Here’s a home for the 70 or so poems of mine published over the past three decades, from most recent to the first. –Lee Patton, Denver, CO
Note: This poem cycle was a finalist in the 2025 Lengthy Poem Contest, published in Defenestrationism.net
TREE OF SAWS a poem cycle by Lee Patton
ABALONE LIMIT
We stroll just inland from Glass Beach through the portal-like passage where the logging road bridge was dismantled–just the sky overhead now, not log-laden, honking trucks. Our next-door neighbor honks at us. He shows off abalone shells arrayed across his wetsuit, splayed on his pickup’s seat like a flattened passenger. “Got my limit. I’ll take these home and give a couple to your folks.”
As he sputters away, my head’s as full of hungry memory as our back porch sink when my brother came home shivering from diving near the old dump’s cove. Loaded with his limit, he’d dunk the squirming mollusks into the basin, their single-muscle selves stuck to the smooth porcelain as if still clinging to their tidal life, clueless that our back sink was only a holding tank, a prelude to slaughter, that my father was about to flatten their flesh with a tenderizing hammer.
ARTS PATRON IN THE GRAVEL YARD
“I am a patron of the arts,” my brother claims as we scramble through his buddy’s gravel yard. It stashes his cache, long, rusty saws among discarded lumber. My brother likes to browse the lot, hold a blade close to his almost sightless eyes and caress each rusted tooth.
He’s hired an artist to sculpt the blades into the idea of a giant redwood. Each sawtooth edge will form the trunk’s vertical line, a tree of saws to glorify his seaside shopping center.
I squint into a thin fogbank which blurs the green-black, jagged horizon of redwood hilltops. “So,” I ask, “Have you commissioned another saw-tree for the Wal-Mart you’re building across the highway, on the ocean side?”
“Naw, that store’s just business.” He shakes a blade so it sings down to me. “This tree of saws…it’s art,” he says, enraptured by the music in the metal teeth.
DISMANTLING HELL AT THE OLD DUMP
We swerved toward the sea bluffs laughing about when this park was the dump and we’d be stashed in back of Dad’s pickup— itself a candidate for the scrap-heap— hunkered among the week’s trash as if we ourselves were candidates for expulsion over those slimy, guano-topped rocks.
Tidied in the hands of wary heirs, the beach of broken glass, of beer-bottle ambers and sea-greens, rough edges soothed by twenty thousand tides, has smoothed into local attraction, “Glass Beach,” where tourists rove barefoot over a crust of shards— our parents’ and grandparents’ discards too worthless for the penny deposit.
As if in crusty mockery, twisted, rusted almost through, stubborn fingers of scrap metal stretch like old men’s claws from the tops of sea rocks. Fat seals doze on the lower ledges. Today, locals yammer about the seals “taking over”—transmitted on talk-show feeding-frenzies of fact-free disdain, callers equate “environmental law” with Satan.
But Hell was actually dismantled here when the eternal trash fires were doused among smoldering rags and cat carcasses jumbled down bluffs to trash tides of shoe-polish tins and condoms, seasoned by a fresh stream of raw sewage, puked airborne into the Pacific like talk-radio spew, the shuck of unpolished families who didn’t know from Shinola not to defile our home.
NEW HOUSE AT THE OLD DUMPE
“I notice they didn’t name this The Dump,” my younger brother says. Our walk wanders past the eroding logging road and into empty asphalt streets planted with lots FOR SALE, platted between the old town dump and flat land where the mill used to be. “No, it had to be Glass Beach Pointe,” he embellishes, sounding out the extra “e.” Then my brother spots the lot where his school friend’s building her house comically close to a gravel heap.
Stealing up the pile, I peer like a pirate at a vacant patch of the lumberyard where our uncles operated forklifts thirty years ago, their tall pincers toy-like in the acres of stacked redwood. Other than impressions of old pallets in the yellow grass, you’d never know a kingdom of salmon-pink heartwood had vanished, unreachable as El Dorado.
WONDERLAND
Behind mounds of sky-gray gravel squeezed by wild blackberry vines, slow, sure, my aunt’s rented house implodes, empty, its front porch slapped by the Shoreline Highway. In a few years, it’ll be another pile— brittle lumber, shattered glass, shingles— its collapse a last resound for all the laughs, squeals, hollers, and screams it housed.
At five, I led my younger cousins behind that house, across sea bluffs to Wonderland—cliffside stalactites, fresh-poured palaces in tidal caves of clotted concrete. Wonderland spread its empire when the gravel yard dumped excess Redi-Mix down embankments. The Pacific spit salt froth at our sneakers— we tread tide slime across poured cement.
Years later my aunt gasped to realize, “If I knew you kids were playing there, I would’ve died.” She thought Wonderland was our fantasy, not that solidifying dump ninety degrees above Dead Man’s Cove where ooze immobilized above the shore. (I’m not sure she told me this before or after her husband ended a drunken fight by pitching her off the second floor.)
