Ambassadors of Smooch

A leash in each hand

2012-02-02T21:59:00.001-08:00

They howled and barked
and bit holes in dusk’s hide

all the way down Mesa Verde
and into Taylor Park’s meadow and field.

Each stagger made his head hurt
and his wrists burn as he wrangled.

He talked softly first before cursing
but the light in the dogs’ minds

shone at the tips of their pearled fangs,
unintelligible and unbound.

The neighbors could not not watch
the man’s sweating and flayed composure

in his V-neck sweater and ivy cap,
holding in his flapping arms

the hellhounds he never on his walks
could control, nor stop his heart

ever while he no doubt tried.

Batting practice at bedtime

2012-01-09T21:29:00.001-08:00

Up to home plate
while already in bed

a blanket across my neck,
one pillow folded underhead,

socks in a pile nearby --
I level the bat across a knuckle

to lay down the first bunt
on the ball field behind my eyes.

Again and again pitches
catch the sweet spot

on the fat end of the bat
with the dull knock of wood

in a rhythm of baseballs rolling
down the chalky third baseline

until the park lights dim and I sink
into the dug out of my bed, satisfied

and ready, at last, to let go of a day
of wild swings at most everything.

Thomas McGuane (another good MI writer)

2011-12-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

"Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best."

Wordless

2011-11-20T04:30:00.000-08:00

Wordless

I want to call it vividity
That quality of the city yesterday
Framing every surfaced edge with perfect light.

But vividity isn't a word outside a private
Kind of context--a certain day in a certain place
Where things made sense in the specific way
I saw them.

Only later when I search again
For the clarity of that coffee cup, the words I read
Sitting in a cafe on Wabash Street, finally understanding
That hunger is hunger and lust is lust
Without confusing the two--even the clear face
Of a girl in the bus outside, even her clear eyes
As they locked on mine for a brief
Lifetime, until the bus lurched forward
And she moved into the day's
Clear margin.

Later I'll want to speak of this day again, to tell
Of that coffee, that book, that girl--
And I'll search for a word to describe them, the right
Word that sets them in a mind's eye's perfect light
And I'll struggle to find it
Finally giving up for lesser words, the ones
Left when clarity has no perfect word,
But should.

November
18, 2011

This I Know

2011-11-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Someone’s in love
in our den of cubicles.

The matrix of embedded fixtures
above radiates a hint of sunlight.

When she laughs on her iPhone
and swooshes down the carpet paths

Her corduroys swish to silent music
that strafes our many walls of thumbtacks.

In front of workstations hemming
emails, fielding calls from Shanghai

Fingers tap a little lighter. Even me, I won’t pretend
to gouge Dick with my staple remover

For how he chews and swallows
hard. I’ll forgive the world for now,

While somebody believes
giving in is not giving up.

2011-10-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

"Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away." - Danish physicist Niels Bohr

Ten Spot

2011-10-06T09:24:00.001-07:00

I clutched the chain link
outside the office
like I was ready for a beating.

On the other side,
men in hard hats
rolled and lugged heavy metal stuff,
tools and materials.

Lenny, holding both ends of that white towel
around his neck,
was in the middle
of hitting me up for another
ten spot.

I looked out to the tough guys and told Lenny
I’ve got three in college
including myself.

He got six bucks.

I kept three.

2011-09-12T05:39:00.001-07:00

David Foster Wallace: "Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."

2011-09-12T05:37:00.000-07:00

"To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident." - H.L. Mecken

Space junk

2011-09-03T10:53:00.001-07:00

The sloughed debris
of our failed
ambitions clutter the view
of our exit strategies.

We can no longer
gawk at infinity
with the rusty rocket booster
bumbling about.

This morning the pocked shamblings
of two satellites met
in the first orbital chest bump
and added to the detritus
overhead.

Oh, Schlitz cans on high!

It’s a mess our eyes
cannot bat away, neither
yet-devised harpoon, tether,
nor magnet can sweep.
Say nothing of confessing.

What a problem for a clean launch
off this trashed and trampled rock:

My Flying Leap--Soulful Swan Dive Up--Curtain Calling

Up, clear of all metals, plastics
and twisted solar panels
toes pointed into His or Her or Its hands.

An unbruised plummet please:

I always imagined
reaching out,
being reached
in an open up I’m home embrace in the Spotlight
room enough
for each of us.

2011-08-11T09:08:00.001-07:00

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"
- Louise Bogan

The Rising: Tonahutu Creek, Colorado (July, 2011)

2011-08-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

The summer waters of Tonahutu Creek
plunge through these cabin walls
gargling its mouthful of hammers
and cymbals and sledge hammers.

A turn of the window crank
swings out glass in the dark
to invite the meaning of all this ruckus
to pause here in my sleeplessness.

This one oceanic wave extends
white noise from eternity’s many tributaries,
webs of water coursing deeper its paths,
making the banks of my inner ear
tremble in its faith.

Rough touch and barbed exhalation--
all pattern-less wreaking,
wrecking and making ever smaller
all bodies, even that stony
bruiser squatting midstream and weighted in tons and ages,
its gritty scalp and girth grows smooth
and leaner.

This stream is unbroken brokenness
of sound and water:
None can shoulder the Tonahutu.

There will be no calm this summer
for those listening to the Tonahutu,
no trout to scoop from
small basins of evaporating pools.

Only the real and steady meting out
of water on the march, gnashing and washing
away puny expanses
of prayers and manifestos and the peace
that comes from sleep.

2011-04-26T05:55:00.000-07:00

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. All I know is what I have words for." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Love Cookie (or The Day After Valentine’s Day)

2011-03-25T15:23:00.002-07:00

At bedtime from our separate sides
between different layers of blankets
she speaks of the last Valentine’s cookie.
The same sugar cookie I lifted from the plate at lunchtime
with a glass of milk for a dunk, and then scuttled the plan
when I drew her hungry eyes in my mind.

That cookie was big, pink-frosted, heart-shaped tummy love.
The last one. I slipped it back into its cellophane sleeve
and twisted the top off a Swiss Cake Roll.

Now, she tells me before she turns over
wrapped in her rose-colored fleece
that she thought of me too, of bringing it up to bed
and eating it together before she devoured it.

That will be enough cookie for me.
In our separate moments of hunger, we thought of one another,
mine an invitation, hers an acceptance.

Sacred, sacred ground

2011-03-24T15:38:00.001-07:00

The pastor repeated himself as gusts of wind
smacked the sides of the open tent with five rows
of chairs on fake grass above frozen ground.
We shivered in white tights or pressed slacks.
And again, he said the ground was sacred
standing over the hole next to the casket.
The wind too, again and again, whipped
and lashed from the north.

Geese from somewhere approached,
their honking back and forth to one another
fell upon his words sacred and ground
louder and louder from long black necks I imagined
stretched southward and then softer and softer
until one human voice was alone again,
and our ears turning numb.

I felt I’d been told the old man had moved on
and we could make for the car where each of us
could begin to measure that cold against other cold
and the real shape of his absence.

Love Cookie (or The Day After Valentine’s Day)

2011-02-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

In bed we rehash our days
from our separate sides
between different layers of blankets.

Somewhere before sleep
I learn that she ate the last Valentine’s cookie.
The very same sugar cookie I held to my mouth at noon
with a glass of milk ready for dunking, and thought
about her.

It was a big cookie. Pink frosting. Homemade. Heart-shaped to boot.
The last one. I slipped it back into its cellophane sleeve,
twisted the top and opened a Swiss Cake Roll.

Then, she tells me before she turns over
wrapped in her red fleece blanket
that she thought of me too, of bringing it up to bed
and eating it together.

That will always be enough cookie for me at night.
In our separate moments of hunger, we thought of one another,
mine an invitation she accepted.

2.14.11

Twice Upon a Noun: An English-Class History

2010-10-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

With a DRY ERASE MARKER (I hold)

we begin at the foot of the thought

where a noun

is something

to hold on to

such as this.

Yes, you

can we agree

your CAP slid bill backward?

and you, the silvery EARRING

at your neck

upon whose head is turned away?

(thanks so kindly).

And Jeremy, back again

for another class and in the front row,

welcome:

The glinting CRUCIFIX

outside your t-shirt.

See these. Touch these. MANNA, good people.

Not enough.

A noun

is not just your PACK of cigarrettes

you reach for on break

but that idea you reach for

like LOVE

(getting lucky, no)

or TIME

(to take more hours

packing chicken thighs in cold storage

this weekend to make rent).

A DEAL or a SHORT CUT

to satisfy a late-night craving

for Dorito's Cool Ranch nachoes

or fix the misfiring No. 8 cylinder

in need of a new coil and boot.

Not enough yet.

Some GRACE

in our pockets with the LINT

you'll never lose

would be fine.

A tender REMISSION

on the ring with the

KEY to that hard-up

pick-up to drive

your father to radiation

when you miss class

Monday.

And what of the others

Yet unwritten

between cinder-block WALLS,

double-wide TRAILERS, or

while on third shift with a de-boning KNIFE

held with rubber GLOVES

with numb FINGERS.

Assign names your first-born

and second

may learn when you tell them

of your trials

and triumphs. Like PAIN

you took with you

some REDEMPTION

that could meet you,

and add another

and another --

MEDALS you've earned the freedom

to describe as the author of each,

the story to unwind now

your own.

Eulogy: He smoked, He drank

2010-10-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

My cousin warned me

About the tequila he introduced me to,

what it would make me do.

He also told me biting my fingernails

Would turn me blind.

He was mostly right.

I’ve smoked all sorts of hand-rolled

cigarettes

Drank sundry cheap spirits

And swore mighty, and continue

To burn my innards

On the coarser

Things I can put my hands to.

