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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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?

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

The train horn sounding its archetype
of loneliness down by the ranch houses
and their televisions and gas grills
nonetheless eases the pain.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
No Comments »

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.

Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
No Comments »

“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.

Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
No Comments »

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

Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
No Comments »

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
No Comments »

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.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

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.

Categories: Uncategorized
No Comments »

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
No Comments »

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
No Comments »

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
No Comments »

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
No Comments »

1.

“On your left” I said
again, as his wife yanked him
away from the ducks.
“Must be deaf,” I told myself,
and then told myself again.

2.

Toodling along
the dusty canal path, grooves
purr from his boombox
while fancy bikes speed through
his Hanae Mori nimbus.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I sense the way the house
wants to give under its load of goods,

the way the beams will rot
under the betrayal of soil,

the way small seeds with insidious wings
will carry it all around full circle again.

We didn’t choose any of this.
Accident?  It only makes sense

if there’s an opposite to accident.
Waving toward yourself the scent of lavender

growing by the front porch. It only
helps conceal the stink of last night’s fish.

Still, we cultivate the shrub.  Who
would mock his own creation? Only a man.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Anything.

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

Well, you know I’ve had it
so I declare tomorrow a day off
from my obsessive problem solving.
I’ve gone so far as to put on a compelling
movie while I write this poem. Maybe
like Ashbery, or so it was rumored,
it will turn out to be a good poem.
But the movie’s too good, and

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

I keep getting Error 425
Unable to build data connection
Connection refused

I tried to reboot her
but all of her reps said
she was working fine

Then to reboot myself
but I was afraid
I would never wake up

So I just sit here idling
the fan running occasionally
spam about all that gets through

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

I love you when you’re absent
But that is not the same
as love when you are present

And I love you when you’re present
and I love you when I’m present
but you’re not or vice versa

And I love you when you forget me
and when you forget to tell me things
and though I can’t forget you sometimes

I can forget about you
for a few seconds
which isn’t bad on the scale of things

I do and don’t think about
love being one of them
and how it’s different

from being in love
sometimes and sometimes not
not being in love is not

discussable because it
could be too many
other things

This must be love because
I love you when you are absent
present and all the rest

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

It’s not a poem when there are thoughts in it.
It’s not a poem when the crickets are mistaken for jet engines.
It’s not a poem when the carpet lies like a cigar in one place all year.

Life ends when the nose turns in on itself.
Life ends when the promises made in youth scratch the windowpane.
Life ends when your bosom fails to prevent the slice that sends the ball
into the lake.

We bury our past in the hopes of the Internet.
We bury our feelings in the shade of the fledgling pear tree.
We bury our fists in the sockets of comical volcanoes.

Let’s listen to the floors creak.
Let’s listen to the swelling of distant arteries.
Let’s listen to the fall of reindeer.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I don’t know if I can make a poem
out of the minor hell of the last few days’
misunderstandings among relatives, realtors,
lawyers, and property — land and objects themselves —

any more than I can make a life out of them.
Which is to say, with the right frame
of mind, with the right skill, the combination
of desire and will and talent, I might.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Tony’s socks are drab white
and faded grey so that the white
is almost grey and the grey white,
almost. Sort of like Tony, which is not
to say he’s a dull sort of fellow. Quite
to the contrary, he’s a colorful character,
though muted of hue.

Tony’s socks lie folded
on a red pillow. They seem peacefully
asleep there, folded as they are
like a dog’s forepaws, or rather
a dog’s floppy ears upon paws,
asleep by midnight coals. Or perhaps
towhead hair above burnt lobster skin
from a day of jet skiing without sunblock.
Though I doubt he’s the jet-skiing type.

Tony’s socks have lain idle on
my book-closet shelf for exactly a year
today. He shucked them and stuffed them
into his sneakers as we walked off
the boardwalk and onto the sand
of Provincetown where I was taking a class
and he had the goodness to visit
while I was having the toughest of times
with my wife. The end seemed near.

We sat, Tony and I, under the shadow
of someone’s deck, neither of us loving
so much sun. We talked about marriage
and death, how little we knew about
any of them, and about my ignorance of sports,
and his dinner plans. Unaware
at first that my wife was sitting by the shore
a hundred feet away, writing in a notebook
about her heartbreak and hope.

Then he used our bathroom up
at the studio and took his sneakers
but not his socks. So that now
Tony’s socks lie, as though without
life, as though they they can’t actually
hear what I’m saying, as though
they have no heart.

Categories: The Grind
3 Comments »

Have you ever bit-
ten into a submarine
sandwich and felt the cold
steel blue spike penetrate?

Have you ever turned
on the radio to disc-
over your favorite composer
was dead? O Vandervleet!

Or rolled into
the lawn freshly after
mowing, when even the worms
have abandoned their tunnels?

I’ll tell you what it’s like
when you and I meet
on the other side. Here’s
too provisional. It would slip

unnoticed into judgment,
arrest, or obligatory obliteration.
The static here. The distrust.
The polite prevarication.

Or if there’s no place like
here, in a real sense, a sense
of place, of fingers and sound
or sight or anything sentient

then the secret stays a secret.

Categories: The Grind
3 Comments »

Moving from one place to another, we felt alternately like newlyweds and near-divorcees. We never had a real honeymoon: our wedding night in a mediocre hotel (though nice by our standards, more than we afforded ourselves on what we took for holidays in those days) and, after the family left, one night in a lean-to in the Lost Creek Wilderness. I’d forgotten fire for my Coleman white gas single burner camping stove, so I had to drive a mile to the next campsite to beg a pack of matches. The cover blazoned,
“Cancun.” So with this move. We bought before we sold, moved in stages, tried to find room in a smaller space for all we thought we were.

This morning, mad as
I was before bed last night,
as I leave — a kiss.

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

From: “David Ruekberg”
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 10:34 PM
To: “Karen Llagas” ; “DeLana R.A. Dameron”
; “David Ruekberg” ; “ros”
; “Zena Cardman” ; “Vicki
Murray” ; “Tommye Blount”
; “Ross White”
Subject: Email (8/13/08)

> Please do not respond
> to this email. This is an
> automated msg.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Where did it all go wrong? we may well ask.
This sky blue sky threatened with rain, with doom,
with change. This penchant for longing.

In the eaves of a basswood tree a starling
chatters, invader not by its own design: blame
not the bird. Along the country road
Labatt’s Blue cans litter the narrow margins

between stone wall and tarmac, signatures
of some late night high school party on wheels
for the last two years. This, too, must pass.
This must be a beginning, not an end

a voice chimes in. Ego? Spirit? Or
some unnamed construct that someday
will surely be named. The skies become
dotted with various forms of cloud someone

has identified, has found in their action
and being a common coincidence of being
and action. Thought, too travels along
paths of recognizable accidents.

Oh! the many ways of correcting anomalies,
of steering strays back, whipping us
into some shape or other. Oh! the ways
we seek escape. The abnormal, the para,

the wobble. Yet, for every discord, a chord.
For every net, a fall. Somewhere in the brush
behind my chair and pen, some animal snorts.
Nothing I expected, yet might have, could have.

A few seconds later, a half mile away, a gun
goes off, echoes zigzagging along the valley.
No relationship prior to their happening.
Not hunting season. Yet, the deer bounds.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Living with crazy people was once thought
an act of love so desperate that saints
were burnt not as punishment but to save them
from themselves. Only the boys
grinding pigments saw through the hoax.

We know this because of the crickets’
song in August, despite the sudden cold
snap and the cicadas’ contralto. They know
what lurks in October. And they care less.

The French have a name for it,
but they keep it to themselves.
They flounce the baguette, their one
bad impression of their Chinese masters.
So what? they seem say, and make
that gesture for which they are known.

Meanwhile, children and small animals
allied by large eyes and rounded heads
are dying beneath the wheels of self-
propelled machines. As if anything
could be that automatic, that original.

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

Is it that thunderhead piling up in the north
like an advertisement of a creation so magnificent
I would have to be near dead to say, “I don’t care”?

Or is it the man who lays claim to some precious thing
belonging to me, who is so convincing that I begin
to doubt whether the thing is that precious after all,

or even mine, until I escape by falling
into a kind of Buddhist non-attachment,
and then begin to doubt even that assurance?

Or is it the taste of mediocre beer or bread
reminding me of what I could have had, or the din
of the highway three blocks away reminding me

of the country home I left, or the smell of the cut
grass reminding me how beautiful something
so pointless as grass can be?

Or is it only that I was born to cry,
that in order to come fully into this world
I had to announce my ache to live with a roaring

that only yesterday was finally translated
into a phrase I could comprehend, that something
in the world makes me want to cry because

that is the language of being in this world,
each cry a new letter in an alphabet constantly
reconstructing itself with each cry for pain and joy.

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

People are adding me to their Facebook
friends lists faster every day.
It feels strange to be so popular
in an anonymous way.

Meanwhile folks at work
and in my neighborhood wonder
what I look like.
I tried to Google them under

“people I live near” and got
a Facebook thread: “I keep
getting those email too. I’m killing
this profile now. It’s creepy!”

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Even that squirrel
nattering on the pine sprig
reminds me I’m here.

Categories: The Grind
3 Comments »

You say it’s not stonewalling as your backhoe scrapes rock and passable loam five feet away from where my legs lie splayed and your dump truck maneuvers perpendicular to my front gate. It’s okay. I’ve read my contract. I know that in twenty days the wings of law will spread over me and touch my brow with their scaly glow. It’s not what I want.

I understand you don’t trust me. I’ve betrayed myself so many times, how could you? Though I warned you for five years I would someday give up the kingdom left to me. It was the one thing you wanted most.

