Swimming away from the green horizon,
I didn’t know quite what to expect, although
I had an inkling of desiccation and light.

I sensed there would also be flowers,
a kind of spiral dancing among lavender
and apple blossoms I’d later equate with sex.

But all I knew then was a fluttering in my belly,
a rush of water and the quiet world twisting
and heaving in a way that was both monstrous

and fun. A new sensation in my belly
I’d call fear. Some form of tremendous love
pressed down on my sun-shaped face.

I came to know deformity. I learned
the perfect grief of leaving some perfect part
of myself behind forever.

What I didn’t reckon with was the shouting,
the fire-tipped calipers, the rigid god
who drew me into air like an aborted sacrifice.

My final learning was of hate, and it wrapped
its rubber hand around me like a net,
dangled me above the crowd, inverted

and shrieking for everyone to witness,
the ridicule and pity in their howls
a rasp against my brand new skin.

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It’s not that I ever got over my fear of death.
I just became too busy to remember.
In that way also I avoided an intimacy with strangers
which was really all I wanted.

I had studied the plastic breastplate
and the plastic sword I’d begged for as a child,
made them stronger with a collection
of daily insults. The imagined ones were best.

I erased the memories of fear and pain,
then erased the erasures. I bleached
the unsoiled linens, forgave the forgiven,
skirted the camouflage cover of moss and sticks

I’d built above the vertiginous void
which was my origin and my salvation.
And in the order of my ink and clips and paper
announced my arrival at my arctic bliss.

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I pour the coffee into the cream
and all the faces I want to put my hand to
float up from my diaphragm, clotting.

I open the red curtains fearing
to fade old engravings and photographs
of relatives taken by relatives.

That’s how much I crave sun.
And fearing to ask questions
not because I don’t love answers,

but that something in the teletype
part of my brain can only ask questions,
I let them instead dissolve

into today’s anatomy of distractions.
Near the end, stomach swollen
with pizza (fatal antidote) and beer

(muse of poets, bringer of daylight dreams
and a sudden nap on the couch)
I wake in time for the anchor

to announce my mother did love me
once, but at the moment I was too busy
crying to notice.

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It’s hard to write a poem
the day after Christmas
with guests in the house

reading in the living room
to music you won’t hear
for another year, their baby

in the guest room swaddled
in coats. Easier after
a heart-slicing argument

with the wife, seeing a tsunami
swamp an island, or hearing
all about the new Macbeth.

The medieval carols swell
like crystalline bells, like wind
in a belfry, or children sighing.

Pages rustle slowly, like a hand
around a shoulder, and I open
a book, its ink still sweet.

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December 19: Small Miracle

Saturday. The calendars says
Hanukkah ends. Goyim
timekeeping. But that’s okay,
I’m half-goy myself
and my wife is full-blooded.
We light the last candles late
again, too busy or forgetful
on Thursday and Friday.
Every few years we have enough
left over to skip buying a box
entirely. Small miracle.

December 20: Agley

The best laid plans
take a back seat again
to urgencies of the season.

Three short errands
become an afternoon -
collecting the long-neglected

Goodwill donation,
the last few stocking stuffers
(decisions as weighty

as the boxes under the tree),
the grocery list that swells
from three to twelve.

Folders of ungraded papers
get demoted to a chair
from the top of the kitchen table.

December 21: Teaching Tolerance

A three-day week at the high school
between Hanukkah and Christmas
is a series of hours that teaches us
the limits of our seasonal imperatives.

December 22: Haiku

Forgive them, for they
have not done their homework, as
I haven’t either.

December 23:Ho Ho Whatever

I have my principles. I shall not
show The Grinch all day to my classes.
If they bothered to come to school
I shall reward them with meaningful activities.
Until today. Maybe a sign of kindness,
or of increasing age and indifference.
Go ahead, forget the research paper.
Play your Internet puzzles and games.

December 24: Another Kind of Ritual

Out of my son’s homecoming at almost every holiday
I have made a new ritual: improvise a sumptuous supper,
share a meaningful movie, drink and smoke too much
but deny it, until the next day which I spend
entirely in bed, missing the party downstairs
with ever-growing and ever more beloved relatives.
My son cooks gumbo, does dishes, entertains.
I make three ghostly appearances, pale or green,
attempting to be well, failing. My body knows better,
sends me back to bed. I resolve to be as smart
as it someday.