When I was ten, puffing my first Swisher Sweet,

David Hirschfeld said I was hell-bound

But I think that was for being Catholic.

He was right, mostly too

It turns out.

I kicked my dogs

When I had them,

Wrenched their innocent necks

With the lead

On walks

When they forgot

Me.

I ripped the hook

From the soft pink gills

of gasping fish,

Split the warm breast of

of dove I shot

And gutted each with one bloody thumb.

Rabbits. Squirrels. Pidgeons and cats.

Aimed once for a chickadee and missed.

Church and conscience

I skip ahead of

With the lunge and grope

Of the hobo catching

The next train out of town.

Scruffy and stained.

A taste like kerosene resin in my teeth.

The wind shifts a newspaper in a wire trash can

Whispering of days

I don’t bother to count.

Ping and Pong: Two Brothers on a Rainy Day

2010-10-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

The furnace snort and creaking joists

of an aging house. This

sifted through walls

like time ticking

behind a dentist's chair that gave us

the creeps.

Down in the basement

we found no ping in ping pong

just pong-pong, pong-pong

from paddles made by someone in Taiwan

we swung in sweaty palms

with narrowed eyes.

But static is pong-pong;

ping-pong more dynamic,

a call and answer,

a challenge and acceptance:

battle two brothers know well.

In the fake light with a tinge

of wood stain in our noses

we'd ping-pong

patiently until brother’d bash it

in or out, more often out.

In dark corners we'd fish for the lost ball

underneath dad’s table saw, or behind grandma’s paintings,

cobwebs on our fingers

like cotton candy

sticky.

I pretended to lick.

You'd flick your hand

in the air as if it were on fire,

white tendrils trailing in the mock panic.

Such strange play

away from the sun,

the wind, the worn base paths

of our back yard that led

everywhere but inside.

10/4/10

Five fat mollies (fish in aquarium)

2010-09-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

back-paddle, gaze

up for holy host

but they have to wait, for I have come

to play a hymn before them,

my only audience.

At first stroke on steel strings

they dart for the fern's tall fronds,

or crowd inside the ceramic house

as if their scales be plucked.

My song turns to gargle

upon their gulping faces.

Their bunch draws tighter, butting & snap.

Then one breaks school

and sinks to a dark corner.

What is it here he harbors

that he cannot share

amid his band of brothers?

Soon like smoke

he comes to the glass

with his eyes unblinking history

to fathom the form

I make:

My mouth sucks in

and pushes out,

this hand as if pectoral

flutters to float my body.

Deeper yet, a hungry look

of ages we both have shared

and therein may find

my being like itself

worthy of both the worry

and the feeding.

Demolition Man

2010-08-30T06:24:00.001-07:00

The student who earned

a police escort

from campus today

for threatening a teacher

had passed two of my classes

because his stories

were head butts

in the face, beer

breath, fisticuffs

mosh pit voice

bare of falseness.

From work release

he came:

Couldn't turn on a computer.

Forget typing. Reading was

a demolition of half-wrought

starts and stops.

His cloud-white skin

tatted with black

flames and initials

of a son he's forbidden

to see became artifacts

he always exhumed

to begin a story.

His childhood was flipped

in the back seat of a Vega

and later rolled his own cars

until he learned to allow

high speeds inside a revolving

automobile to unwind

a pain twisted inside

and walk away unbroken.

Inside several careening cars

he learned to resist his nature

to constrict against opposing

forces.

He stopped clenching,

let his arms and legs hang

about him like floating

inside a space capsule

as glass shards tumbled

around him; his body pretzals,

his head a rattle in the hand

of a maniac god.

Inside fitful eyelids

beyond the reach of shearing metal

his calm mind counts

revolutions of mayhem

per second.

Aspiring welder, chef,

and then motorcycle mechanic,

I saw him led away,

his blue eyes closing

down in the seventh week

of a summer term.

His arms hung loose

like his jeans

heels dragging

a body spinning

inside a strange universe

that wants so badly

to break bones.

------

Rooster Eye

2010-08-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

Awakened from coal-train trance

and seed corn field stupor

us children by that smoke sweet

with alfalfa seeping our car.

Above us always in the night

the rooster-shaped shadow

red eyed, white light tail feathers

high atop the grain elevator

west of Gibbon

marked our exit

on highway 30 to the farm.

Two generations of city off-spring

back to our Garden for

fresh dinner rolls,

cranberry sauce

in the final years

before foreclosure --

we'd gnaw lamb chops

of the ewes

from the sheep yards,

in the afternoon shoot the squirrels

from the sides of elm

trunks. Watch them fall

onto the sloppy bank

of Wood River and bleed.

In those days

we did more than

wander

the big house

and flick box elder

bugs from grandma's curtains

while grandpa rested,

the dishes dried.

We sampled chores--

hoed a field of beans, sheered sheep one spring,

dug a few fence-post holes,

swung machetes

at thistles blooming

in the corral. We held hands

and said grace around

the long table before we ate,

and one summer

painted the wrought-iron fence.

Something in the grandfolks' faces

sun-soaked necks

and hardened hands

on the car ride home

with the rooster at our backs

unearthed a hidden past

when feeding people

like us around a table

like that was a faint

dawning on a century's

budding landscape.

---

Modern Man: My Resume

2010-08-30T06:22:00.001-07:00

I start and push the mower

on Sundays

across the grass in rows

straight as teeth on a thin

black comb.

My thumb works like a nozzle over the hose

for mostly 20 minutes to spray

silver arcs at the hosta, the columbine

and coreopsis on the hill

without wetting the bindweed.

I can bake

bean sandwiches on wheat

with a slice of Velveeta

at 350 until the cheese begins

to bubble but not blacken.

I can do breakfast

eggs made to order several ways

in the skillet with bacon grease

before the pancakes.

Scrub and load dishes

into the washer, tines down, knife-points

horizontal on the top rack

hardly room for a shot glass.

With a toothbrush in one hand,

I can find and route

the popcorn's skin

tucked inside my gums.

When senses are cut

sharp in the dark, I know the beast

that makes a noise: weight,

and direction

by the feet that pad concrete

or earth.

I can tie a fisherman's knot

in the tiny eye of a hoola popper

bass lure at dusk on a rocking kayak

without my readers on.

These frivolous things, and still

the fire I can build like my father's

without gas or lighter fluid

raises its flames into the sky

and then its teeth I tame

to cook marshmallows

and make glow the faces

of those of my tribe.

Pooling

2010-08-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Can one step into

the same word stream

twice

thrice

or more

like now

where I worry

on this page

with words

of children leaving

passing

aswirl

upon days distances

beyond redemption’s reach

like days before

I stopped being

the father

in their house.

Those two girls

gone off

out where trees

grow in big woods

and snow falls head high

and stars shoot

slivers of skies

and smart people

ply their minds

with stuff

I never thought

with the hose

in my hand.

I water the same

brown spots

in the front

yard

and stand

there still

hunting crab grass

water pooling

again and again.

---

I’ve stirred the tea

Crossed words both ways

Rapped a jazz step in my ears

Pedaled the line of a poem

down the page

Sleep yet stubborn on my eyes

Eyelids like rocks in hamocs

un-

budge-

able

From the loll of late mooning

with a novel whose world

Will not wait for reason.

2010-07-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

The clothes, shoes, and furniture

exhale the scents of the lives

that weathered their seams,

left heel prints in their soles,

faded their patterns.

This miasma

wraps around me when I enter

behind my daughter

as if I've been dragged

under the back seat of an old

city bus. I squirm inside myself

and want to turn and exit.

But I follow her and push further into the store,

past her and I hope past

the smell, beyond rows of shoes, belts,

and VHS tapes, to a rear exit maybe.

Unprompted, a composite line-up

of images turns in my mind --

a Jiffy Lube mechanic standing too close,

a guy eating a Whopper in the front seat

of his car in the mall's parking lot,

a young mother with greasy hair

changing a baby's diaper

on a park bench ...

I face the back wall lined with books

I instinctively scan for a title

to distract the sensation

of bodily vapor trails

creeping into my skin's pores

and attaching to follicles

on my scalp.

Soon the assault withers

as if someone's strange

house odor has become familiar.

I slide onto a chair,

word-by-word slip away

into a T.C. Boyle novel,

and elbows ease onto someone's old dining room table.

I read a dozen pages or so

before rising to search for my daughter,

ready to buy my 99-cent novel and bi-lingual

New Testament and exit through the front doors.

I pass two familiar women

and each in turn looks me in the eyes

before pushing past with a cart

or holding a child's hand. We share

blank but knowing faces.

Not embarrassed to be here

re-acqainting with worn clothing in older styles

that may even be some of our own,

but that maybe each of us

away from our homes

where flowers in berms

wave petals, a lemon sits on a counter

with its smooth sunshine skin; here, at the Good Will

we become part of all humanity's

dirty laundry, sweaty, soiled

and pungent with fecund

pasts that reach inside

until you say 'uncle',

a recognition that we

share everything

whether we like it

or not, and to resist

otherwise

doesn't make it

any different.

2010-06-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

Fingers and toes

everybody knows

even the smallest of these

older grows.

Body of soul

no one's for sure

if this one knows

it's own way home

to a love that's whole

Through the doors

if it's up the stairs

darkness waits

before metaphorical gates

The confusion

of the spirit's fate

belies the status

of our devilish state.

Decisions in mirth

a self determinism

or the ticket's stamped

before our birth

It's all anyone can do

at times to keep awake

to simply greet what's

beyond day's dusk

and a new sun-break.

----

My oldest daughter's been home two weeks and I sense

there's no need to pat her back, grab a hold of her arms,

and hug her now.

She's real again, a presence back

in the house swinging in the hamoc

over her bed with a book I didn't recommend.