You see, I was the false king in the story returning home after twenty years to discover his treasure lay among the roots of the cherry tree of his pauper childhood. I have no need of digging. You even could plow it up and take it. Why would I want to hold it in my hands? I just sit with my back against its roughness.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

So there you were, sawing
into wormholes. Or should I say,
boring. Looking for a kind
of existence. Meanwhile,
all your past accomplishments
still felt like future to you.
So much happier than I.

I thought. Until I interrupted
myself to listen. What was
the meaning I had been looking for?
Where was your landing strip?
But these were not the kind
of questions I should have asked.

What’s this? What’s this?
You could inquire for centuries,
etc., and never get bored.
The reverb. The echo.
The sibilance doubling back
down the alleys of infinitude.
Composing atoms. Semi-conscious
breathing things. Finally, music.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

My ego is bigger than yours.

Categories: The Grind
1 Comment »

Today’s version of the journey
began with a computer crash
and my wife’s panicked ransacking
of self out of bed.

Are you familiar with the labyrinth
of ego as manifested in
electronic architecture
and domestic détente?

Are you willing so much
as I am to let go of a slice
of time such as August 5,
7 am to noon, forever,

elbows sunk in mire of Windows
and consultations with Google
and shuffling between offices?
Then it was on to closet doors.

Poorly hung, mangled
by some former tenant’s
circular saw in the middle
of the last century. Here

at least, after five weeks
of near camping-out
in our new house
I came face-to-face

with my demons in the guise
of three pairs of bypass doors.
As you might expect, as I do,
the first two were easily fixed.

The third possessed me
until after eight. That’s when
the devils came out, intoning
their truths, as Buddha and Bill Murray

have made us well aware:
It doesn’t matter. That’s when
darkness finally fell, and its blessed
reminder of nothing.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Self is the heat
to burn off the haze

eyes like fire
body burning

brisk winds in the ears
fan the blaze

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

All it took was her lazy refusal
to push me out and the doctor’s forceps
like two fires at the poles of my skull
to make me turn my back on God
and scream okay if you want me
you’ll have to take me dead

Categories: The Grind
3 Comments »

Some things die.
Some things pass away.
Some things change from one thing into another.

We suffer losses.
We give things up.
We let go.

In the center we feel
a heat, a great sea,
an expansion.

At one end, light breaks
open. At the other
emptiness collapses.

After thunder, silence.
After breath,
no breath.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

We’re not going to get
all serious about all this,
are we? A hint

of nomenclature is all I need
to give me bad dreams, a hard
belly, soft willy.

I spend my days in serious detritus
as it is, as in: what to do
about the lawn, my wife, the meaning of it all.

For the sake of all the beans.
Open me gently.
Watch your thumbs.

Categories: The Grind
4 Comments »

Death, has that been your hand
pressing on my back all these years?
I thought it was the clock

with its pincers and knives,
its Catherine wheels
and little distances.

Was that your black neon
flashing in the dark
that I followed like a scent?

Your constant comparisons
are a ruler by which I lay out
my plot. Thing is,

it’s a relative measure,
it’s not absolute. It kills
me every time I use it.

And your cloak of fine
distinctions, of thought,
at first was just a loan,

but now I wear it greedily,
coveting it even
when it’s on my own shoulders,

your finger like a flipped tag
poking at my neck.

Categories: Poems
1 Comment »

Sitting near the window,
some days a breeze touches my skin

some days it seems
no wind is blowing at all

though outside the house
the trees are always stirring

Springwater, NY

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

No, never actually had dreams
like that, with people I woke up
missing, only occasional falling

dreams, three, maybe
in my life, same cliff always,
always steel blue in the night

beautiful image for a kid,
and the river below
and several of playing

the piano so well I almost
broke into tears
right there in the dream

I was that good, and again
when I woke up knowing I’d
quit lessons when I was eight

and couldn’t remember the damn
music anyway, and wondered
days later what talent I was

currently squandering
and promptly shoved that
thought down too

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I love the sound of the metal men’s room door
as it scrapes across the broken metal threshold,

and I love the way my skin seems to be
falling apart before my eyes, huge flakes
of it snowing down on my shirts and faces

of the ones I love and teach so that they
get the dry heaves even as I approach,

and I love the guy in the Hummer
this morning who ran the stop sign
in the dark and then drove slowly
on the snowy roads spitting

salt and sand on my windshield for two
miles before finally running the red light

so that I didn’t even have the chance to get
out of my car and tell him what I really thought,

and I love the two old women making
their way down the street in the dark
tonight, one hand each on the rusted cart

stuffed with shopping bags stuffed
with other shopping bags, clothes that might

or might not fit, empty pop cans,
bottles and all covered with snow.

Categories: Poems
3 Comments »

If I could curve the tamarack
into a soft crack, to surprise
the sharp cloud, to bruise the chunk,
I might envelop tough buttresses.
Instead, I kiss the envelope
and pause in front of every list.

If I could bite the understanding
and wing the frog into the berry,
and reprimand every uncle
who festers in the slag, who says
“I have not yet ruined Dad,
or dragged him through the clinic.”

If I could strip the cynic who
clips the estuary, who browns
the game, who shoots the frog
into the red tree, then maybe
I could borrow leather shillings
from an undergrown undertaker.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I miss the quiet of my own room.

I miss the stomach ache I got from eating a whole box of Fig Newtons.

I miss the elephant and the steaming loaves of manure it pressed from its elephant oven.

I miss the silence of the swimming pool.

I miss the lost grammar of kindergarten.

I miss my mother.

I miss my father.

I miss the little boy I was before I became my mother’s and my father’s little boy.

I miss my hair.

I miss my wife’s hair.

I miss the minutes I lost because I wasn’t paying attention.

I miss the hours I lost paying attention to my teachers.

I miss the moment I just missed.

I miss the vampire dogs.

I miss the frozen baby.

I miss the fingernails, I miss the chalkboard.

I miss the years when I was a girl with blonde braids and a gingham dress with mother of pearl buttons.

I miss seersucker.

Categories: The Grind
3 Comments »

Just as the last light of today was seeping
from the grey bank of clouds over the ridge
on the south side of our valley, a wail
of sirens streamed toward me as I was ending
my walk, boots sliding down the muddy track
into the dimness towards our house -

or rather, when I stopped to listen
to its strange vibrato, I heard not the cry
of engines to the rescue, but coyotes,
maybe twenty, chaotic and nearly silly
in their yipping, except that it was also
a kind of screaming, a hilarious hysteria,

like a tent full of clowns on fire,
presenting the fraught comedy
of living, and one lone retriever
baying in the middle of them all,
lured off by some cunning coyote bitch,
and soon the pack’s lucky supper.

Their anarchic concerto filled the valley,
abusing me for the foolish image of God
I’d been resurrecting the last four months,
a God benevolent, bestowing the fruits
of peace on those who, with earnest prayer
or meditation, approached His precinct.

I had not been attentive to His hidden Face,

Who enters at the throat with fangs
whose only purpose is to rend;

Who uproots oaks and drives them hard
against the remnant of His own creation;

Who walks the streets at night, and if
your money won’t satisfy, blood will;

Who presses rock to molten meaning,
then cools it to a kind of mausoleum;

Who unfurls the blossom just in time
for one last arctic visitation;

Who lifts the eye of love in time
to witness its betrayal.

Soon their wild singing died away, and I reached
the bottom of the northern ridge, and brushed
most of the mud from my boots in the long grass
behind our house, and set them on our porch,
and poured a little wine, and put on water
for dinner, hoping you would be home soon.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

When my house burned down
my greatest fear was that I’d
become rich again.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

The boy in the black and white photograph
is getting ready to go to the hospital.

Someone has posed him sitting on the edge
of his brand new cardboard suitcase.

He feels very special to be the only child
in the family to have had tonsillitis.

It almost makes him forget about the knife.
Yet the sun is shining in his eyes so brightly

that it makes him squint into the dark
eye of the camera, its mute single blink.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Even writing in that setting was difficult, verging on vertiginous. The bedding was changed only monthly, the rugs rarely beaten. Ascending the stair on the pretext of celiac ruminations, which no one in the house had sufficient wit to descry as being neither true nor extant in medical taxonomy, one met a siege of mites, coal smoke, millennial malaise. The nibs were often fouled, when they were not dry. Since it was night and the windows shuttered, for subjects there were only the cracked walnut escritoire and the stained and consequently overturned counterpane. So much for Saturday and Sunday.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Rich man, poor nun,
avenue of cheese.
Up in the copper blonde
eleven sembled bees.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Lately I’ve been throwing words to the wind,
caring more for the launch, the flutter, the spin
than for where they land or if anyone picks them up.

Don’t mistake this for insouciance.
One look at my desk tells you something
in my life has grown more than a little careless.

I want to defend myself and say I’ve been busy
keeping up with my job and trying
at the same time to save something

of my soul. I’m afraid you’ll snicker,
but instead you say, “Yeah, I tried that.”
Then you look at me, for a long moment.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I stopped calling your house last year when your sister was a week overdue with her essay on Huck Finn and Romance, and it must have been you who answered the phone when I asked for her dad, and after I explained, heard him call out her name like she was an animal ravaging a fine piece of furniture. A month later she told me her mother was dying slowly of brain cancer.

I thought I was sparing her the next time her essay was late, and the time after. And this year, I worked hard to tolerate your explosive non sequiturs, your purposeful lack of effort. Not for your mother’s sake — like half of what you learned last year, I’d forgotten about her. But twice, just to cover my ass, I called. Your father was as empty of answers as I.