December 25: Risen

Rising early, purged
and ashamed, I finish
the final wrappings. Prepare
for twelve hangover jokes
and ribbings, one hug.
That done, pray for clarity,
forbearance, and love.

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Money issues had got me down again, so I drove
to Dina’s office because she photographs well
nude in the desert. In spite of my scorn

for brokerages, I liked her building with its jungle
landscaping and Spanish colonial architecture,
and I was pleased as I walked through its dim,

cool corridors that this time I knew the way.
But her sign on the wall had been replaced,
and the entrance to her office remodeled.

Back in the parking lot I remembered, again,
she’d moved to a new location, but I’d lost
those directions, and she didn’t answer my calls.

There was a corporate shuttle on the blacktop,
so I boarded it, sat down across the aisle
from a corpulent manager thumbing through papers.

After a while, without agency, the van pulled onto the street,
and I finally spied the driver using passenger-side controls.
Up the main drag in Denver we lumbered, heading north,

twenty businessmen by then, and me. On my phone
I began again to read The Brothers Karamazov,
when it dawned on me that Dina didn’t work

for that company any more, and dawned on me again
we were no longer headed for the branch office,
but seemingly the airport, and then Toronto,

just over the border. Even if I had gotten off then,
I had no car to get me home, no passport,
lost and at the mercy of indifferent authorities.

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Let’s talk about the ways we’ve been abandoned.
She, at seven days, by a mother preoccupied by
the Chevy she’d lifted from her parents,
taking it home, childless. And you, less
dramatic, but nonetheless traumatic –
the rapture threatening daily to spin
you off like a Kansas twister, vying
with the safety pin stuck safely
in your crotch to teach you
something about staying put, and
something about the distance
between your mother’s love and
yours. And mine, less urgent
of all, less wonderful – oh, I forget.
Was it something I imagined? Who
can see it? Recall? Can you? Can you? Can she?

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For a while it helped to remember that I am nothing.
Nobody home.

But I am also desire.
I am that stream.

There’s no such thing as nothing.
My thoughts invade everything I touch

and when my body’s gone
it scatters into everything.

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i

on the car radio yet
another jazzed version of
walking in a winter wonderland

the dj spins bitten
by a cajun bug
in disneyworld

ii

geese fly east and west
and east and west
north is lost

all their darling hatchlings
gorged by ferocious
fuzzy warm things

the polar bear is dead
except for dwindling replicated
museumed artificats

iii

before Aristotle showed
the sky was not a ceiling

but a space between
the soil and sole
revealed in walking

we grieved
at life’s brief leash

now Hade’s cave
seems a hopeful place

what we’d give
for those grey days
in eternity

iv

we’re not supposed
to write poems about politics
this is not one of them

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Snow compacts leaves in the front garden,
melts; a new freeze comes, thaws again.
Skin breaks from ribs: next summer’s soil.

After supper we unclip stiff
sheets from wires slung on basement joists,
fold and put away for next week’s use.

We write the Christmas letter, fold and seal,
unearth the list of friends we wish were near,
peel stamps, surrender to the darkened box.

Clouds sift in, a promise of snow and sleet.
The fattened squirrels twitch in their sleep.
A few sparrows flock, seeking seeds.

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My legs are cold.
My blood thickens.

My twelve-page Christmas letter falls over and puts a nice crack in the garage floor.
My instinct tells me not to turn around, my desire lunges, my intelligence condemns.

My dreams abandon me daily.
My inertia slams into my entropy, but my no-fault policy seems to have no effect.

My Rolodex recounts Kepler without citations.
My Sunday surrenders, balmy.

My laundry hangs, damply.
My turtleneck from Penney’s hangs, pilly.

My pages run out.
My bed calls, guiltily.

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My poem for yesterday
was lying in bed
sunlight blazing
against the curtain

some small celled thing
crawling through my system
the way I crawl home
after work

fighting through pain
for position.

My poem for yesterday
was feverish,
written by a lazy man
aching for work

drowning in anguish
and phlegm.