She's painting over the godawful

pink and blue striped bedroom walls

she picked years ago.

She pushes the roller up then down -- a green slate

when I commend her mature choice of color.

I think she smiles at the wall.

I am a vapor trail. A balloon bumping corners of the kitchen. A reason for the recliner.

I will become a ghost again

walk through walls, slip silently

in and out of rooms, clank dishes

in the sink. Bump pictures in the hallway.

Sit and listen for the click

of the front door deep in the night.

One year in college and she openly

inventories my liquor stash and laughs.

Especially the apple green bottle

of kamikazee shots -- that got her.

It's late but I take a horribly tart snort

right from the bottle, glancing over my shoulder,

all 'I better not get caught or I'll have some explaining to do.'

Of course nobody sees this or the other.

In the night when I pace

I stand barefoot on the stairs

touching the bannister and listen to sleeping family

and imagine

breaking

the spell of invisibility,

like a cloak I wear

drops and I'm really there

and you smile and I can see it.

2010-06-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

"To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life." - Czeslaw Milosz

2010-06-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

"The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away." - Paul Muldoon

2010-05-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

May Swenson said that poetry is "based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness."

Dear God

2010-05-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

At any one snub, stub, barb, bane

It’s so easy to start:

Oh, Jesus, Holy Mother,

yet finishing feels like

raking leaves in my Nebraska wind--

Oh, Christ, God, Heavenly Lord.

Hands pressed into my pockets.

The pleas & help me's, help you's,

help us's.

Bleeding gums and grudges.

Cloud spittle. Oil spills. Sonofabitch.

Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.

Chew. Breathe. You. Me. Walk some more.

Kneel down. Bow. Thank yous. Blessings.

The listing & cataloging of graces--

peony petals, star-lit skies, your bayou eyes, melodies

of untraceable mysteries.

Never an Amen. Always

The pull, the push, the rock

Underfoot of groping and fumbling.

Nary a Hallelujah

On the walk of so many

Wandering words wanting

To reach the porch, the beach, the upper-most branch

Of anything

A prayer, a poem,

one simple task

Before we rest

2010-05-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

"The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo." Alan Hollinghurst

He’s eleven

2010-05-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

His history full of pornographic

pixils.

I’m growing up.

He validates

his curiosity

swiftly.

Today’s formative perversion.

Child grows to boy to man.

Oh, not even close

to see function of body

tooled and calibrated

for the souped-up sexual joy ride

thrust and suck and spank

lick and fondle and …

That’s more than enough.

He’s eleven

with a catalog of photos

videos, poster-size genetalia

and orafices touched up

and super-sized

laying hard rubber

on the electric highways

of his mind.

There is no fight to win

now the download

into the matrix of brain

is complete with the library

of position high-lights

already embedded

as history to fulfill.

Within

pre-adolescent foreplay

revving the idle

rattling his hood

on an emerging appetite

already insatiable for skin

like, maybe, his daddy

wherever he is.

Last I heard

pacing behind bars

downtown.

Mary's 2 cents

2010-04-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

Not only did Wordsworth probably reference Dorothy's journal for inspiration, but his wife Mary came up with two lines: "They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude." William said they were the best lines in the poem.

2010-03-30T22:48:00.001-07:00

In Ride the Dark Trail (1972), L'Amour wrote: "I just pointed my rifle at him … and let him have the big one right through the third button on his shirt. If he ever figured to sew that particular button on again he was going to have to scrape it off his backbone."

Un-Sober

2010-03-27T16:51:00.001-07:00

Today I stayed sober
down where the words
stone and cold
hunker
in the quarry of
straight faces
and laughless throats.

In stone beds
one finds
no mineral laughter
vitamin color
or vegetable warmth.
I awake

inside my sleep together

stone cold sober,
knuckling rocks
into raw-bone echoes.

Water can claim
a quarry's empty can,
rise in the mouth

to sweet my lolling tongue.
I wait
and for new words to burble
and steady me
above the jags
of stone and cold.

More than any drink

of hell-fire

nor the flat hound

teetotalers.

A shape

smooth in the hand

soft as new skin

simple as a giggle

breaking inside

or between us --

suckling without deference

to any liquid

in this now, even here

a seed.

So

2010-03-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

You think you’re better than me:
Can judge the holes in my briefs
unmatched shoes, unbroken spines
of my books the gods gave you.

I collect bungee cords the way you collect
scalps.

Lemme tell you something:
we ain’t brothers nor we kissin’ cousins.
We’re just here toleratin’ our separate
and unequal parts of our wholes
at this stop-light.

The two stinks that make you you
and me me
coon and coyote could whiff
no problem even on a thin
plate of December night
and know the rank in their noses
are badness both ways.

If you wanna measure mileage
your feet against mine
it’s Go Time. But fund balances and tax breaks
footage or fence links
that keep you-know-who from gettin’ in
you know where, stay inside.

I’ll measure pounds per square inch
of my dead body next to yours
in the ground, side by side
together for all the lonesome days
and late-night whelps
eternity grants the dead.

It’s all bones,
2 sandwich-sized bags of wind
dirt and intestines,
no matter how you twist it.
So turn back
and agree not to look next time
unless you really wanna stand
toe to toe. Or just shoot
the breeze.

2010-03-06T06:59:00.001-08:00

Happy the Man

by Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite or fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

"Happy the Man" by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation by John Dryden. Public domain.

2010-02-25T17:21:00.001-08:00

On Learning Jabberwocky

Tickle the air with your fingers
wriggling at the sky
for the brilligy way the moonlight
sweats in the night.

Bend your knuckles, my daughter,
into teeth that clench and bandy,
for the tongues that snatch
the hinge of your wrists -- chomp-chomp
fiercely

On the hilt with two hands
these stacked fists, hold steady ...
Brace the blade:
One fast edge toward the Jub-Jub bird,
the other at the fowl of eager appetite.

And in a moment's thought
point the index finger
toward the scales that whiffle,
follow it close, the eyes that a-burble burn
through the shadows of night.

Hai! Karate!
One-two! One-two!
Both arms chop
and then lop
the gargantuous melon of our maximum foe.
Spelunking she can fetch that head
and now getty-up, you're aglow!

Open your arms wide
as your grandmother's hide!
It's greetings galore, you'll have slain
that thunderwockish brute.
Woa, baby! It's a new day.

And the moon again washes
with your tickling, wippling fingers
dancing in the air, all fireflies
and mimsy. Tease ivory notes
upward toward the toves
humming along with our hands.

Now clap
a lot!

Barefoot Road

2010-02-23T19:27:00.000-08:00

My breaking of pots is in the kiva

of my life, cylindrical, alone in my hands

I drop

let slip from my fingers

below wood beams

above soil

lit interior of my house

without symmetry of light

insulated by the breath of my days

When the sun's right

the moon down

windows to the north

full of shadows and one eye

watching

I commemorate life

purify with loosening my grip

descent shocked

to shards, mounds

Vivid and bright

on every horizon of day

Aligns with the crooked

corners and walls

Rise and set many years

cycle again tracking

north then south

round the extremes and follow

the generations of Chocoans

to break more pots

make useless to the living

what does not belong to me

Each time sun

and moon rising and falling

day to day passing the knowledge

the glory of a sacred center

to which I answer back

by breaking another

and then one

Out

2010-02-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

past rows of hoods and windshields
next to the power station
a patch of prairie as skinny as the pencil on the sill
shimmies in the southern shift like a church choir
holding back its old and buried voice.

Where, I can’t imagine all that is separated
by concrete
horizontal line
body of water
crevasse
epidermis
and always a voice in the ear.

Sometimes, though, when the flat earth causes a stumble
or the blink of light from a dark corner

in a moment
I flinch, throw splayed fingers
toward the other side of unknown spaces
and land
in vaguely familiar
languages spoken
by grasses in the wind.

In the windows of my house

2010-01-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

I can see the candles burning

in the windows of my house

from the street where I stand

in the dark.

The hope some find

to keep them alive on the street

standing up

through the night

is here for me

on Mesa Verde Avenue.

These are the words

that I found in my sleep

last night by your side

my hand on your back.

When we woke the sun

for the first time in weeks

washed snow and ice

and my street-walking mind

clean of the gray streaks of winter.

In this light we rose together

with the paper, a prayer, and dishes.

Undivided, one flame

and the shadows still we keep

beneath our feet and in our fingers

an unspoken faith.

Lorrie Moore

2010-01-13T10:23:00.001-08:00

"How to Be a Writer" begins: "First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age — say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."

Henry James

2010-01-13T10:20:00.000-08:00

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."
He also wrote: "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
He hung out with Freud, Jung, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, and many other intellectuals. He once said, "Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world." (WA)

Winter, It's Time to Go

2010-01-08T09:19:00.001-08:00

Above our drab grass and field, bony limb of tree, you
our mistress, wove with crystalline thread
the sequined gowns fit for dancing virgins
on a moonlit parade.

We’ve toasted your flakes,
sipped them one by one, twinkling on our tongues,
those champagne baubles from your icy hearth.

The mercurial splash of frost on the pane was a lovely touch,
the clean white sheet spread on the picnic table a sweet décor,
even the wind-cave sculptures made each day a filling
desert tray around which we grew dizzy with festivities.

Such jollifications in your white robes sieged,
grow hard and entomb our lives in silver-slick nightmare.
The icicle tinsel shatters and crunches
like old bones on which we slip, crash, and crawl. Our tongues,
soft palates upon which you served us flakes, you now pinch
against the lamp post, insisting on the choruses that once
praised your decorations.

You’ve mauled our snow angels with hoary beast
that seethes around window sashes and down chimney’s flue.
Its breath white abyss we inhale and expel, shackling
our nostalgia for you in a numbing freeze that cracks carrots
and breaks wooden fingers even at noontime.