Her obituary explained your latest string of absences. Today you mustered the will to attend the midterm.  You dutifully outlined ten characters in black, then laid down your head on the desk for two hours. I wielded my best arguments.  In the end, yours won.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

When did you begin to realize that
the smudges underneath your eyes
had grown feelers and begun to test
the wanton fragrances wafting
through the leaves of backyard schist?

And when did the circumflex burned
in your breastbone ignite from boredom
and drill new math into the tropospheres
of children about to embark on a final
examination of sledding down the eclipse?

You sent a card to everyone you knew
just in time for winter to send it back.
No matter, you thought, fish feed
in any season. But what length the spring-
wound tape that measures out your wonder?

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Some days my heart is so full
of hate I look around for someone

to kill, or someone to kill me.
Some days I want to live forever.

Not in this form, the burden
of this personality, this web

of neurons, firing and hitting
or missing their targets;

but in a kind of blue-sky forever,
an infinite darkness of deep space

with little lights every
million years or so.

That kind of peace.
That holy loneliness.

Or just silence — no regrets
for the unfulfilled, the waste.

Just for the light to go
out completely *click.*

Or a blaze of sunlight
hotter than the sun

burning all that’s not pure
desire and knowing, hotter

than the eye of God purging
a mortified soul, painful

beyond pain, a raging
so awful it shucks the heart

of attention wrong-side out,
annihilating distinctions.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

It’s kind of an odd way to make a world –
you up in bed, curled like a worm

in your nightgown under two duvets and heavy
sheets, wishing I would come up to warm you,

and I down here in the kitchen, reading a book,
my hands cold, a blanket wrapped around me

because the thermostat’s turned down for the night
and I’m a night person and you’re not.

And odd for there to be night and day at all.
Hot and cold. People say these differences

keep things from getting dull, that we wouldn’t
know pleasure without pain.

Would it be bad if there were a unified field?
If the universe were entirely light

wouldn’t you know it? It’s light for Christ’s sake!
You don’t need salt to know vinegar.

Similarly, I’ll be up soon. My hands are warmer now.
We prefer that kind of equilibrium.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

The roof’s going on the old barn
and the house has needed painting too.

You see a lot more deer
feeding in their pastures.

Somebody died or they just don’t
have the money anymore.

Only a few horses left
and those not well taken care of.

Soon there’ll be nothing here —
just trees and weeds and those deer.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Behind the sandwich counter of the supermarket deli
a couple of kids are talking, and I could make up something
like what they were saying; a life, even; a plausible story.

But since I can’t hear their actual words, but only a laugh
or helpful suggestion indicated by a lilting inflection,
let’s say they’re speaking a foreign language.

Still, from the tones I can infer this one’s at ease,
eager to please, though the somewhat overly earnest
look in the eye makes me think there’s something

insincere at work, though that may only be me.
By his hook nose and chin I think he may be
of Polish stock, and over at the register she

with the chocolate dishpan face, heavy nose and lips
perhaps Egyptian, with a splash of German or Dutch.
Though they might as well be aliens, for all

I really know of their actual origins. So that
when the sort of fleshy manager with the Irish
(or is it Russian?) red tonsure hugs the brown girl,

for a long time, it’s nice to see that even across
the vastness of this little universe a hug is still
the universal sign of love, still in fashion.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Some days you just like the world, for no reason.
The brats in school hallways remind you
of creekside eddies, leaves turning
in whorls that seem like chaos
to your limited understanding;
or they remind you of yourself at sixteen,
doing the work you were born to do:
flipping the bird to all authority;
or of Blake’s imprecations to open completely
to desire and let it rip, because
to do so completely is the only way
no one gets hurt.

And your boss, too, coming towards you
down the now empty hallway, his arms wide
with that threat of sincerity: you’ve worked hard
to tolerate him, but mostly your stomach burns,
your teeth grind, you spread vile stories about him
(mostly true), you wish all kinds of works involving
knives and sharpened gears upon his appendages –
even him, today, when he delivers the response
you knew he would that sentences you
to half a day of unpaid labor because
“everyone else in the department has to” –
even him you look in the eye, and love.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

The clock on the wall
and the watch on my desk
occasionally tick together.

The bird hopping across the lawn
and the wrapper blown across the lot
also share certain affinities.

This mind looks out on these,
and something looks out on it.
One hopes the ironies end there.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I’d rather sleep
in a dead man’s bed
than a chain of luxury motels.

His sheets are cold now,
the same ones where he let
go his last breath.

His drawers and closets
still home to his papers,
old shoes and slacks.

Soon they’ll all be emptied.
A longer stay they had.
That’s all.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

There are so many reasons I wanted to write you today. Now that I’m sitting at the table with the paper in front of me, pen in my hand, it’s a little hard to remember what it was I wanted to say.
Don’t take it personally, it’s just my mind. Always been that way. Loose knit.
But don’t judge me either. I’m not yet enlightened, and a certain amount of judgment always gets through, depending on how my day went.

Today, for instance. I slept late — a blessing, for all the sleep I lost this week.
Does that mean I got a little more life lived?
It was sweeter to lie late in bed, dozing, knowing I didn’t have to answer to anyone’s demands.

Later in the morning I was thinking about the simple-celled animals that live in the dirt in the fields surrounding the road I was driving up to my brother’s farm. There was standing water in them from all the rain and melting snow of this long January thaw.
Some, no doubt, have adapted to days of drought and days under water. Others have not.
And for those, I thought, approaching the bottom of the s-curve up the hill between halves of woods rumored since I was a kid to have quicksand in them, for those, does anything feel sorrow or grief? Can their small, brief lives be thought tragic or, for that matter, of any consequence at all?

I got to my brother’s house and spent part of the afternoon helping him revise his resume, and another part trying to upload it to a website which refused to do what it was designed to do. The first half felt useful, negotiating the trick of stuffing a lot of ideas (most of them true) into a
very few words.
The rest was waiting and waste.
Waste of what?

I met him in the barn, where he’d gone to feed his goats and cattle. He has little tolerance for that kind of waiting.
When I got to the milking parlor, I found him cursing himself for leaving the water running in the trough all morning. But I felt he was comparatively lucky. The water had flooded the concrete floor, running down the muck channel, under a door our great-grandfather had built, sinking
slowly into the rich dirt of the barnyard. Little bits of hay were floating in it, like boats.
What reason was there to be angry about that?

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

First I peel back my forehead.
Kind of like a banana

except rounder. More
like a melon.

It’s an expansive forehead,
and getting broader, so maybe

peeling it’s more like an
interrupted sinusoidal projection.

If all goes well, lines
of latitude and longitude

don’t hang me up too much
and I sink through the blue.

The easy part is putting it into words.
Because it doesn’t always go well

down there. Or, it starts out well
and then I begin to surface too quickly.

Or the lines do trip me up
but I manage to keep my feet.

Or they just trip me up
and I put down my pen and walk away.

It’s nice when I can stay down there.
Floating. That happens once every

few light years. The words —
they’re like old shoes I bring up

from some sunken world
on the bottom. The best

we can hope for is a decent
fit and a good story.

But there is no perfect shoe.
It doesn’t matter. It’s just nice

when I’m down there,
floating, taking it all in.

And it’s nice when I bring it
to you, and it fits you.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

I’m talking into my hand. I see my two
chins wobble in the cake case glass.
Loving myself as I am, I order a triple
Sunshine Ice Cream Cola Latte.

I’ve maxed out my Seven7 jeans.
I have an interview tomorrow
for an opening in real estate –
good benefits and a really big desk.

Some day I’ll figure out what to do
with this hair. It doesn’t matter now –
it’s ten o’clock and the shop is totally
empty, just me and one barista.

The magazines here are quite terrible.
Either old ones or only for English majors.
The furniture’s not so bad, though –
pretty soft and colors I never seen.

I’m talking into my other hand now.
Kind of a nuisance call, a friend
in some kind of need. You have no idea
how hard it can be to be me.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Kent stares, nearly
gawks, even, at the idiot
spinning on the granite slab,
in the mud baptismal, braiding
rye into his hair as he prostrates before
his only Lord. Erupting in tongues.
It can’t be called speech, he thinks,
or music, anything like
sense. Meanwhile,

the old King mutters
in his fog of old griefs.
If only you, Chamberlain,
could make your duty clear.
Instead, these sounds cast so much
shadow on sound. Too old
to learn this lexicon.
Nothing

to fall back on
when the old relations fail.
Those trails not only cold –
but the looking makes them
barren again. A wilderness.  A little
like running blind through an oak plantation,
crows declaiming coordinates. So
it seems. We want

to tell you, Pick up
a brush, Kent. Daub
a plank for fresh perspective.
Doff your clogs, kick up heels.
Or pipe it — a ditty or reel, or fantasie
five hundred years before its time,
a signature of genius. Be
that kind of man.

Instead, you simply
disappear. Is it that you sink
into the mire of statutory gestures
defaulted by your severed tongue?
Or that you see, between extremes
of actual madness and the made, between
act and art, art and act, a middle way
that runs away from compromise,
down the flood of the absolute?

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

we take off our shoes
and blow our minds
before we enter the house of God.

In the real world
the cicadas of inspiration
crawl up our legs
and diddle with our estuaries.

In the real world
something stirs in our guts.
From a limbec of antimony
we take a purgative of blancmange.

Passion doesn’t stir us
in the real world.
Instead, we move
as though lit from behind
jerkily, hoping to entertain it.

What is the formula for success
in the real world?
What is the prescription
for progressive exculpability?

