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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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