Stricken by your gala we’d once celebrated,
we burrow under scratchy scarves, synthetic rawhide mukluks, and faux fur,
our eyes to the ground, backs buckled from shoveling,
and hope chaffed against each heaving
of your northern breasts.

All we have is this small one who is bundled up tonight
for the task we now push him toward:

Down the dam delivered, white scarf waving over the clenched lake,
our message of surrender is offered on the two cracked, raw lips of the child
sitting cross-legged on a saucer sled. A prayer of its reception
feels like our last hope that you grab your gowns
and go make merry with another season
and its silly people.

"Scared money doesn't win."

2010-01-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

Old gambling saying.

17:1 Jimmy the Greek put $10G on Harry to beat Truman mainly because Dewey had a mustache because he learned that women do not like men with facial hair (Dewey had a mustache).

I'm going to shave in February.

Promised my wife.

Snow Day

2009-12-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

In our house, we begin early,
almost with the sun blasting
off the white roofs, yards,
piles and layers of fresh, light snow
like ash heaps from heaven
and all this light refracted fills up the bathroom
like a cannon of stagelight
plunging through the north window.

No one here begins with a shower
or even ends with one. The newspaper
is read twice, the crossword torn out
and even completed. Our heads
are all bed-worn messes. She's in velour pants,
I'm in sweats. All day its from slippers
to snow boots, back to slippers,
back to snow boots, and finally,
slippers.

This household of teachers and students
cannot, will not, do not even think
of going to school today. But we drive
down snow-filled streets, tires plying
waves of white, risking it all,
to buy a new sled, new snowboots
before we arrive at the foot of the dam
ready to ride, catch air in our mouths,
snow in our boots, hot red splotches
on our cheeks.

It's cold as hell but still the sun
is shining. People like us are smiling,
until our teeth feel like falling
like ice cycles from the tops of our mouths.
The rest are complaining how
when they were kids they walked
through tunnels in the drifts to get
to school. It's okay with us.
We don't mind the comparison.

I lean the shovel against the door jam
after scooping again
the stuff the wind has blown
into the driveway a second time.
My back is clenched by the uncommon
labor. My mind relieved in the space
of the uncommon hours unharrassed
by a clock, by traffic, by production.
I lay my frumpy head on my pillow
almost like it had never left.

2009-12-02T13:02:00.001-08:00

"May the grace of god be with you always
in your heart may you know the truth inside you
from the start may you find the strength to know
you are part of something beautiful."
Alexi Murdoch blessing/lyric

Hard Blessing

2009-11-26T22:30:00.000-08:00

My head feels heavy during the prayer
my dad is winging, the words split
by his heavy breaths he tries to buy
a slice of wisdom with, but the words he wants
so badly to drip like hot honey
choke out of his mouth like dried stuffing
and cold turkey he's making us wait for,
the gravy congealing, gramma's beans thickening
beneath my open eyes.

Oh, Lord, daddy!

Words of thanks for family, friends,
here and buried, across the globe,
our country . . . soldiers, God's will for us . . .
the list wanders like an out-of-orbit satellite,
and his pauses stiffen with the rolls, the butter knife mires
deeper in the margerine tub while he searches
for another direction--for neighbors, his job at the muffler factory,
at least maybe a finishing salvo that could relax us
before the flatware hits china.

He finally gives up and says amen
like a truce he's accepted with a sad truth.
I second that amen and my hand scoops
my first forkful of cranberry-ham-corn casserole
when an unspoken pang
roots in my gut an unspoken hunger
for more than just this fast feast.

11.26.09

2009-11-24T19:27:00.001-08:00

I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.

Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine. Our families will be with our families and our families' families, your father and perhaps in some way my grandfather as well.

-- Everything is Illuminated

Flash Bulb

2009-11-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

My mother wants me to campaign
for office, a position with a title
and a leather chair, and space at the podium.
She sees me enter a room of people,
never enough eyes focused on her youngest focal point.
But I can’t become that target
with no exact spot on which to fix
and stop the spinning microphones.
Those who do can
and it’s a secret they keep
how their eyes tread through
the mobs of questions and needs.

Let me settle again
against the wall,
twizzle a straw while I set my eyes on a stain,
the wrinkle, the tremolo of doubt on the smooth edge of response,
slicky reach of hand, fingers squished,
a promise released in a cough.
I could keep my slanty smile
from where I sit watching others’ children
do dirty things that will make
their mothers blush beyond their coffins.
11.9.09

Sitting on my throne
facing dryer whirling clothes,
tumbling jeans, socks, and undies.
An assortment, including, I see now,
a dollar bill here and a dollar there
now one pressed against the window
damp and steamy,
sweating off the grime of many hands. My son's laundry,
or even his mother's. More likely
the two of them together collaborated
on its contents.

The currency of daily life trades
hands between them while I’m away.
We have one checking account –hers,
but separate clothes hampers.
I've lost too many articles over the years.
Money and socks, evaporate out of the side
of the house and dissipate into the world.
My own entropy model of life’s energy
sloughed off as another layer of skin.
I watch, dreamy witness to the tumbling
in this closet machine,
warm and almost sweet smell
of cleanly chaos.

2009-10-19T23:01:00.001-07:00

When I slid my son's bmx bike into the trunk

of the Hyundai Saturday night

I was careful to avoid damaging the pine cone

as big as my head that had been rolling around back there

for several months.

I'm awake and thinking about that pine cone,

how we were on a brief vacation

in the mountains--clearly, it had to be some mountains--and we found it.

I said I wanted it. The kids once back in the car started arguing about

who would claim the find. I stayed out of the sparring,

thinking only that they'd forget all about the cone

we'd tossed there and at home I'd bury the prized souvenir

into my book bag and find a nice spot

on my metal cubicle bookshelf.

The sunlight that hits the office wall in the morning in late fall

would paint the pine cone's scales more golden,

almost like a dripping honey comb. I'd think of the hike

we took up to some waterfall I can't recall the name

of and imagine what must've been shouting and some laughing.

There might've been a rainbow in the water's mist.

For sure I'll remember picking up some dried horse poop

and hitting my son square in the back

and his incredulous expression.

That I will remember.

good morning

2009-10-19T08:55:00.001-07:00

I can’t see the sun directly
but the splash of its yellow face
flattens my cubicle wall calendar.
I spin in my chair to the horizon
in time to witness the morning
bang its symbols
thump its bass drum
lift its operatic voice. I imagine
the pulse through this inch-thick
double-pane glass, wordless
but speaking a creation song
I want to sing along to
the rest of our day.

2009-10-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

I know the times,
each one, when a child of mine
received the harsh silence,
the wooden word,
the stiff posture,
flinty stare
I aimed their way
when they were out the door
hardly a glance my way.
Up to something
I hadn’t fully approved of,
who they were with
where they were going. The world was absorbing them
into its miasma of hormones and grinding. That’s what I thought.
I stood over the spade. Flipped through channels.
Soon, I would be the one to stew
for not saying goodbye or I love you or have a good time.
Not them. That’s not how it works.

I am a man who wants to keep
what he thinks he owns. Wants to protect
what he thinks he can. Whose
brittle grip may be selfish but I shouldn’t let it
keep me from being the guy who greets them
when they return from the world
resembling something I knew
once better than my own hands.
It will never get easier, will it,
this.
---

I was at the table,
the midnight seeping
in through the French doors behind me
when the boy walks in
followed by his sleepover buddy,
both with flat hair dripping onto their faces,
shorts dark and heavy with swimming pool water.
They pad down the entry toward me and nod,
tumble down to the basement
with my silent approval for fence climbing,
trespassing, and feeling what a thief feels
after taking booty from the night
that sweetens dreams for years.

---
I’ve thrown a bucket of words
on my face and, awake now,
I am in the wet ash of thought
from days of refusal and stubborn silence.
the work I have is about me, dripping,
the hanging out my shirt in the moonlight
over this hotel, then before dawn
the folding up of my body
above the covers
finally quiet and dry. The pen
the paper on the table.
---

The Impressionists
They like
breasts peaches
boats one cow
peasants at harvest dancing
children in arms or laps
open eyes breasts
bodies without sunburns
everything in the afternoon light
of their eyes brushing
a likeness of their own
pounding hearts which so want
to do more than what color
and brush will allow.
---
I meet the painter

gnawed raw and red
the edges of nail,
top-layer of skin
chewed to bits
as small as crumbs
to make a bib upon my chest.
Just my fingers sore
bare to breath,
press of color
as I watch a painter
lick his brush and then squeeze
its hair to a point. My fingers
throb when he spits
on his thumb and rubs
his pointer in the mercurial yellow
before scratching a hot coal
rising from the inferno on his cardboard canvas.
Sparks that rise up in to the ocean
sky, blackening the beach amid squalls
of gulls, an acrid burn
my fingers tingle
at the artist's heat.
9.30.09

So many empty words spent
like open credit
but one day you have to pay back
and answer for each
word-spree that left you speechless,
bags of notebooks at your feet,
shoes kicked off. The car wrecked.

The police on the way.
A sweet aftertaste turned ashes

in your mouth.