We ask these questions repeatedly,
or we wait for a breeze
to remind us what we were about to say.

In the real world
we paint our fingernails dirty
just before we write the big check.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

When my brother stands
at the crest of Coyle’s ridge
he’s amazed you can see
five counties. At night
you can see
the lights of Geneseo.

Whereas when I look down
I wonder at the river
that used to run east
down the valley — nothing now
but a creek we call O-at-ka.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Thanks for the words of encouragement. I’m glad you liked the poem. It’s not so popular around the house just now.

I’m realizing I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who writes to live, lives to write, and for a long time tortured myself because I wasn’t. No knives or sharpened sticks, just the thud, thud, thud, thud of regret.

Wanted to be, but the bees in my head won’t let me, so I squeeze out a few words when I can get the focus. At least I’m finally coming clean with myself. It’s refreshing.

For a minute I thought you said, So you like Borges! Yes.

But then I read you said, So you are like Borges! No! I’m not a librarian by nature, it’s just something I could do, since my current job is killing me.

But if I were to follow my true nature, it would be to found a museum of miscellaneous objects, and my first show would be to sit in a rocker on the front porch and chew on a piece of wild rye grass with a jug of grape mashings by my side and a crate of desert island books (Shakespeare, Whitman, Joy of Cooking, Cold Mountain, Cold Mountain, Middlemarch, Merwin). Admission would be the price of a story and a bit of food the size of your palm. I’d keep a notebook, and let anyone read it who wanted to.

It’s easy to forget what’s important. You just do it.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

One day you discover death is not
the hollow laughter, the black emptiness,
the knife at the throat or the cleaver
against the fragile wrists; none of those
abstractions: only in the memory of your
own mother talking on the phone, her back
turned toward you, like some awful magic
trick, no matter where you stand, waiting,
tugging at her hems.

Only in your father, or rather, in his stand-in –
the varnished study door, waiting for it to open,
trying to decipher the mysterious music
(Brahms, Gershwin, Garland) playing
muffled on the one-armed turntable
inside a suitcase-kind-of-box smelling
of felt, brass, and must; in the papers
rustling; in the occasional creaking of a chair
that bears his weight.

Enough of that: that’s when you decide
to disappear yourself. And there’s your old
friend death, whom you’d met once already
on the awful first ride into daylight. He makes
good friends with you, so that even when you
can no longer trust in God, his assurances
are stronger than any faith.

Though, his power’s now a little weaker,
remembering your mother sitting at the kitchen
table, instant coffee and cigarettes insufficient
to reignite her love for anyone, especially herself.
And your father, giving love away so freely
he seemed sometimes a circus barker,
or at least a clown.

Death sort of disappears himself
in that sort of company, and all you’re
left with are a few handfuls of memories and,
perhaps, an equal number of tomorrows,
lying like mail on the table, waiting
to be opened.

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

They come at me like small animals,
cute, in a way, but still sharp of tooth.
Some, in fact, like wide-eyed lemurs
looking only for a place to curl.
Others already on the business track.
I can almost smell the leather
and fine vinyl of their new cars.
Most, though, remain obedient
for their durable hour
in the plastic and tubular steel cages
the state’s arranged for them.

I try to show them how to unfold
the paper petals of great works.
The nice ones appreciate (or think
it’s cute) that I’m so eager
about those quaint arrangements
of thought a good wind would ruin.

It’s not only for the mark that signifies
their willingness to comply
(and perhaps a thing or two learned)
that they oblige me. At times
they sense I oblige them too,
my desire for flight stayed
by some potential I sense in them.
Or hope for, desperately.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

And then there was the time
on the dark continent
of Europe when they invented
childhood. It was like an awakening
almost, a kind of developmental
epoch, like actual children’s
separation anxiety, or the discovery of
object permanence. A period
in history when something became
clear, for a time. Then, understood.
Then codified, inscribed, disseminated,
compacted. Children, as such, began
to be dressed like children. Sung to,
in regular rhythms, with important
messages. No longer seen so much as
short adults, but rather as foreigners.
It became easier to shout at them.
And instead of actual questions,
What is time? How did you
get to be you, while I I? simply
a catechism before sleep.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

i write monday
wednesday feels like monday
after a holiday

everyone’s deserted
the building nearly just cleaning
personnel and i

thanks to the state
of new york the lights go out
if i am still

a little music
from little speakers
little waves drown silence

the glare of tube lights
and sun off snow all day
yellow now in decline

blue soon and then
a color under black and cold
stings the nose

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Last night while we slept
people were hooting horns,
ringing bells, tossing bits of paper
to announce a new year arriving.

This morning I watch the darkness
grow lighter, think about what
it means to look forward.
There are so many things to do.
Fix a broken door. Plan a lesson.
Convince the world the treadmill
we’re on speeds towards nothing
but greater sadness.

Amid the busy-ness and doing
what is the question that will bring
an end to suffering and desire?
Will its answer contain a verb
in the present tense? What noun?
What pronoun, in what case?

The light grows from east to west.
The grey increases. Fat flakes
of snow fall against it, west to east,
like bits of torn paper, over
the whole world, it seems,
or only on this wakeful house.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Those were days when we burned lights late into the night. From space you could see the glaze of mercury- and argon-lit signals of our restlessness and boredom.

Those were days when we went into space, some of us looking for something out there. Others (a few) spent their lives looking inside,privileging those glances, waiting for the rest to join hands. But it was all to find out who we were. So we could improve ourselves.

We discovered a lot of interesting things. The universe is expanding. It’s probable there’s life on other planets. The sun is mostly hydrogen. Our lives are built on chains of self-replicating proteins. Like gravity and electrostatic repulsion, love and hate serve survival purposes, as well as creating a lot of interesting social situations. Light behaves sometimes like particles, other times like waves. And so on.

To get to space required a lot of ingenuity. It was a predictable outcome of our capacity to wonder, a kind of sublimated hunger. And lots of fuel. We used a lot of fuel in those days. The stuff that lifted junk and us away from the pull of gravity was also mother hydrogen, pure, what we aimed for, ultimately. Though what fueled its making here wasn’t any old chain reaction, just a lot of dirt with a little bit of light left in it.

We thought we were big shots then, converting all that memory of movement back into movement. As though carbon were the big news, beating out the more popular wonders of the galaxy: helium, silver, even silicon, which gave us faster knowledge.

Though knowing is only half the battle. It is not meat or drink, it is not salvation, which asks a sacrifice, an appeal to something greater than our particular selves. We did a lot of driving on that dirt. We got from here to there and back again. Sometimes for more defensible reasons, like to eat and sleep in a relatively civilized way. Sometimes just to have a look around, Sundays and summers especially. That was nice.

So eat your vegetables, and huddle up. It’s likely going to be a cold century.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Death wants to turn me into nothing.
Death hates me.
Death doesn’t care about my feelings.
Death is rude.

Death tells me that my feelings are trite,
that my thoughts are inaccurate,
that my actions are all in vain.

Death wants to come at me with a twelve-pound hammer and crack my skull,
with a handful of knives and slice me slowly into bleeding pieces,
with microbes that will make me shit and puke my life away.

Death stands there with an expression that is both smile and sneer.
Death holds out its arms to me.

Death wants to embrace me,
hold me against its enormous breast,
nurse me deep.

Death loves me.
Death has been waiting my entire life for me.

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

Look how this morning
the light returns to our back yard
and fields behind it.

Now the night is a memory
and in place of the absence
which gives it form
is a color we call black.

And look how on the lawn
the white snow has melted,
revealing circles of green
like islands, some,

or little planets scattered
and forming, in my mind,
a kind of constellation,

and others massed, whole galaxies,
or, as some call them,
patches, as if the ground
were quilted with them.

And how, under its sheet of snow
the yard merges with the sleeping
field and its yellow stubble.
Or dun, or brown, or ochre.

And how the field becomes a hill,
climbs, becomes trees which
reach up with grey and purple
fingers. Or magenta, or sumac.

Or black, against a sky
where, after three days of rain
and grey, the white clouds part,

touched with a little rose
from the morning sun,
and behind those, blue,

finally, after three days,
and behind that, something
large that we compare,
finally, to night.

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

In the hills he thinks
he hears a coyote cry

but I think it is only
a branch sighing against the window

until in the valley
we both hear the wail of a siren.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Having packed the car perfectly my brother despaired
when I handed him the bag of spent bows and ribbon

his wife had sent me out with. In less than an hour
they were in the lot of the Baltimore Target,

a hundred dollars poorer, a microwave, five glass bowls,
and a Swiffer Jet richer, and the battery in their Explorer dead.

At the hour that they finally left the Sears Auto Shop
(it’s uncharitable of me to confess),

you and I were munching our turkey on whole wheat
and leftover apple-pear pie, overlooking

the Susquehanna Valley, while the already-fallen sun
painted clouds into lace across the winter sky.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Everywhere this season people are running
toward or away from this day
gobbling down our sharp-cornered greed
or else fleeing in dread

as from a large dog that closes in
the faster we run.
This morning is the day itself
and I say, Come in!

Come in! all you furtive wishes
like stifling ribbons,
choking the life from me,
silencing my deepest wishes.

Come in! all you ulterior motives
and passive aggressive attacks
like knives in the belly
twisting and ripping open the hard, sad center.

Come in! all you lost and lonely
former selves, ennervated and starving,
begging at the stoop
of memory and resentment.

Come on! all you dogs
of fear, devour me!
I’m waiting for you
to shred me to the core,

to cry myself empty
until there’s nothing left
but the blossoming rose
and the trembling over the abyss.

