It’s the season of the unseasonable birth – dead winter
wherever you are, under this aspect of the sun.
Even the desert greens disguise themselves in the dun
of death. The holly and the ivy comply,
but palely. People are mean. They want to kill me.
I want the same. Jesus Christ, give it up.

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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.

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In the wall of your fortress
you open a narrow breach and fire
arrow after arrow at me.

Each one enters, bites. I feel
the hot fury of your hatred and hurt.
I see you on the height, raging.

When you are exhausted I let go
the bird to fly through the wound
you have opened in your defenses.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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