---

When I was a child, I spoke as a child,
ran or pedaled places, and sought food
or play day and night on my feet quick
or pedaling off the curb. Cautious only
for the shadows that crept from my head
and into the corners of the yard, park, or bedroom.
I breathed gulps of air and drank sloppily
from fountains. I slogged in water,
threw moss, swatted balls, spied in windows.
Broke windows. Slapped signs.
Always I remember running. And didn’t need to gulp
at breathing.
Today,
I walk. Sip. Fester more than play.
Sit more than dance. Think more.
Watch more.
I am on this bench
waiting for a boy to climb
inside and smack me on the head
and say, Come on, old man, let’s ride
to the park.
9/24
---

I vacuumed the garage Sunday night
after I stuck my fingers up the air tube
and got the dog’s hair removed.
I swept around the carpet remnant
that’s unrolled across the concrete
and threw away the juice boxes that were
fermenting in a plastic trash can. I guess she
thought there’d be a use for them eventually.
The rest of the shit I stacked over my head and pushed up
against the walls of the garage.
Yellow and orange extension cords I wound around my elbow
and tossed them over the easel’s arm,
the ladder’s leg. The pruner and saw
found branches on the old coat tree to hang. My only
confession: 3 Christmas tree ornaments,
round frosted bulbs: they're tucked deep
and ready for Monday’s trash pickup.
I could dance now in this cleared space.
But I sat on a stool in the middle, kept the volume down low

and let a song wander into the dark corners. I felt my way,
careful not to ask too much, let us both get used
to each other.

Letting go of Styrofoam

Some say Styrofoam doesn’t biodegrade
for a few thousand years, longer than it takes,
say, for my rusting Ford pick-up

to sink into its own skin.
Looky here: the cup I keep re-using
for near two weeks for my coffee
is getting a little sloppy in the sides.
Against my fingers it’s weakening,
against the test of my dark java
I make in the mornings and keep full
til late afternoon. The point, as I see it,
is that refilling and reusing is breaking
the chemistry of this body in my hand
and when it comes time that this
freckled cup finds its grave,
like the very skin I wear,
it will yield willingly to final decay
and release back into the hand
the spirit that made it.
---

I went with the diagonal mowing pattern
this weekend, striping the yard
southwest to northeast, and I have to say,
it looks pretty damn nice.
I’m glad I went that way. The grass,
for its own good, hadn’t been mowed
any differently than north-south all summer,
so I think it appreciated the change.
Its blades pressed to new directions.
Come Monday, I see, the pattern
is lost in the wind and the September sun,
a new posture has slumped back to easy ways
of summer and habit. I should know better
myself walking so many straight lines
that angles are hard to come by,
that nouns don’t easily make verbs,
that crab grass on the sunny south slope
will always need me to pull, to pull, to pull
for change I catch in brief snatches.
---

A student is in my office
right now
a female, late adolescent,
living at home, a waitress
and former Star Strutter at her high school
from the northeast part of town.
She’s flip-flopped into my office
and roosted on the stool next
to my chair. Brown with some strands
of died blond pulled into a pony tail.
Sweat pants and tight t-shirt
across her breast. She needs help.
I guide her pecks and picks
amid pages of the course catalog,
she scratches out a schedule; then, quite suddenly
stands, harnesses a poofy golden purse
and grips with soft fingers my hand
before taking flight
toward registration. The sun
not yet cresting the trees
on the eastern edge of campus.
A rooster somewhere out there
cackles.

2009-10-07T06:11:00.001-07:00

"He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing." - Sherman Alexie

Edward P. Jones said: "If you write a story today, and you get up tomorrow and start another story, all the expertise that you put into the first story doesn't transfer over automatically to the second story. You're always starting at the bottom of the mountain. So you're always becoming a writer. You're never really arriving."

2009-08-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." - Goethe

Leaving Central Park

2009-08-25T05:30:00.000-07:00

We came out of the wooded trail
in Central Park and into the sunshine.
Left behind on the trail where water puddled
like black clouds and flora grew tangled and sweet
was the worst of what I’d find in New York.
We’d side-stepped human feces,
a used condom, and two dark shapes
in an army coat and blankets
slumped under a picnic shelter.

Back in the straight morning light
where the grass was mown, I turned
to the grey-bearded man on a bench.
The London Plane Sycamores, he told me,
are all over the park because of their
resistance to air pollution. The thin skin
of their exteriors, pealing alternately olive
and scabby brown, could not be more
alluring to me, now more impressive
towering here, absorbing all of it.
***

My oldest has gone to college
and I am left with the thoughts
of my non-deeds, misdeeds,
and assortments of silences
of my fatherhood tenure
with this child no longer
under my roof.
My grocery cart I kept
empty of her snacks,
Harvest Cheddar chips
and Arizona tea,
and kept going round the aisles
avoiding going home
where her heavy healed footsteps
are not and I would be
looking at myself
for all that I was not to her.
So grateful for the price check
on green seedless grapes
and not finding my foot fungus spray.
But home is where I found myself
falling asleep with the empty spaces
of my crossword puzzle,
anxious for the answers
in Thursday’s paper.

2009-08-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

A space
between breaths
rakes of a hollow stump.
Because a day asleep
as shadow’s flat recline
mimics man.
Words garbled
gravel spit or choked.
This, now, divines
the blood to quicken
in silence’s calm opening,
peals the shadow
and touches palm to palm.

White on White

2009-07-09T20:14:00.001-07:00

I am from tube socks,
bread, light bulbs
flickering awake.
Table spread. Mayonnaise. Milk. Placemats. Bathroom tile. Sink. Tub.
Clean nails I don’t bite anymore. My white knights.
All of Colonel Sanders. Popcorn.
Scratchy wool of the sheep I sheered on Grandpa’s farm
turned clean cotton of my briefs.
Silky dresses of my two princesses on Halloween 14 years ago. And sailor suits.
Standard English Language
with a white ascot and Oxford.
Blisters. Scars. Some memories.
I am from the music, dance, writing that’s white. A table or three in the lunchroom. Most of the zip codes I’ve lived in. My son’s baseball pants before the game.
A bad dunk, a bad car color, a man in a hood and cowl holding
fire in someone’s front yard:: trash. Cinderblock of too many of my classrooms.
Maybe a white angel. A white-bearded saint in a snow suit too, if you say so. The All-England Tennis Club.
Cream filling. The whites of my eyes blinking back
fears.
The priest’s white collar. The dome inside the sanctuary
where prayers turn to ether.
Above this,
the clouds of jellyfish and giraffes and big birds
hoping for spots and stripes. My faith
(our faith?)
that there is much more
to love
if we unclench our eyes, let the white smoke rise
for the real and vast to imbue the day
with all things beyond just my own.

Saint

2009-06-30T04:34:00.001-07:00

I might love her best when she makes soup. This
Angel of the kitchen, this
Mother Mary of Merciful Broth.
As the stock starts to boil I watch her
Pull her hair back
And lean into the knife,
Cutting vegetables for the curve of my spoon
Deboning meat
Trimming away fat and gristle
So that what's left
Is pure and wholesome
And tastes only just like itself.

What starts her soup is what finishes her soup
Noodle and bean, bayleaf and peppercorn,
Hambone, diced onion, and cloves of
Garlic run through her fingers like beads of prayer.
She makes soup with no hurry
At home in our Sunday kitchen and
At the center of the family we hold.

I taste the God of love in each spoonful
And in the baptism of bread.

Sinner

2009-06-30T04:21:00.000-07:00

That old frog knows my soul, I guess
So he preaches to me past midnight
A mosquito-bellied sermon from his pulpit of muck
A message from that holy place that begins
Just down the small hill behind the house
Past a few trees
To where water and earth are one
Where cat tails stand like stone pillars
And fireflies light small candles for the
Cricket-voiced choir.

Some nights he wakes me up with admonition
The deep bassoon thump of hellfire and brimstone
The smell of swamp gas bubbles around him
And rises through my window with the
Sound of cloven-hooved deer.
Some nights I lay awake and sweat in my guilt
And confess my failures to the darkness I see.
And some nights he preaches in tongues while
I dream of harps playing:
Repent, Repent, Repent
He says to my dreaming soul
Which might be long past his salvation.

Long Past the Hour

2009-06-24T09:04:00.001-07:00

What comes of this work until 3 a.m.
In the pressed down dark
Of the basement, flights away from love
Sleeping in all its forms. Only Allison Krauss
Keeps watch with me, and all her songs
Are of lonliness and some good thing
That is yet to be.

What comes of this trying to connect
The dots of my thoughts
When the air conditioner is broken and
Wet heat seeps in from wild places—
Those places I no longer
Recognize at this hour
Just past the lamp shine in the window pane,
To where raccoons own the night and coyotes
Edge the lawn,
And spiders creep across my naked toes
Telling me
I am the trespasser now.

What comes of keeping at it long past
The hour of reason
The hour of evenness
Past when my sons curled into me
Half asleep already, and my lover
Invited my longing with her shift
To bedliness. Twisting now in our bed
With no hand to reach for.

What.

2009-06-01T06:37:00.002-07:00

Roger Daltry said he wanted
to die before he gets old,
stuttering, m-m-m-my generation.
He’s old now.
Rich wrinkly rocker.
Autumn frailty,
stumbling, bite of the breeze,
world turning with him still in it.
Songs as anthems blaze
somewhere, like in Joey Pee’s head,
with the hole in it and his black hair grown over the pistol scar.
A lame arm tremoring, his left,
rising when he least expects
like an old rock song that won’t die
even when he’s ready,
and waiting.
6-1
---
The peonies’ plump heads
were pitched face-down in the grass
when I got home.
Their beauty too much
for each stilt-like stem to balance.
Ants clamored into the satin-soft glory, doing nothing
as far as I could tell but inhaling
the fragrance of pink bosoms
in heady daze.

I couldn’t be sad the peonies had fallen
where creatures such as these
and I could accept the excuse to loll about,
or snip their bodies and carry them
into our darkened domiciles
and live a bit lighter for a day or two.
Not thinking about the falling,
only about what is promised in spring
and taken hungrily.
5/21

I don’t want to envy the man
with this walkout basement
who’s looking out over my head
from the patio smiling at the seventh fairway
he wakes up to every morning.

White teeth on tanned face. So healthy.