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Beneath the August moon
the crickets churned
and flames danced on your face.*
We donned our heels to stamp them out.

Disguised in ordinary plaids
we added the remainders
and divided the unrequited lovers’
penchant for a taste of antimony.

Frolics were forgone. Deeds
were deemed superfluous. Renegade
and reggae headdresses patterned
after Antigone’s Neanderthal

ancestors flared and vanished
in the same thought. To fill
the void we invented ritual,
convention, and time-wasting devices.

* Borrowed from a 12th grade fiction submission

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

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

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Before Thanksgiving at your in-laws
some voice stirs in you, says,
I’m gonna get you wasted.

Some other voice replies,
Oh no you’re not. It’s bad.
You don’t like it.

No one listens to that voice,
the first voice says.

So you scurry to the basement,
to the storeroom in the back
where the old twine, twelve oak boards,
and mildewed maple syrup
lie bearded in dust

and pack a bowl
with sticky bud,
light it up.

Through the haze
you remember now why
it might have been a bad idea.

If you could, now
you’d peel back the caul
covering up the question
you can’t remember
to ask.

You want to feel better.
That’s all.

But covering up that feeling
is some ancient anger,
punky with moisture and drought
in wrong proportions.
Or ossified, steely, or just really,
really.what? Hard.

And covering up that anger
is the present one,
just a few hours old.

And underneath them both
a little fear.

And underneath the little fear
a bigger one.

But anyway, none of what now occurs
to you occurs for very long.

Giddy with the tingle
of basement molds
and the lurid 40 watt
rainbows of the naked bulbs
you rise into the steam
and conversation
of the packed kitchen.

At dinner you make
silly conversation,
give your in-laws
one more story
to layer over
who everybody
thinks you are.

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Monday morning the main office secretary asks what’s going on in the woods out my way. “Oh, they want to open the trails to mountain bikes,” I say, tossing mail I never asked for in the bin. “Not those,” she pursues. “The Ponds.” A body found strangled and abandoned in her car among the birches that borers and leaf miners have left alone.

I don’t know, and shuck the inquiry. I don’t watch TV, mostly ignore the top half of front page’s bait. Murders and gossip aren’t news to me, though they’re hard to escape.

Next day, on the radio, between segments on Afghanistan and holiday breads, the local spot tells how the husband’s now suspect, a professor of business and media psychology. An uncontrolled holiday argument, I assume.

It makes one reflect on the fragility of our natures, one’s unassuming neighbors, what’s ticking inside. Then quickly return to troubles of our own: rude drivers, the question of the perfect present for my wife, my own piles of papers to be graded. Every year this season grows less and less forgivable. “Let’s stop giving and getting,” I silently wish. “Let’s do something meaningful, help a family in need, write poems for each other, plant a tree.”

On Thursday, not a word, all is still on the matter.

Today, driving home, for the first time I hear the murdered wife’s name. I knew her, a photographer, an adjunct at the same college as he, but known better as wilderness defender, fighting fiercely to save the same woods where her mate delivered his final irony.

I stop at the Christmas Fair where the alternative groups sell Peruvian caps, handmade soaps, Tibetan scarves. Declaring self-reliance, fair trade, peace. The table where she would have sat selling gel prints of the Ponds in all seasons now inhabited by a sculptor who has risen from the waiting-list, peddling his coffee-can characters.

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Her greatest fear, she said,
was that she’d come home
to herself, and there’d be
no one there.
I took
that on, and the door
of my cell swung open.

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“you can’t turn feelings off like a water faucet…”
Jenn Adams, Facebook status post

Sometimes you come home and you realize you left your feelings running and the whole first floor is flooded with feelings and you rush upstairs to turn the feelings off but you slip on the stairs and there you are, drowning in all the feelings on the first floor again, until you grab onto the tv that’s floating around in them and you catch your breath and get back on your feet, and then it’s back up the stairs, more carefully this time, and you finally get the feelings shut off. “Oh jeez,” you realize, “my feelings bill is going to be through the roof this month!” Good thing it wasn’t the hot feelings tap, you think, trying to look on the bright side.

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The body struggles against the obvious
conclusion that the mind readily grasps
and wields like a small machete
against the soft belief and prayer
and buried memory of the body’s hope

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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

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