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

The taste of Jesus
when I was five
was plastic and white
with a little gold paint,

the booklet of Beatitudes
so crinkled and waxy,
sky blue and warm peach
and creamy.

The music of Jesus
was sweet and sad.
The nails in his palms
like roses.

How I wished
I could join him
up there, so sweetly
suffering,

the rooms of my house
so square and solid,
the blues of the walls
dim in the corners.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Sitting at a dead man’s desk
in a dead man’s house
prepared for sale

I slide open drawers
to reveal the state
of his real mind –

five plastic tape dispensers,
wooden spoon, Ruder
magnifying glass, pencils

paper clips, ruler.
About what I’d expected.
A Treasury of Humor, photos

of my sister’s lover
at Christmas ten years ago.
On the desktop an old

Seth Thomas, gears buzzing.
And my pen, running
out of ink.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

was a busy day, as
was yesterday.
Tomorrow I have plans to be

busy too, these
tendencies are nothing
I can control, at least

I know what to expect.
Complacent? No.
Jaded? Not yet.

Scared as hell?
It’s possible
I’ll get back to you on that.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Day of shortest light.
Unremarkable, although
sun hasn’t yet sunk.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

got thrown across
the room
didn’t even bleed but

but a few stitches opened
that’s all
a little dust

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

to do list explodes
russian woman sweeping up
bits of paper lying
about my inert body
all chambers emptied

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Not quite brave enough for this world
I read no books old enough to have withstood
kings’ pleasures, or new ones pretending to
the time’s reflection, silver-backed. Or take
no walks at night, not for fear of evil-
doers, only, but thoughts, too. I curl
myself into a self of terry cloth
and gin, amazed by blue shadows dancing,
projected plots. All the fear that’s fit
to package polished, lit, boxed, gone
at a single press of a doubled digit. I look
forward to nothing doing. I lack faith
in an apocalypse. I’ll hire someone
to blow snow, fill cracks, serve. I’ll wait.

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

You’re moving between the kitchen island and the stove,
the exquisite smell of freshly grated ginger spicing the air
that otherwise tastes of winter even here, in our kitchen
of oak and glass and certain fabrics and plastics.

You’re tense, mad about something, I feel it’s me,
something I said or didn’t say when I walked through the door
twenty minutes ago. Jesus, didn’t I offer to help?
You let me get out a bigger pan from the drawer

under the oven. Jesus, didn’t I have a long day,
starting with snowblowing the driveway
twelve hours ago? Maybe you’ve had a long day too.
Jesus, haven’t I also? my mind demands.

But it’s not a competition, I can hear myself say
twice in the last two days to two different students,
the first time surprised by my own insight,
the second making points on my own cleverness.

But it is. It is a competition. I feel that I
I feel more tired, lonelier, and more in need
of propping up than anyone else on the planet.
And your back, scarlet in its new cashmere sweater

that I think I may have bought you for Christmas,
accuses me, sitting in black pants, black sweater,
in my armchair on the far side of the kitchen,
where I pour another glass of wine, wine you don’t like,

for all of the efforts of preparation, shipping, selection,
and you pour yourself your own from a bottle
you bought with your own hard, hard wages,
after you said No thank you to my offer.

I take a sip, not understanding what’s so bad
about these particular grapefruit and grassy notes,
as they seem to me. And I wish only
that I could come into the room again

and start over, or take a holiday from tomorrow
with its insistence on compressing tonight’s
spaciousness. Time is not our master, I think,
or rather, it’s a thought that thinks me.

Well, what is it then? I do think,
manhandling the wheel of my own feeble engine
of ideas. But then the scratch of sulfur on carbon
makes me look up to see you lighting

a candle in a little green glass cup and setting
it on the table, and suddenly I want to start crying.

December 17, 2007

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

Riven to pieces
the snow has hopes
of a big reunion.

Home from a cookie-
decorating party, sheaves
loom on my desk.

All day my heart
has been clenched
in its watchband.

Will snow be enough
to soothe
my hot pillow?

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »

Really to feel the pen
in my hand,
and the absence to which I dedicate it.

Really to remember my brother’s hands
on my throat,
and my mother’s hand over my mouth
and nose — crying please
don’t cry. Please.

Really to smell the smell of snow
blown in
on a cold nor’easter in December.

Dry snow, and lots of it, and beautiful
for that, for its atomity.

Really to feel the strain in drawing in
a full breath.
Really to feel the emptiness
when I exhale.

The universe comes down to four forces
which may, most people hope
who know, be one.
But I say, let them be two:

To really know, and to have
no idea, really.

December 15, 2007

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

In tears this morning
at the agony of being alone,

telling you about it, wanting you
to see the real me, the invisible self

(impossible need), I found
in the pain itself, for a moment,

like a star, the answer I was seeking.
Then why did I find it necessary

to drive an hour this afternoon
to a zendo in the middle of Nowhere,

New York, where the topic was
a Zen approach to whatever

this life of suffering is? And why
did I fail to reach it for the second time

in two weeks? Last time I was late
and turned around halfway.

Today, it just didn’t seem to exist.
No such number, no such road,

just anxious drivers behind me,
and mud on my fenders

from old snow, and sand, and salt.
Some kind of allegory? Some kind of lesson?

On the way home, hungry for forbidden
coffee and pumpkin pie,

but all the diners closed
in this liminal part of the afternoon

I settle for McDonald’s,
and chocolate-chip cookies,

music blaring from Rochester’s
“Official Christmas Radio Station”

over the noise of the Coke machine
compressor, and two ladies yakking.

By some chance, one of the windows
looks out over Conesus Lake,

the banks dressed in ice
like a lace collaret, and a slow

flock of mallards sinking
with the sun on the western shore.

December 8, 2007

Categories: Poems, The Grind
No Comments »

I woke up with the word insouciance
stuck in my head and a fly
buzzing around the room in a way

that made me want to kill.
Was it the green tea
at dinner that left my mind lit

like a morning bell ringing
in a glaring vigilance?
An ebony fly in a dark room,

and only the glowing embers
of the clock radio for guidance
through that strict attention.

Downstairs, in the book,
near the word that woke me –
insomnia. Which I did not need

to look up. In the kitchen
I take an apple and cut it
into quarters, like my heart.

For all I know the fly
marauds the empty room still.
But here, I hunt down

sleeplessness with pen and paper,
noting its tracks. Twenty years
from now who will look on these

works and despair? The label
swears a third as much
caffeine as coffee. Then what

drives on these hollow thoughts
like shrimp casings drifting
in viscous air, invisible,

but rustling? My prey slips
into the understory, and I lie down
in the matted grass it leaves behind.

November 3, 2007

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

Happy to find it open on a Sunday
though I had to walk through the tunnel of smokers to get through the door

though after I’d scanned the chalkboard menu
the girl at the counter told me they don’t have bagels (breakfast or otherwise)
they don’t have soup
and the only pastries they had were those (few) in the case (stale)
(which I wouldn’t have wanted anyway)

though while I waited for my Smoking Buddha sandwich
leafing through my new copy of Mindfulness Yoga
I had to endure from the very nice Bose speakers mounted in the rafters
that too familiar album from those college years of stoned misery
Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here

and though when the sandwich came it was sans pesto –
that treat I had been most looking forward to

and someone had put honey in my red raspberry tea
although I had not asked anyone to

and though when the counter girl finally came around
after tidying up almost all the other tables
and asked me how my sandwich was
and I said, “It came without pesto”
and she said, “No, the pesto’s on it”
and to correct that I opened the halves of the half sandwich I had left
to show slices of turkey, cheddar, and canned roasted red peppers
but no green smear of pesto

and she repeated the fact of their not usually being open on Sundays,

and told me the story of the last time they were
and went on wiping down the remaining empty tables
and left me regretting I’d already left
a fairly generous tip in the jar on the counter

and though I heard her tell the manager who doubled as chef in the kitchen
that my Smoking Buddha panini had come with no pesto

and told him again, for it didn’t seem
to have registered precisely the first time

and though I heard nothing come of it
except for that existential finale of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

I wondered –
what if they asked me how they could appease me?
What would I say?
What was it I wanted?

What if they offered me a free cup of tea?
No thanks, I’d say, this one’s enough.

What about one of those pastries?
Uh, no thank you.

Cup of soup?
Um.

Our sincere apologies and a coupon for the next time?
No, no thanks. I don’t want to feel,
in addition to inconvenience,
the pain of indebtedness.

Then what? Then what?

After some meditation as I chewed on these thoughts
somehow an answer arrived –

Maybe…
maybe for them to sit and spend some time with me.

I would ask, How you doing?
What’s on your mind?
Would you put up a sign – ‘Limited menu.
Out of most things.’ And,

How’s your life?

And they’d ask,
How’s yours?

November 4, 2007

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

Reflected in the window before me
the image of the window behind me.

Reflected in them a thousand times
the one lamp in the center of the room.

***

Laid out on the grass
a transient geometry — frost
in the shadows of trees.

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

When: Saturday, October 27.  10-11:00 a.m.

Where: Rochester Public Market (East Main St. entrance).

 Letter from United for Peace & Justice:

Dear activists, colleagues and friends,

It has been over 4 and a half years since the invasion of Iraq. 3,835 U.S. soldiers and over 1 million Iraqi citizens have lost their lives. U.S. taxpayers have spent over $600 billion on this war with no end in sight.

This Saturday, October 27th, you can take a stand. United for Peace and Justice is coordinating over 150 peace groups across the country for demonstrations in 11 cities.

Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough Tennessee, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

There are also events in Fairbanks, Tucson, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Denver, Kapaa Hawaii, Des Moines, Smithfield NC, and Oklahoma City.  AND NOW ROCHESTER….