The Budweiser in his hand looks colder
than mine. Delivered fresh, I’m sure,
like the sunshine each day.
His garage doesn’t have
cat puke in a corner either.

While I’m still hung up on the golf course house
a man in the news, some Austrian, is raffling
his mansion to invest in microfinance
and move into an apartment.

I want to be him too, the man wise
enough to know the world’s foolishness
is only made by the price hike of Starbucks coffee.
How did he learn that he won’t be taking
much with him when he leaves
for the last time.

5/19

2009-05-25T07:30:00.001-07:00

The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning." - Mitch Albom

I can't say I hold up to these standards so well, but fortunately I know people who do hold up to them quite well. There's the saved and there's those needing saved. Blessed be to the both of them.

2009-05-18T05:35:00.001-07:00

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
- Bertrand Russell

2009-05-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

Wooden Bat Night

I watched the ball game
from the car, but read mostly.
When I looked up and found
my son in right field late in the game
I paid attention for a few minutes.

The wind from the south
brought waves of heavy mist
into the lit space of the ballfield
and draped it over him and the others.

None of them seemed to mind.
I rolled down the window to see
better, but it didn’t make a difference.

I could see everything like a god,
like a poet, like a big eye over a crystal ball
making sure operations ran
smoothly, according to plan.

But it wasn’t just the seeing,
it was the sensing of how this game
fit into the bigger picture, the context
of these tiny actions amid, maybe not the cosmos,
but this night and this day. How
breathing in the thick air and exhaling
right here fits, how the fathers hunched behind
the dug-out belong. It was an easy job.
Not much work, just watching
between turns of the page.
5/16

Make More Room

I left the house without my prayers
or a blessing on their heads.

I pedaled down the walk,
coasted into the store and bought
a Danish and a soda.

I forgot my medicine and my vitamin.
The kiss I had for you came with me
and fell into traffic at the 84th Street stoplight.

The sun was up well before I dropped
in to the office. The door in my hands held
open for Julie. My ear buds hanging
over my chest.

Time to smile in my cubicle. Rehearse
what will happen the rest of the day.
Map the future of forgetfulness,
all pills, prayers, and hugs and kisses
-- tag it for inventory and storage.

----------

The fitzer bushes have called it quits
and yet their twisted little arms
and webs of woody roots make an unrelenting chore
on the berm crowning the back yard.
The grunt and strain against them
transfuses my body with stiff bones
and soreness over days of botanical
warfare with spade, ax, and the hooked nosed
pruner.

Ankle-high transplants decades old
to hold the hill’s shape testify like mountains.
What man can compare to these bushes,
together an army that could hold firm long past
when scant moisture pulsed in this flesh? Today,
scratched and aching, the man who always toys with quitting it all returns again
to measure himself against their indefatigable
corpses ready to buckle.

If I did relent, the lesson from the bushes would be lost that I did not keep in my cramping hands. The memory erodes in me like loose dirt. If I could live this way, hold with others to what’s dearest,
I’d be one famous bastard long after my bones have been pried from this earth.

5/10

Gone

When they’ve left,
my parents, gone and buried, their lives distant figures
and their faces frozen to forever smile back,
I do wonder if I will become the pastor’s kid at summer camp. Except older
and so dismal. Their lives I feel could leak out of the holes their absence
has scored in my skin.

In weakened state, I could forsake my promise to live up to the shape of their lives,
and go park myself naked on the patio in moonlight
to sip whiskey from the bottle, curse the daylight hours
and buy that motorcycle and ride it until the saddle fits.
I could do more than forget where I sleep,
who my wife is and take up with strangers
who still smoke cigarettes
despite the warnings. No one would know me
again.

So many mistakes I have to make,
twisting this life into shapes unrecognizable from here.
I’ve heard disappointment has a hard time crossing over
to this side of living. But perhaps later,
if we’d meet, I’d need some answers
in response to What on earth were
you thinking?

Oh, who am I kidding?
It could just be easier. They could stay
and I could go first, so no one won’t look for me
when I go missing in the night.

On borrowed day

On a perfect day, I play an old song new again
in the back yard with the trees swinging.
The porch hound near my feet, gnawing on the steak bone
I tossed from a meaty lunch, grilled, not fried. Sauteed and
not frozen.
With a borrowed song, my feet dance across the hardwood,
my arms flapping like a cormorant
that’s lost its balance on a branch. Then the quiet hammock
rolls me higher than I’ve climbed
into dreams I haven’t reached out for in years.
The rest of us come home when my own company
has lost its pleasure. My hands reach
for their faces, their eyes my apples I fill my basket with
until the flames from the fire pit, the marshmallow
sticks aside, burns down, barely breathing like the cat
curled in my lap, needing nothing more,
not even time.
5/7

Neal pops an aluminum tab and will slurp the liquid off the lip
of his can. Richard clears his throat.
Each of Bob’s fingernails
fire off his clippers like sparks. When Jeanine reaches
the bottom of her big slurp, a gurgle
of air bubbles climbs her straw. It’s as usual
in the office where we are divided
and isolated yet share every click of our keyboards,
sniffles and muffled music around ear-hugging headphones.
Another afternoon we’re forced together, but three days
before we choose to go to Jeanine’s birthday party
she’ll be hosting in her apartment where she lives
alone. We’ll see each other’s faces and smile
like old friends who’ve had a fight a long time ago
about something no one remembers. We’ll
leave after drinking too much beer or wine,
go home until Monday; return to the same familiar
noises that let each of us know our locations
and whether or not Dan’s hay fever
is back.
5/5

2009-05-11T06:59:00.001-07:00

Romans 10:8-10
The word is very near to you, it is on your lips and in your heart: the word, that is, of the faith we proclaim. If your lips confess that Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. By believing from the heart you are made righteous; by confessing with your lips you are saved.

Photo-Journalist Danny Lyon

2009-05-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

“I wanted to change history and preserve humanity,” Mr. Lyon writes in the new book’s introduction. “But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.” (“Memories of Myself")

“People who purvey ideas in pictures are nothing anymore than propagandists of one kind or another,” Edwards told him in the 1972 conversation. “A great picture is something that awakens a very different reaction from each person who looks at it.”
Mr. Lyon, who has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, one for his film work, has called his work advocacy journalism and does not deny that it purveys ideas — if only the idea that everyone should be more aware of the pain and struggle around them in a consumerist, media-saturated world that tends to encourage isolation and apathy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/arts/design/26kenn.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=danny%20lyon&st=cse&scp=1

Old Dogs

2009-05-03T18:35:00.001-07:00

My old dog trips on the one step up
into the house and falls on her side.
She looks up, off to the side, away from me.
She blinks me away. It’s a humbling experience,
she’s telling me, and staring won’t help.

When the hips go bad
and the body trembles under its own weight,
each day is one less rather than just one more.
She’s showing me what I’ve to experience,
perhaps. If I’m lucky.
My own body will soon enough
fold onto the patio pavement,
an elbow scraped on the brick step, the nerve in a hip
striking hot lead.

How will you look?
Will your eyes, clouded, see the shapes
of the trees, the faces of family looking down
at you?

I don’t need to care how they will see me
with pity, sensing the loss of me, a part of themselves.
They won’t know it, either. The ground, as much as it can rattle the bones,
might feel like an ideal place to be
and my eyes, like Bella’s, I hope, are seeing beyond everything.
5/3

2009-05-02T18:54:00.001-07:00

The river in my head
flows always upstream
through the waters of the Platte River.
Where the carp swim over my feet
soft fins flicking my belly-white skin.
The sun bounces off the slow flow
of time at mid-day. My ankles sink.
The polish of laughter streaming
with the splash of my children.
The current floats us together
toward the train bridge and shadows.
Sunrise in their eyes. A moon song
in my ears.
5/2

Home Cooking

2009-05-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

Phip Ross 12/9/08

“But this is the language I speak
when I’ve an appetite for the moon and for you …” – Paul Guest

I get home and rest my chin
on your shoulder while you
lift the lid from the frying chicken thighs,
stir chopped tomato into white rice.

Steam coils. I follow. You measure
and sprinkle oregano, cilantro, garlic.
I nuzzle into your pink scarf and pat
you as smoke roils from a stainless steel bowl.
I ask what’s burning.

Nothing, you say, it’s just cooking.
I climb to the bedroom,
toss my trousers, hang my shirt,
try to warm myself
first between pages then behind
my drawn eyelids. Still I
smell you, this burning
I cannot put my nose into.

I stumble into cellars
of darkness, sniffing for crust,
gnawing on roots. Wander
toward meals you make
of what and for who? I find
seating at last a feast,
a table and us.

Family Dance Lessons

2009-05-01T11:33:00.001-07:00

Three clocks tick against
his head, two feet
sweat inside unholy slippers,
one daughter drives
and doesn’t pick up
his calls to come home.

The one son comes in
descends to seventy-two inch screen
flicks through phone’s eleven plus one hundred messages.
One says you’re cute
another says you’re stupid
three say go all the way to hell.

One mother dries her face
in waning moonlight,
lips always dry, elbows on her thighs.
One husband follows, face
wrung out, fingers loose.
Together mute.

One man writes eighteen lines
flipped by turn with every stroke,
sips from a glass of Kessler
with a seven-ice-cube jiggle
expecting to find the gorilla suit zipper
and escape to grab his golden fortune.

Five hours sleep
two broken yokes on the griddle
sizzle, one toaster
rejects stale bread slices
within crumb-crusted coils. Grape jelly
traces behind in the butter. Ten feet
of hardwood floors
scuffed and scarred
by dining-room chairs.