The Harriet Tubman $20 was a redesign plan, advanced during the Obama administration, that was supposed to have rolled out in 2020 to mark the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. That plan, like so many others for the year, has been shelved.
A genocidal maniac stares back at us on our twenty dollar bill—native killer, ethnic cleanser extraordinaire. Plans to put a slave liberator in his place got erased—
Miss Tubman, ever poised for glory, will not suffice. Our leader admires the killer, even placed his portrait to grace his office. Franklin and Hamilton, our currency’s
sole non-presidents, were at least fun guys—Ben, teenaged runaway, Alex, Caribbean bastard— but unlike civilized lands, we have no artists, no philosophers, no scientists on our cash.
Our basic buck poses an honest slavemaster— zealot of forced labor, profit, and the lash.
Urban Renewal
Summer’s lease expired six weeks ago,
so night falls like a cartoon piano
from some third-floor balcony
while we’re stuck on the street going,
“why’s it so damn dark all of the—?”
Six weeks ago, wasn’t this a parking lot?
Weren’t shopping carts overturned where
that Lexus slinks into concealed garage?
Didn’t lonesome condoms congeal where
marble fountains spurt on the breeze?
Couples smooch on wrought benches
lining street after street of luxe condos
stacked three high and packed tight
behind brick facades, faux-antique,
every quarter-paned window still taped.
Even though a quarter-century gapes
between you and me like a bulldozed lot,
I feel fearless even under the threat
of steep, black grand-piano nightfall.
Instead of smash and squelch and silence
I hear the first chords of a prelude,
simple and sure, from an open window.
In warm fall breeze, on fresh-poured curb,
we mark our first six weeks with a kiss
freshly-planted as these autumn trees.
—Impossible Archetype 7, Winter 2020
WRONG IN YONKERS
I was in the wrong clothes, too pressed,
wrong hair, too combed, too poufy,
ordering the wrong drink, vodka plus tonic,
not straight whiskey or draught beer,
doing the wrong thing, typing on my laptop
minding my own damn business
in a stab-wounded red booth.
I heard one of the young punks
hovering near the bar stage whisper
“fuckin laptop!” then his buddy
sotto voce, “fuckin faggot.”
The other young punks played pool
in a silence sometimes broken
by a lowdown wail, “fuckin wife.”
Answered by a nod and sympathy:
“Can’t be worse than my fuckin bitch.”
I was fresh from the plane. Wrong,
I thought I might seek liquid refreshment
while I waited for my friends, my hosts,
to get home from work, just a few doors
down from this nondescript pub.
One punk, emboldened by beer, skirted
my booth. I said, “How ya doing?”
The punk said nothing to me, just staring
with fury. When he got back to his buddy,
he unloaded his heavy grievance:
“fuckin faggot with his fuckin laptop.”
I was in Yonkers for a week
that October but that’s all
I ever remember.
—Impossible Archetype 5, 2019
Another Dead President
Just wait, another long week of non-news—the demise itself, long expected, the prepackaged obits, the lugubrious commentaries on the long-gone context of his single term, all of it muted in longing for “better days than ours,” because the bar for presidential behavior is now so low that all the deceased had to do was act the decent rich guy— anything but behave like our intimate casino gangster.
But wait— it’s just begun. There’ll be videotapes of stilted appearances, recountings of his public service over and over and over— with no such tributes to nurses, teachers, roadway flaggers, restaurant servers, farmers, or home caregivers, no— that’s not service. No, service is being vice to a treacly phony who lied and lied to us. It’s voting against civil rights, demon- izing minority prisoners and gays. It’s staging bogus wars.
But wait— there’s more, the body flown from Houston to DC with solemn militarist salutes, the body lying in state in some solemn capital venue, tearful attendees and glimpses of best-forgotten dignitaries, then finally, finally, for sure, the deposition of the body at a military cemetery. Please, at last, let’s just bury the poor old guy to rest in peace.
New Verse News, December 2018
TOY DRIVE MORALIST SEEKS MR. POTATO HEAD
The upper shelves belong to Barbie,* mostly arrayed in pink,
the lower to Disney princesses in even deeper pinker pinks, all of whom
face shelves full of glitter eyelashes, fingernail gloss and bubblegum lipstick.
Another section showcases Transformer-Kill-A-Thon black-and-blue weaponry
that every boy seems to know judging by the rugrats’ pawing at rocket launchers
and weaponized trucks and nuclear drones and warrior robots with electric sabers
and bladed fingers like daggers and fighter jets with blood-red-laser-flesh-penetrating
aerial explosives. And speaking of weaponized, what the hell happened to Legos,
now a whole subspecies of dark superhero monster-killer devices that’ve usurped
those little fitted plastic rectangles in primary colors?
It’s so obvious the beauty goop is for girls and the killing contraptions for boys
that the good women shopping for some institution split the sprawled lists
and multiple carts heaped with plastic-wrapped toys: “Louise, will you please concentrate on princess stuff while I do what I can to stock up on the boys’ artillery?”