We made a video to help get the word out. Watch it here and recruit your friends to come:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcJG8gyn3c4&eurl=http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/16736-october-27th-mobilization-to-end-the-war?play=1&utm_source=rgemail

Please come! Four years ago this month we documented the lies that led us into this war in “Uncovered: The War on Iraq,” and last year we took on the mercenaries, cost-plus contracts, Blackwater and Halliburton in “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.” Both of these stories are now widely known in the broader media thanks to your efforts in screening the films and organizing with them.This new video is about getting people into the streets and DOING SOMETHING.

See you on Saturday!

Robert Greenwald, Jim Miller, and the Brave New Foundation team.

Link to United for Peace & Justice site.

Categories: Political Animal
No Comments »

Not that I’ve got anything against the grass. In fact, I love the grass, though there are things I love more, such as trees. Trees, bees, and pygmy goats, though the latter also cause me some discomfort, not of themselves – for it is they being so of themselves that I love them so; no, they rankle me simply because they are bred. Because somewhere down behind the long line of manmade goat clans is the Ur-Goat, the wild goat, the goat windward side of evolution’s raw wind, free as the wind, which we have tamed and put on our plates, more or less.

Such is the grass: refined, groomed, spoiled and whipped into shape by man’s hungry hand. Trouble is, his is a hunger augmented by too much mind, intellect the inadvertent tool of selfsame evolutionary wind, hapless and aimless, whose only rule is “forward,” also construed as “survive,” a.k.a. “eat.” First, scattered weeds that bear somewhat edible seed (especially if chewed long, or ground, or roasted) are turned to a noble cause like quinoa. Then wheat. Then someone decides the whole damn field looks pretty from a distance, like a kingdom, and reduces the herb to a carpet called a lawn, complete with fertilizer and ornaments in the shapes of slaves. It’s even brought inside and stuffed in a vase, with dead daisies.

This is where I come in, I and my hate. My hate of mowing, of the lawnmower, the weedwacker, the rake, the whole damn concept. I’ve never had anything against a field of green wheat sprouts, whole stalks, green or dried and standing head full of seeds, of fruit. In fact, I find it preferable. I think it should remain tall and a field.

If a practical reason not to have one’s house surrounded by a border of short-haired grasses is to keep the mice and chipmunks and other lovers of warm spaces behind the clapboards at bay, there’s something in that. A house itself is an artificial statement against the wild, so one must have a boundary, and it’s in keeping with nature’s law to let the rodents fight harder for their own stolen turf.

The poor bound the house with dirt which they sweep. If that’s not so appealing in mudtime, there are alternatives, like a cat. But even grass, I might say, in such a case is fine, if only it were kept under control. I mean not the height, but breadth. Something one could trim with a push-mower, or lamb. But not these vast savannahs of an acre or more that these other country folks adore.

I inherited my patch, my plantation of grass, so perhaps it’s not entirely my fault. Just the part just around the house would be enough, small and broken as it is by beds of lilac and periwinkle, lavender, rose, and viburnum. Hybrids all.

It’s not really that I have so much against all the works of man, but some are so absurd it would make me laugh, if it weren’t for the darker fact behind the grin. That beyond the ruff of Kentucky Rye around the house proper, there’s a half-acre lawn my grandfather had planted to make a field for his many grandsons and tommish grandgirls to play football on. Solely for that kindness I’ve been consigned to a weekly sentence of an extra hour’s mowing. And to accomplish that, I’m killing my mother, the living planet.

It used to be worse, in a way, for the four years when I still stubbornly held to the walk-behind self-propelled mower. Worse for me, since the whole job took three hours. Three hours a week less of life to live. Worse for the air and birds and global climate that I finally gave up some of my principles and invested in a riding mower. Urged on by my wife. I suppose it was the sensible thing to do, since now it only takes me seventy minutes to do the whole job. But I would rather have let the one-time football field go to seed, let the vermin revel in their restored acre.

So tonight I ride the ridiculous machine, a slave to culture and romantic love, spewing toxins and carbons into the evening air, all the while well aware the planet is already destined for trouble beyond its capacity to repair (if one considers homeostasis to be a willful force). My guilt weighs on me as heavily as the turf I roll over, blades lopping, engine howling.

The thing about guilt is that very weight. If I have somewhere that spare ounce of ambition that would allow me to live my principles without compromise, guilt is the blanket that snuffs it, as if it were a small fire set in a patch of straw. The blanket, though flammable itself (flammable, because like all functions of memory, it derives from passion, however dulled by fear) – the blanket baffles sufficient oxygen from the mouth of the fire. The flame dies down. Dead.

In other words, guilt does little to move one towards one’s desire; although it has the best intentions, it’s one of the quicker killers out there.

Still, like any evil, it’s not necessary that it prevail, and rising against its putrid stench, and against the idiocy of the lawn, is a light like morning sun, a face on the horizon in the form of a student of mine. Let’s just call him “Jake A.” This is a kid who I’d known barely a month last year when suddenly he was cadging my classroom once a week after school to hold his own student peace group. This is not what you think: another one of those ephemeral well-intentioned band of bleeding-heart freaks out to replay the Sixties with their manifestoes and tie-die t-shirts. Well, maybe some of them are, but this one student in particular, this Jake, has a fire in him that, well, he’s the kind of kid you say you wish you had a million of. But in this case, you really mean it. His depth of conviction and his ability to organize people is admirable for any living human, much less a seventeen year-old one. It puts me to shame. Which is, of course, another way of saying it puts me to guilt. But that’s my doing, I’m pretty sure, not Jake’s. Oh, occasionally he does give me that “I’m so disappointed look” when I say I can’t go to the rally in the city because I have too many papers to grade. The underlying question is, “What can your essays matter, when the world is burning?” But the question is out there, without so much weight, just out there, hanging. It’s I who can choose to take it on or not. Taking it on as a gauntlet is a different kind of weight than taking it on as a yoke; it has a heft, rather than a stranglehold.

But most of the time I tend to push that radiant, earnest apparition out of sight all together, grinding my teeth in ire as I bump along on my riding mower. Still, that promise is out there, that beamy face, offering me a way out of my misery. I don’t think either of us thinks my planting the lawn to the carbon-sucking sycamore is necessarily going to save the world. But it might save my soul.

And as for the grass, if it had a mind, it would mind either.  But for mammals, shade is preferable to hate.

Categories: Political Animal
No Comments »

Dear Brian,

Yesterday evening, spontaneously, Leah and I went to the Eastman House to hear some music in the garden. Last time we went, year before last, it was out on the lawn; a fiddler and a flautist or guitarist or something. This year it was in the formal garden, and we sat in the back so we had a view of the whole garden and the white-bricked wall of the mansion, and so we could hear each other over the 50s R&B/pop/Elvis of Krypton 88, the warm-up act. And look out over the snap-dragons an daisies and larkspur and whatever they had going on; a very mini-Versailles, with no fountain, only a fat guy making a stone pedestal into a serving table for his family in their folding chairs, and for his friend who showed up later and proved to be excellent at throwing back the offered beer(s) and inhaling the camembert and jalapeño jack on crackers, and the wine-soaked salami, and no thank you to the pasta salad or anything that required a plate and fork.

The headline act was billed as a bluegrass duo, Mike Stevens and Raymond McLain. McLain, the banjo, guitar, and fiddle player, was a short, roundish guy, physique of Wallace Shawn, and he played straight bluegrass (Bill Monroe, etc.), traditional Appalachian tunes (sped up), or accompanied Stevens, the harp player. Stevens was peeled out of a Beat Colorforms set, with pork pie hat, heavy dark shades, natty crimson sports shirt with the vertical black stripe running clavicle to femur, and the requisite hangdog look of Leon Redbone.

They weren’t amped as loudly, so we could have sat up closer to really enjoy Stevens’s very cool solos and crossover bluegrass-blues-spacejazz that he effected with echo, sustain, and repeat pedals; but we got the idea.

Admission got us into the museum, and during the break we saw what we could see in the gallery, running into a new exhibit of political pieces, “What We’re Collecting Now.” A photo by Katharina Mourtadidi: German subway placard of a woman with her shirt off, holding her left breast in her right hand, modestly but not shyly covering it, her right pectoral smooth except a scar where her breast used to be. And, in German in a caption at the bottom, quite small relative to the photograph, a statement (translated, on the wall) of the number of women who get breast cancer a year, what that translates to as a percentage (10%), that there is no known cause, and that governments need to do something to find a cause and a cure. Polemical, but you really have to want to read it to read it. And the photo makes you want to. And to do so, you have to get up close. Real close.

And while, yes, that’s the method advertisers use, it’s also just rhetoric. The thing that was compelling was her expression. It was a combination of indifferent, challenging, blasé, and pissed. I don’t know how she got all that into one expression. A Mona Lisa with a camera, sans chemise. High rhetoric, and high lyricism.

There were others in the exhibit: a girl with a hunting bow, Mexicans nabbed by DIN cops in a field of grass and wildflowers under an unsettled evening sky. A closeup of an ant by a ten-year political prisoner in a Croatian jail. We went back to the music, and after the museum closed I realized I had forgotten to make it to the Ansel Adams show. Oh well.

But that’s not mainly what I wanted to talk about. After, I took Leah to her car that she had left at her East Avenue office, then went on to the Little, to see what I could see. At Little 1 was Paris, Je Taime, which I figured I’d see with Leah; nothing else was familiar, and two looked downright bad (crocodile wrestling and overwrought anti-establishment type stuff), but at Little 5 was something about gypsies. A documentary about their music, a tour, Gypsy Caravan. Huh, that sounded intriguing, at least.