Shoulder to shoulder
toe to toe, seated
this time five for one hour. Eyes
of each face like wet colored windows
stained and framed and almost silent
before they all scatter.
pr

2009-05-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about the smack of the mit
from the baseball my son throws,
and the bruise it leaves on my hand.
I’ve drawn with words the muffled songs
my mother played at night as I listened
to the baby grand from the basement.
I’ve been to the park and back, tracing
childhood steps over and over again.
Really, I’ve done it all a few times
probably too many. I went back
for more kisses and caught the same
big bass more times than I can count.
I’ve been to the pond’s edge where
we promised each other a lifetime
in the witness of the moolit water.
And I’m wondering today if I can
write one of those poems again
letting the words like prayer become
the tracing paper I’ve worn
the soft edge of my heart against.
Today it feels like silence can take its seat
where usually I put a pile of words,
like damp laundry needing hung.
All connection to the perfect past is loose,
and here I am in the open space of the present,
wobbly on these legs, alone and without my cane.
5/1

2009-04-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

"If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."

Émile Zola

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."

The Limerick Song (ala Margaritaville)

2009-03-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

Grab your beer, give a cheer, raise a toast,
Cause it's limericks we love the most.
When you're at our table
Grab a pen if you're able,
Take her all the way home to Third Coast.

2009-02-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Gustave Flaubert

2009-01-06T07:31:00.001-08:00

Caroling Phip Ross 12/21/08

Alone in the truck, a hump
of ice on my hood, when two turtle doves whip
across my errand for a Christmas tree.
Two winged shadows in six degrees of December
recall the same cold of a different day when the quail stacked as one cairn
and flanked by fields shorn in a Nebraska winter’s teeth.
The birds held to each faint pulse in their huddle
before one shotgun pop,
a feast of feathers with palm-sized birds
scattering out into open country,
three wheel and wobble on snowy gravel
like tops about to unwind on a table. Small bodies draining
what warmth they shared
at the end of a bleary season.

With an eight dollar pine in the truck bed,
the gristle of ice and salt crackles
in the wheel wells.
Somewhere inside a bare bush in south Lincoln,
the two turtle doves hold
to a vein-thin branch, perhaps like me,
too numb to call or listen for response.

In the arms of this pine, cold harbors
a darkness my hand withdraws from.
Soon the house smells
like a greenhouse, musty pine
drinking the basin’s water. Warmth
will permeate
and lights will wink from thick needled branches.
It’s the doves and their cousins
I will sing and listen for, like as a kid, before gun or saw.

2008-12-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

Crosswords

The corporal said I’m too hot to enlist
for homeland offensive, too many itchy fingers
on my pens making poems with short fuses.
That’s what he tells me.

So I stand down near my yard’s perimeter:

Keep daughter one and two from entering air space
of back closets, back seats, anybody else’s sheets.
Cross the channels of bulging breasts
and bayonets of innuendo with son one.

I pace while
they’re at school, pencil in
8 across
3 down
at breakfast;
staff Driveway Checkpoint A
for minor in possession of gnomes and out-of-wack testosterone;
Keep watch on stories
of peeping tommies
at lunch
still hatch a haiku
after dinner.

Nobody expects
transfer orders, a change in command.
It’s the duty that calms me most days
while I stand post
for the after-dark sirens
the click of the dead bolt. Lights out.
Boots polished. Sidearm
clean. My bandolier
across my breast.

2008-11-26T08:35:00.001-08:00

Home Cooking Phip Ross 12/9/08

“But this is the language I speak
when I’ve an appetite for the moon and for you …” – Paul Guest

I get home and rest my chin
on your shoulder while you
lift a lid on the frying chicken thighs,
stir chopped tomato into white rice.

Steam coils. I follow. You measure and sprinkle
oregano, cilantro, garlic.
I nuzzle into your pink scarf and pat you
as smoke roils
from a stainless steel bowl.
I ask what’s burning.

Nothing, you say,
it’s just cooking. I climb
the steps to the bedroom,
toss my trousers, hang my shirt
and try to warm myself
first between pages and then
behind my own drawn eyelids. But I still
smell you burning
something I cannot put my nose into.

I stumble into cellars
of darkness, sniffing for crust,
gnawing on roots. Wander
toward meals you make
of what and for who, I find
seating at last a feast,
a table and us.

----------------

Leaves of November Phip Ross 10/22/08

“a leaf revealing its belly to a breeze
shows the silver color it always is” Molly Peacock

Two nights I wake to water
battering skins of yellow ash leaves,
their chlorophyll engines cold,
waxy cuticles thinning. Here
between yards raked clean
they recompose to my prayerful purpose.
The others have been chopped and sucked—
smooshed into bags and buried in the open maw
north of town. Such a waste.

Repeat dawn’s ashy smudge
with the fallow pigments of coming winter
when I stumble out with my bag,
my coffee and one key in hand.
These leaves upon the grass,
their pinnates overlap and stems curl,
all shiny and waiting
for one more chance, I think,
to validate their season.

Sunshine and dry air yet two forecasts distant
when these once green buds of spring
might just rise, and along with me,
skitter down pavement and up
like struggling kites toward lift off,
untether a deep thaw
for all light sleepers grown
rusty, cold and calloused.

--------------------

Thanksgiving. Kearney, Nebraska. 2008

Inside the garage retrieving beers,
I glance up, between two by fours.
In that hollow space in the early Cold War
I stacked quart-sized cans of peaches,
green beans, and corn on plywood planks.
Up there heat comingled with small thoughts
of spy games and the mystery
of Emily Broeckmeier's gray eyes.

The odor of a bitter smoke, for some reason, wafted there,
where I stared at nails poking through the roof,
the stored cans gathering dust. Labels peeled while I scratched
at rust spots sprouting tiny veins.

Today, the smokey scent suggests a flame
always sensed beyond this bank of sunlight,
an angel holding a flute in a berm, a gurgling fountain;
the quiet voices of my parents,
the games we kids wore into the ground
could not extinguish.

Always this trail,
a mean meal eaten and repeated.
Ash-fall from ovens
burning bodies.
Beyond imagination of a child and my father's precautions.
The dirty breath of a man holding a machete,
a leaky finger in his shirt pocket.

I can't say I knew the shape
of things unseen: A missile's jet trail dissipating
beyond kites in a field. Somewhere a fuse
flares, burns down. We all do now.
Know the shape, the smell, the sound
man makes in the dark.

------------------------------

Morning Movies Phip Ross 12/9/08

“From shallow water the deep shimmer came.” Paul Guest

When I was a small boy and the snow banked
against the sides of our house, I stayed home
alone, burrowed under blankets
and watched my mom look back at me
from the studio set of “Morning Movie”
on our local TV station. She’d cross
her legs and read from a clipboard
before cuing “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”
Above plaid pants and a turtle neck, her smile
glittered like sunlight on fresh snow.

One wintry morning made for movie watching,
the creature from the Black Lagoon sloshed up
from behind my mother as if I’d dreamt it from my comic books;
webbed claws opened toward her beehive hairdo while she read
notes about Béla Lugosi. Then, the Creature knocked over
a phony lamp with his tail. She screamed and I jumped
and grabbed the phone handset and then dropped it
to twist the channel dial and banish the beast
to the set of “Let’s Make a Deal” with Monty Hall.

I could only flip back and watch
as the man-fish with the green lips chased my mom.
An empty set, a toppled plastic tree,
a scream echoed from somewhere.
I gaped, unblinking
in my pajamas until the screen flickered. A strange lady
not my mother began to scrub ketchup stains
from a yellow shirt, her sleeves rolled up,
eyes pained as if she herself bled
from the arrow-head teeth of another
monster I would someday very soon
make with my own hands from a model kit,
a tube of rubber cement, and a tiny jar
of red paint.
-------------------------

Roger’s Way Home

“When the shooting began
Everyone ran to the trucks …
Except K” — Fady Joudah

On the hill where we boys turn home
the noose on the branch
above the rock, hair adrift like broken web,
shadows with hands
and hammers with nails.
We gun our flesh backwards
through these boogeyman visions
wanting only to live to run again
through another day.

Park lamp flicker emulsifies
the negative space I burn through
all fists and limbs flung downhill so far after dark
beyond center field, tennis court, and black eye of lily pond
toward the back door.

Somewhere Roger’s here
against a tree with his dented whiffle bat
looking to find a game.
We duck the plastic ball he’s swatted,
stumpy legs churning toward a home base Styrofoam cup
spewing spit in chops of breath. We clear the way—
No one catches the throw, no one stays to apply the tag
or even suggests out!
because Roger is always
safe at home, he’ll tell you
with only
grass stains on his toes,
fingers rounded into
hellboy cannon balls.

Long I run with bones akimbo, joints scraping
before I finally find him
after all these years
crossing town in the bed of some rusty truck
holding mowers steady,
his teeth chalky stains –
yet his jaw’s set
in a jack-knife lock
you can never turn your back on
but can still believe in like stone,
somehow see it bring so many
like me through their worst nights
not even close to those of Roger’s days.

2008-11-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

"What always benefits the most people is the life lived authentically, i.e., the life you were created to live. How do you know what that is? What gives you joy. What else other than joy lets us know we're connected to God and doing God's will? Every other path I've tried to take has led me to darker and sadder places than I ever want to have to be again." AK

2008-11-13T22:04:00.001-08:00

2008-10-27T18:59:00.001-07:00

2008-10-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

2008-10-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

2008-09-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

Our Father
After his work, the TV news cracklesof nothing I can hear of Vietnam,assassination, or gasoline crisis,
only father’s cresting and settling with my cheek and earpressed to his chest, my body afloat on his.
Where is his voice that rarely speaks
to say who I will be. I rise and fall. I grow into his quiet bones, wear his old shirts and listen long after I leave
but not to him. To titans of my industry, the re-mixed crackle of war
until in a rest home across town, we settle ourselveson the white pillow with him and question what we’vebecome. Afternoon light througha curtain warms our bodies, loaves of bread rising fora meal. Our last.
After the grave is ground, capped with stone unmoved, we drive north to lie down above him here, still wanting.Wind buffets our bodies beneath an empty
linen sky. My ear pressed to his chest wanting again to draw as close to hear him call my name.

