thought up the hurricane (those whimsical gods of Olympus), but the ones who thought it was a good idea to dig canals up the estuaries of Louisiana, the ones who sold real estate below sea level, who shipped slaves from Nova Scotia, who devised an alphabet to more easily control the sale of cattle, bovine or other.
My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, Wings of Desire, Fanny and Alexander, Seventh Seal, Lars and the Real Girl, Where the Road Bends (Gypsy Caravan), City of God, Delicatessen, 8 ½, Volver.
Categories: Essays & Rants
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December 25, 2008 8:57 pm
We had missed the plane to Tulsa
and as we drove home from the airport
the snow melted back into rain
and flooded the canals
running perpendicular to the highway.
Next morning, I awoke to the sound
of you whirring berries red like God’s blood
and grinding coffee. I roasted
the duck while you shoveled what was left
of the snow back onto the walk.
We spent the rest of the day on the phone
rehearsing memories with distant families,
or in bed, or walking in the raw sunlight
and the wind like a frisky puppy
threading its leash around our legs
and down our necks, or shaking
hands and exchanging boxes
of chocolates with new neighbors.
Near the end of the day, not even halfway
through the last present and still marveling
at the miracles of whipping cream
and electricity, we played dominoes
at the familiar table, tucking in
ghosts like old friends.
December 25, 2008
Categories: Poems
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