I won’t say too much about it because I want you to see it, and you don’t like to have anything but the purest experience of a piece, but it was interesting timing because last Monday, when I was on Long Island at my Dad’s condo, giving the buyers some old furniture for their grandson who lives upstate and letting in the contractor to fix the problem in the attic, the day it rained like hell all day, the day after I’d been with Brian to see some experimental videos at the Abingdon on West 36^th, I took a cab to the Lake Grove diner (the big shiny Greek one, with patriotic bunting), then walked over to the Waldbaum’s plaza to Linens N’ Things to get a better umbrella, then to Waldbaum’s to get vitals for Tuesday morning (coffee beans, raisins), then back across Nesconsett Highway (a sure place to get killed by assholes in Humvees and Hondas with bullet mufflers) to Sears to get primer to touch up after the attic work, then back across Nesconsett to Borders to find something to read after William Matthews, because Banana Yoshimito turned out to be a bust. Tried to find some prose I could mix it up with, but gave up and headed to poetry. Lorca, In Search of Duende jumped out, and the collected Roethke. So I read Lorca in dry clothes on the remaining half of the sectional while the rain poured down and the contractor hammered and drilled upstairs.

Duende was on my mind from reading Tracy Smith’s book which I got from the Academy, which I haven’t finished. Stopped halfway, I got frustrated with it. I’m not one of those readers who can finish a book he doesn’t really like. I’m too lazy/distracted/slow a reader to spend time with something I don’t really dig. Maybe only reviewers do that, though I don’t see how.

Roethke writes, in “The Longing,”

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

That’s what I didn’t hear, though I think it’s what she intended. It’s probably my tone deafness.

So this film was a two-hour meditation on duende, basically without seeming to set out to do that. Sorry if I gave away some precious discovery. I didn’t tell you anything about the plot. Still, life is loss.

I take what Lorca says about history with a hundred grains of salt, but mainly I was interested in his view of duende and hoping it helped me understand his work better. Since duende is essentially undefinable in words, and can only be conveyed in song and dance, there’s no way for him to succeed in a book, but one has to try, and it sets up sort of a boundary (permeable, a net) around the idea, or sense (sentido).

I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this theme or if it’s chosen me. Surely I’ve felt a lot of loss. It’s strange, my feelings about Dad’s death. There’s loss, though not in the same sense I felt when my mother died in 1988, when I felt a palpable tear in the fabric of the universe, “an unhealing hole.” Death had never come so close. My grandfather died when I was in ninth grade, and though I wanted to feel sad, I mostly felt badly for the people around me who were grieving, mostly my for grandmother who, although they’d rarely been happy together, had made a life with him. I didn’t witness my mother showing a lot of grief, though sometimes that is done privately.

As mine mostly was when my mother died; I was sad, but cried infrequently, and usually alone; once with Leah, which she doesn’t remember, and thinks I didn’t grieve at all, and so maybe my mother grieved her father privately too. I know they were very close. She was his pet, which was another annoyance to my grandmother, since he showered the love he withheld from her on my mother.

So with my Dad I got more practice grieving, though it’s still incredibly hard to cry in public. Even when distributing his ashes, at the beach, I was bursting with grief, but couldn’t let it go. I don’t know why; I guess I’m afraid of making huge retching noises and getting all snotty. It shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does.

So there’s that, but there’s also the anger and embarrassment at who he was, his unbelievable romanticism, which I’d say tipped over into an extreme silliness which people found endearing or cute or even meaningful, but which just made me feel mostly ashamed. And there were things to love about Dad, his candor, his ability to accept, but this stuff got in the way. I suppose because my early identity shared in those traits, or at least in their form (though not temperament, tone). And probably still does, or at least in some residual way.

And finally, cleaning out his house. I’m not sure I can say why that was one of the hardest things. It wasn’t any attachment to his stuff. Maybe it was more that I was further ashamed at what he had kept, what it meant about him that he kept tax returns from the 70s, trinkets from all over, books he never read and couldn’t possibly ever get to. Maybe it was that after a long school year I hadn’t quite recovered my senses, or had just barely, and that experience, mundane as it was, following Dad’s death, watching him die so ignobly, filled with tubes and his chest heaving for air to quiet the hospital-borne infection raging in his system, just kind of peeled the skin off my psyche.

Jane called yesterday to say the meeting of the cemetery association board will be August 7, but I apologized and said we’d be in Provincetown that week. She was telling me that Uncle John had fallen in one of the fields and was knocked unconscious, and also that Volney had passed out at home and had fallen and gotten hurt. And I said it’s time to start looking for some cyanide for “later,” but I guess at least Uncle John is working to go the way he wants to go, at work in the fields, instead of in a hospital bed.

We’ll be going to Tanglewood to hear Yo Yo Ma on the lawn on the way to P’town. I’m looking forward to some time away.

Categories: Essays & Rants
No Comments »

Between the phases of our heart-to-heart,
your thumb flies over your phone, seeking redress,
thwarting entropies. I practice the nonce.
To me, time’s not capital, or waste.

I listen for the hiss of ebb, the gallop;
silence is a margin that I jot
and lineate. It’s like that when I read -
lots of sinking. Don’t construe my long

look as anything but regard.
It won’t last. It may be painful. This
hour moves so slowly, then disappears,

what it is we came to say, and might,
a spark that fills a certain loneliness,
that touches inadvertent fuel, or falls.

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

Waiting for the Bus

Today I want to complain about moms and dads who drive their kids from the house to the end of the driveway to wait for the bus in the morning. No shit. I see this every day when I drive to work. I’m a teacher and I live 25 miles from the school where I teach, and I take back roads for the first half of the commute, so I get to see a good variety of houses and neighborhoods on my way. I wouldn’t say these cases are the majority, or numerous, or even frequent, but they are regular enough that I have to take notice, and my sense is that their numbers are increasing.

My first question is, of course, What the hell?

Before I slice these people up, I want to try to understand what might be legitimate about their practice. First of all, it’s possible that in the winter, on a morning when all the kids and their teachers are praying for a snow day, because there are a few flakes falling, or the temperature was below zero at five a.m. and the wind chill has knocked that down ten or twenty degrees more, that mom or dad would be truly concerned about their kid and sit with them in their mobile shelter with the motor running to keep them from getting frostbite on their fingers which would make doing math problems and writing compositions difficult. I was going to include to keep their hair from freezing, as I remember mine doing after sports on winter afternoons as I walked home from the gym, but then I realized most of these kids are blow-drying their hair.

But that doesn’t explain the other 170 or days of the school year. This past spring I drive by, and there they are, sealed up on a blessedly balmy morning, the sun rising behind their tinted windows, exhaust placidly streaming out of the tailpipe. This image leads me to my second forgiving supposition: that mom or dad and junior are sharing a few moments together, talking about the day ahead or just past, or about grandma’s upcoming operation, or the reason for fog, or any number of other intimacies that I have found have transpired between my step-son and me when both of us were sitting facing forward looking at the world through the filter of a car windshield.

But in that case, I think, why not have that conversation standing on the good earth, and be able to include in the experience the twittering of birds, the breeze on your cheeks, the changing light, and – if you love machines that much – the sound of cars, mine and others, whizzing by on their ways to work?

Maybe mom or dad is on the way to work, and so is just taking the opportunity to warm up the car and spend a few precious moments with her or his child? But often enough I’ve seen the bus come and, as I’m waiting for the child to board and the stop sign attached to the side of the yellow hulk to fold back and the red lights to stop flashing, the parental vehicle – usually an SUV or at least a minivan – back down the driveway towards the garage, there to shut itself down and the parent to slide back into the warm cave of the home.

In many cases these homes are newly built on what was just a few years ago active farm land. In some cases the driveway between the road and garage is long, sometimes very long: ranging from a hundred yards to a quarter mile. These are no doubt people who have fled the dangers and noise of the city to build their 3,800 square foot dream home in the country amid the wonders of nature (beyond their five acre lawns the teeming goldenrod and sumac, the woodchucks and starlings), so they can expend fossils fuels at the rate of a gallon a week to drive their kids down to the road to wait for the bus. Meanwhile, to keep their kids from joining the growing epidemic of obesity, they shuttle them off to the soccer league after school, then swing by the local supermarket to pick up some frozen oven-fried chicken, a quart of coleslaw, and a couple of two-liter Cokes to shovel in at the kitchen counter that suffices for a dining table as they hurry off to do homework or catch the rerun of Survivor.

Unfortunately, when the global warming-spawned floods arrive, they won’t come to their front lawns, which are well-above sea-level. If the drought comes they won’t be affected, because the county recently ran a water line out to their house so they wouldn’t have to depend on a well anymore. (They didn’t run the line specifically for their sakes, but as side effect of construction out to the little town on the edge of the county where the new landfill sits, a deal the town council, though not its constituents, thought was a bargain; a serendipitous bonus of the new water line is that it will be handy for future housing developments which, oddly enough, benefit friends of the county Water Authority board.) If Lake Ontario dried up, they might be in some trouble, but that isn’t likely to happen in our lifetimes.

And, if, as predicted, this particular region becomes wetter than it already is (and grayer, which many already complain about), there will certainly be no shortage of water, and they can rely on their sump pump to keep the basement dry, and advanced artificial playing surfaces to keep the soccer fields playable. If things get too uncomfortable, they can always move.

Though, Where to? would be the question. The deserts of the west are due to become dryer, and all the rain we’re expected to get here won’t help that – though there are plans afoot to pipe some of Ontario’s water out west, or even ship it to our friends in Saudi Arabia in exchange for, you guessed it, oil to keep mom’s and dad’s motors purring.