1 Corinthians 12:4 - 6

2008-09-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Mid-morning reading (Terce) 1 Corinthians 12:4 - 6
There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit; there are all sorts of service to be done, but always to the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them.

Father Figure

2008-09-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

The recruiter said I’m too late to enlist
for homeland defense
so I stand down near my yard’s
perimeter:
keep daughter one and two from entering the air space of college dorms
traverse channels of bulging
breasts and bayonets of innuendo
with son one. I train while
they’re at school, pencil in
8-across
3 down
at breakfast;
enforce a driveway checkpoint
for proper documents;
Keep watch on stories
of migration patterns
at lunch
try to hatch a haiku
after dinner. Nobody expects
transfer orders, a change in command
but duty here calms me most days
keeps me regular
while I keep post
on the after-dark sirens
the click of the dead bolt. Lights out.
Boots polished. Sidearm
clean.

Shadows on Anniversaries

2008-09-02T14:01:00.000-07:00

“… what else can I do but love what casts a shadow … of time running in place …” Khaled Mattawa (Poem 96)

If immortal by the hand
of some All that Is
I have nothing to fear
other than the scepter
a loneliness
that can sweep ahead and swallow all repertoire
of days wedded in our embracing
a numbness
that leaves me listening through eterneity's walls

to hear your lips
meet your blue hold your sweet. Clearly
in this forever, if you are not, death is this living long
without you, the end. I would
die now, as promised, with you
than let life do us part
and let gods rise to hang as stalactites
from above our deathbed.
----

Who can’t trust a writer named Floyd Skoot
so unpretentions it gives Phip a shot at sanity
a chance at words that will lead somewhere
you will be too, in the same breath,
the same blink or wink, a thump of the drum
before everybody’s head is Fruit Loopy, like Floyd’s
and running to the grave.

2008-08-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

I beckon at the door with up-stroking index finger

toward the daughter, that middle child of mine,

who's shaking her head with

a cell phone against her cheek and backing

out of the driveway with the gravity a teenager

of her caliber feels pulling her away.

How long do I keep wagging this finger? There is no pulling

her back inside with me, the world can see. Such authority

requires a wand and even the idea evaporates before the exhaust

leaves the muffler of the lurching

car yanked around the corner. Me

a father left holding

the door to the future.

2008-08-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

The 3:30 sunshine is pasting leafy figures

of shadows on the vanilla blinds of my bedroom.

My after-school channel that Gilligan wasted with smiles for Mary Ann

years past is now archived on a distant network while

my own children scurry about their business

pedaling or driving. It's just

me and the prayer of the day: Snap your helmet under your chin,

buckle snug your belts;

Come home soon to drop your book bags,

slap shut the cupboard doors to the Little Debbie snacks and kick off your shoes in the hallway.

Just give me two more minutes

with the motionless ceiling fan and leaf shadows

to hold the house and spin of the earth

steady so as to bind together all these afternoons

when birds beyond my windows tried to break song

like this with me.

Waking

2008-08-11T05:50:00.000-07:00

I am corpse-like cold in the morning,
a cadavar that needs to idle in the driveway
like a trembling Studebaker
with the radio on low,
a fresh fountain drink bubbling up a red straw
and the windows cracked for a shiver
of morning to slap my jaw --
oh, this carapace face that my fingers try to mold into a shape
others might later recognize as faintly smiling
and having words that can subtract
some degree of darkness
from the dusk that always seems
to fall as soon as I awake.

Of two minds

2008-08-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

I’m hanging from the sun
barefoot at noon. Couldn’t
take the heat,
couldn’t sit for a second
more in my seat.
I kicked off my shoes
loosened my tie and swung
hope and prayer from the rafters
of the frying sky and let
it all cook in a crow’s eye
to ash and stain. Nothing
but the smell of the sun
searing the noses of those
who walk as if they’ll
never get burned
unless they stop and inhale
the heat coming
off the skin of those
like me swinging
all shadow
and bone from the sun
finally scorching heart.
--------------
Today I set out to walk
a happy line about the blue
of the sky, the bright
clatter of the sun smacking
windshields and roses.
Today, I walk with the wind
with smiles bursting from
the seams of my heart
effervescent with joy.
There is a love source
I tap and sap and spread
on the warm buttery surface
of humanity’s pancakes.
Make no mistake, I do pull you close
and hug you, or offer
a high five as I pedal my unicycle
past you with a fistful of balloons
hanging in the boundless
space of my many hearts
that won’t trip or tremble at the cracks
of this world. I will roll on, babies
and brothers, until
my face breaks and my feet
blister. Yet dreaming more
of these dreams I will lift
off in the dawn to you again
and again, friend. For there you have it.
I am unstoppable. Don’t even
try. I make my day round

and filling enough to feed

each of us.

2008-07-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

Kim Addonizio on writing:
"A feeling of spaciousness is crucial. Ideas come from reading, experiences, TV, looking at art, dreams, eavesdropping. Living in as many directions as possible."

2008-07-31T11:26:00.001-07:00

"Teach us to give and not to count the cost." - St. Ignatius of Loyola

Shine on me

2008-07-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

The sun hit me on the back
just where I was bent over in the yard
pulling crab grass, right where my t-shirt
kept sliding up my back, and the gnats
kept spinning dizzily over my crack,
which the drivers pulling up at the corner
couldn’t quite see because
the sun, it was also protecting
me from becoming anything more
than another future skin cancer patient
with a bad back and arthritic knuckles
the size of bing cherries.

Frisbee Eve

2008-07-27T21:01:00.001-07:00

My son and I went to Shopko
for a $6.99 Wham-O Frisbee,
with a hackey sack and a black, misshapen super ball.
I slammed the molded plastic case against
a brick column outside until it cracked open. The Frisbee wobbled
like a soggy pancake, but we got the hang of it in the parking lot;
we ran over the warm black top.
I once felt sad for a man and who I thought
was his grown son eating whoppers in the Target parking in the front seat of a huge
sedan, faces bent into open paper boxes, fingers sinking into sesame seeds and ketchup.
I wonder if people
who drove in and out of the parking lot pitied us, a father and son without a yard
big enough to run down a flimsy Frisbee through a summer dusk. But it was all
I wanted,
to lead him beyond five rows of yellow parking slots
damp hair against his forehead, his body, arms, fingers stretching beyond time,
chasing down a day on the asphalt without thinking much of it, or too much of them,
the onlookers. Maybe pity boomerangs like a horid Frisbee toss
that drops out of the darkness and wallops the person
who pities right in his air-conditioned arse for thinking
someone is ever a sadder case than you.

Sunset over Fairfield Shopping Center

2008-07-25T23:11:00.001-07:00

The sun dropped its flaming bomb
on the mall’s JC Penney wing
singeing sugar-white clouds’ edges
a perfect marshmallow gold. It was
our burning bush
we watched from the parking lot
sipping carbonated chemical soup
until our ice cubes melted and a june
bug hit me in the neck. We took off
with the windows down, letting the hot breath
of the night cough in our faces. I still
thought about the sun’s quivering holiness
and imagined it rising tomorrow
like a big yellow Wal-Mart smiley face
cooking up another parking lot sermon
for later that day. I promised to
look for it and park
at least until my Pepsi goes flat.

When Wrinkles Matter

2008-07-16T13:15:00.001-07:00

They do one day
I have finally found
like spilt milk wet upon your face
softened curdles begin to smell
that smell, a subtle tell
that days
like years like spilt milk
matter in the measure of what’s
being lost at the close of a day
the last drink, the taste on my tongue
souring inside this slow crease
drying on my eyes so much
faster than I could ever run
even back when.

2008-07-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

Under the storyteller's hat
are many heads,
all troubled.
- Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser

Microfiction-- 250 words

2008-07-09T10:31:00.000-07:00

A Poet Answers His Muse

That he shouldn’t, didn’t matter. When he saw her walk into the bar he recognized her immediately. It had been twenty years. He swung his car into the lot, found one spot near the door that wasn’t clogged with Harley chrome. He put his glasses on the dash, took his pen from his pocket and tossed it on an unfinished villanelle on the passenger’s seat.

The bar was full but he saw her across the room, near the pool table, leaning against a hunk of man with intimate ease. Nothing had changed about her. Not her eyes, the electric red hair, the length of her thigh and curve of her butt, the calliope of her laughter.

The fear in him as he walked towards her rose in two forms—bile, to the top of his stomach, and the first thump of an erection with unfinished business. The last time he’d seen her she’d grabbed him there. Lifted up his graduation gown and grabbed his crotch. “Just checking, Philip,” she’d mocked, then turned to her friends, leaving him stunned by this one attention in four years of high school.

His hand found her crotch this time as he wrapped his body around her in one motion, pressing his bulge to her rear end. “Oh yeah, and it would fit right here,” he whispered.

He never lifted his hand to stop the first fist from coming, or the next, instead left it in that cleft of denim that almost rhymed with orange.

Allowance

2008-06-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

Would it only deepen this flesh-current
of the times we’re tumbling
through every day
if one were to suggest that
making love were not outward
offering
nor generous giving of oneself:
Or not only this charity of heart and body.
Rather, in addition to that:
a loving of oneself
by the heated invitation
of another, this cohabitated
allowance for ourselves
through another’s eyes
that warms the surface
of our own souls while
the partner decides
to follow the reflection
in ours and embrace
one’s self here in
effussive light that
affirms us all, where it’s
okay to love “I” and you
together at once.