Can they make a driveway long enough or a window glass tinted enough to escape all those contingencies?

July 5, 2007

Categories: Political Animal
No Comments »

The third body is seated between them on the airplane,
a little anxious because he’s wishing they both had chosen
window seats, because her skin crawls every time he bites down
on the snack mix or slurps the cola in his pathetic plastic tumbler.

He’s plugged in to the weather channel and she’s plugged in
to her book about getting what you want in 27 chapters.

At the same time that he’s working hard to forget his resentment
about her hanging her coat on the staircase newel
just two weeks after she screamed at him for leaving
his there, he’s reveling in that misery too, the way the kid

in the “Storm of the Century” report is wading out
into hurricane waters because he likes not only the thrill
of escaping death, but also the seduction of its authority.

Meanwhile, she’s wishing he would wrap his hand around hers,
or even slide it up her dress, and not worry so much about
what other people think, just be present with her and her sex.

And also, if he could finally get the balance right between
aggression and tenderness, because he’s either an ox or a jellyfish.

Meanwhile, the third body is feeling a little airsick, but not wishing
the engines would fail and the plane go down and slam into earth
in a fireball of glory, and end it that way, all three together, before
things
come completely apart, because that’s not how the third body works.

It has no intention, no will. It’s a made thing only, a begetting,
a child that lives on light and breath only, on the substanceless
substances that animate carbon from its stubborn surcease.

Meanwhile, the bitter feud goes on, and behind it
only a vapor trail drawing its indifferent signature in blue.

April 10, 2007

Categories: Poems
No Comments »

I’ve owned this particular object almost longer than anything in my life. I used to always lose the most valuable things, watches especially. My first few watches were nice metal ones with brass finish that looked like gold, but after a while it would be the cheapest thing Timex made because I could never seem to hang on to them. Oh, I still have the wooden desk that my mother gave me when I was twelve, that she said was from the Civil War (but I think is just a replica) — but it’s hard to misplace a whole desk. And there are the framed photos of my Dad and Mom, but of course you don’t go around losing things like those. But this thing, this pick, this plectrum — it’s so small and easily misplaced. And it’s not like I’ve been especially careful. It always lives inserted over the E/under the A/over the D string, high on the neck, between the sound hole and the shoulder. But it’s not like I’ve never traveled with the guitar. Last summer it went with me to empty out the entire contents of my Dad’s house on Long Island, during which time I visited my step-brother at his rental in East Hampton where he and I and a friend of his howled and banged on our strings out on the deck by the pool for hours. The summer before that it went with me to Wyoming for a month, not to mention the stops in Chicago and Minneapolis.I was given the pick by my girlfriend at my first job. I’ll call her “Laurie.” I lived east of Poughkeepsie and Laurie lived just over the border in Connecticut, and though she went to Yale she was a country girl at heart. Her mother was from Wyoming, and I think she always thought of herself as a misplaced orphan of the west. She drove a four-cylinder sky-blue 1977 Ford F-100 Ranger which looked like it was designed by Stonehenge enthusiasts, it was that angular. The suspension was as stiff as an anchor on a battleship, and driving down a country road was about like riding in paintmixer.

Laurie liked that I played guitar, though I didn’t play well at all. The guitar was a cheap Guild copy (“Madeira” — that’s Spanish for “wood”) that my mom had bought for me from the House of Guitars for $105 when I went off to college, and the neck was warped out of the box and the action too high I learned not by playing with friends or an instructor, but working alone in my sad little bedroom on songs from my Bob Dylan songbook, or making up my own songs when I was feeling blue. But I think it approximated Laurie’s need for an educated cowboy boyfriend, though I was a far cry from cowboy. Still, my grandfather had raised sheep and my brother raised cows, so at least I knew some of the lingo and had worn manure on my boots. Our breaking up was a torrid affair, and on my way home from New Haven I stopped at a guitar store and traded the warped Madeira for the black Martin copy (plus cash, of course). I started smoking Marlboros to remind me of her (though I switched over to Camels, and then Dunhills). I started on and off for the next twenty years, though for a while it became more like stopping on and off than starting.

She didn’t give me a lot, besides that bad habit, but she gave me this plectrum.

I like it because it reminds me of candy, of taffy to be exact. The pink, red, and orange bits especially. It looks like a bunch of pieces of Turkish Taffy were pressed flat and then sliced to make this pick (though, I have to say, mint is my least favorite taffy flavor, except maybe coffee; and I don’t know what that dark blue would be — way too dark for blueberry). You can’t see it in the picture, but pressed into the plastic is the word “Japan.” High quality mass merchandise.

I can’t believe I still have it.

Categories: Essays & Rants
No Comments »

I received for my birthday in 1994 this bola tie with two figures etched into the silver throat-piece. One I recognized as a katchina , the other I mistook for a cornstalk. 

My wife and I had been having significant problems in our marriage, so I was surprised when she took me into Animas Traders just before my 35^th birthday and told me to pick out something I wanted. Things weren’t so bad that I thought she would just forgo the formality of giving me a present, but they were still so raw I thought she might get me a book or CD or something similarly impersonal.

Our marriage had been getting more difficult ever since we moved to New York in 1990, and we were both struggling now more than ever. With each other, and with the ghosts of our pasts

For me, it was the ghost that had compelled me to come back to New York from Colorado after my mother died in August of 1988, two months after wife and I married. Except for brief vacations, until then I had avoided the old homestead near Rochester for all of my adult life. But when my mother died, I felt a sudden need to come back and begin taking some responsibility for the legacy her family had left – in this case, the farmhouse on the Oatka Creek that my grandfather’s mother, Marion MacPherson, was born in. The property had first been built on by her father around 1815, and it had been in our family since then. If I didn’t move in, it was likely going to leave the family.

For my wife, it was the anger at having given up the life she had begun to start for herself in Colorado, and all the ghosts that lived down where that anger lived that hadn’t yet been exorcised came rushing out with it. Most immediately, by moving to New York with me she gave up her first new house which she had only just bought the year we met, and complicated her son’s life, whose father still lived in Colorado.

It was a battle between families living and dead, and between two temperaments that were defining themselves as more and more disparate, in spite of some common interests.

Much of what was in the store repelled me as derivative, touristy rip-offs from various native cultures around the world. I saw a collection of carved ironwood, and remembered my trip to Baja Kino, Mexico, with Virle to trade with the Tiburon Indians there who made it – an apparent rarity, according to Virle. On our way back across the border, I saw panel vans and lunch wagons selling loads of ironwood figures and other “authentic Indian” crafts by the side of the highway.

I was getting ready to leave the shop, despairing a little at another example of our apparent differences, but my eye fell on this particular bola, and it called to me. I asked the owner and collector if he knew what the angular figure was on the left. The katchina, as I knew, was a ceremonial dance figure in Hopi ritual dances which represented the border between this world and the other, between the conscious and the unconscious life.

What I mistook for a cornstalk, however, he told me was a stylized figure of a whirlwind. “It means whirlwinds bring change,” he said, looking into me in a way that made me feel naked. I felt two things simultaneously: that I had misjudged the owner whose junk helped pay the bills for treasures like these. Treasures, at least, in the eye of the beholder. I suppose to another, with different needs but still in a crisis period in his life, the dolphin carved out of ironwood stained with brown shoe polish and imported from the one side or the other of the Sonoran desert could likewise be transformed from kitsch into talisman.

The second thing came with a feeling like something was opening in my chest, similar to the feeling when I had come to the realization a few weeks before that we were caught in a net not of our own making. And now, that maybe these whirlwinds which had felt so destructive might blow away all the dead litter of our misunderstandings and hurts.

When I wear it on special occasions, people sometimes snicker and remark on my “cowboy” outfit. If I say anything, I just tell them what the figures represent. The throat-piece is in the shape of a shield, and though I’m too often sensitive to others’ comments, there’s little they can say about it that bothers me.

April 9, 2007

Categories: Essays & Rants
No Comments »

Imagine your idea of hell,
only smaller, and tapping against your days
like a branch at a window all night in winter.

Only it’s autumn, just.
Whatever happened to summer
it’s over, and though I’ve arranged

a few entertainments -
a party, a wedding -
it’s hard to erase

the image of the man
who lived his whole life
in my father’s form

gasping for three days
beneath a plastic mask,
his whole body shoring

its last energies against the microbic assault
with all the panic of birth,
and losing.

The mask fitted over nose and mouth,
clear as glass so we could look
straight down the abyss if we chose -

that’s the window.
And the futile heaving of his chest
for three days and nights -

that’s the branch
tapping out its code: you’re next.

But it’s autumn, and I’m standing
on the slab of slate that makes up
our front step, holding six pears,

windfall I collected
before I mowed the neglected lawn.
Three in each hand, their globes nestling

in the cups my palms make,
necks peeking out from between my fingers
like small birds, or children

begging for food, to be held.
I was ready to set them on the counter,
hoping by the weekend to be let go

from the double-fisted grip of grief
and indifference. To put them up
for winter, as I’ve done in other years.

But I heard the geese calling, sailing
over the house and yards in near darkness,
like Synge’s inscrutable women

at dusk, keening.
So I came back outside to listen.
And remembered that woman’s poem

about geese, the message of permission
and hope she said she heard.
If I hear anything in their call

it’s not translatable. I see them,
dimly, in a break between
black shoulders of trees,

like dust, scattering across the charcoal sky,
looking for somewhere to overnight
before rain, and winter.

Categories: Poems
No Comments »