So we’re stuck in some hyper-mechanized shrink-wrapped gender-patrolled version
of 1953, plus terrorized by everything deeply fucked up about the new century?
Never thinking I’d be forced to study sociology in the toppling aisles of Target,
I grow ever stiffer and dismissive as if I’m too good for all this shit, but really,
the little boy who still occupies most of my heart is heartbroken.
In a friendlier aisle of plush toys (though by now I’m expecting endangered
species, oil-splattered seabirds and bloodied baby seals) this big clatch of siblings
and cousins scour the shelves with a list of their own for the clan’s little kids,
a few years younger than this cohort, but they can’t proceed because they’re laughing
at every memory of every furry animal they ever loved. “Remember that rabbit,
Joey, that you wouldn’t let go? God it was so gross, old peanut butter stuck in its fur.”
“Mark’s too little for Wookies, Mom’s crazy. He doesn’t know a thing about Kashyyk.”
When they move on, I toss a wooly Wookie in my empty basket and proceed, asking
this teenage clerk if he’s ever heard of Mr. Potato Head. His partner perks up,
abandoning his stocking of Fatal Shot T-17’s. “Yeah, I know just where!”
The three of us roam the no man’s land east of Barbie, joined by two more clerks
who also seem to heed the siren call, that spellbinding Potato Head charisma.
The four kids form a red-polo’d cordon around me, proud, as I tremble to snatch
the last Potato Head and drop it in my cart. “What about Play-Doh? Have you ever heard of Etch-a-Sketch?” Heck yeah, we love that old-school stuff, the quartet assents and we’ve off, searching and seizing Silly Putty, Duncan yo-yos, Tonka trucks,
matchbook Chevys, 48-Crayon Crayola boxes, coloring books devoid of princesses,
inscrutable puzzles of imperial Chinese gardens, Scrabble, Bicycle playing cards, soccer balls, softballs, nerf balls, multicolored slinkies, plastic baseball bats, and Frisbee.
My four wave me off as I wobble toward checkout, then to clutch my sack of toys
over ice and uneven flagstone to the church basement, a vast toy drive consolidator.
The ladies scold me for not following the list, “We need Transformer-Fatal Shot 17’s
for our older boys!” but accept my humble goods with the tolerant reluctance
of good Christians. I smile, though, because I hope somewhere on Christmas morning,
some kid is going to unwrap Mr. Potato Head and love him, too, for the next fifty years.
*All product placement placed over objections of author.
Winning Writers August, 2017
Drunk on Heavenly Florida
A case of Dixie brewskis, a pair of jet skis
barricade the way to my cousin’s open door.
Dark shadow flaps across the screened porch.
On skinny pole, a Rebel flag traps the breeze.
Jimmy-Roy was a handsome if whiney guy,
loved camping, fishing, canoeing the Glades.
For the last thirty years, though, he’s carried
whiskey all day in a Big Gulp cup. He’ll buy
a microwave burrito not for lunch, but to show
his crew he still eats solid food. Thin as a nail,
the face of eighty-five at fifty-eight, he abides.
Jimmy’s wife? Left him. He’s the boss, though,
of Mexican guys keeping his business “on task.”
Behind his place, wild hogs root, snort, and trample
what’s left of the oaky woods. Jim tours his holdings,
pissed-off. Points out a wallow with plastic flask–
see where the hogs ripped up palmetto bogs? Jesus.
His damn kids took off, too. It’s all right, Jimmy-Roy,
I tell him, our branch of the family’s just as broken,
orphans, ex-wives, drunks and ex-cons. Seems like
our clan stretches coast to coast, a Trail of Tears
of Irish-Catholic dysfunction. Don’t mind if I do
have a sip from that Big Gulp. In honor of the family.
What do you say, Cuz? Me, I’ve sworn for years
we suffer some curse. Jimmy-Roy’s land eases east,
up sandy rises, into orange groves in perfect rows.
Sweet blossoms scent even hog tracks, dug-up paths
to Heaven that dead-end beside a condo-complex
pool, mobbed today. Jimmy staggers to the fence
to spy old folks in spandex, souls that ought to bob
on the water’s surface. But they sink and lumber
through Water-Roebics. Still, they laugh and sway,
josh their instructor, and misbehave. Jimmy says
it’s a hoot that these banged-up old codgers get
baptized, resurrected, every pool-time noon.
Think my sins’ll wash off when I’m an old coot?
You are an old coot, I think, but know I oughta
keep my trap shut. Geez, but that pool looks cool,
forgiving, lovely, no matter how full of old fools.
Jim smiles, passes the big cup: “Our holy water.”
Good Men Project, July 2017
Zombie Candy at the Civil War Cemetery
Past the tended lawns of miles of monuments, the angel-spangled pillars for the 54th Virginia Infantry and the First Ohio, past the rusted artillery blinds and the humping green remnants of trenches, past the sole remaining farm cabin and slave shack, past the pocked field lined by tanglewood next to a creek that blasted blood all day, mixed with storm-strewn mud, then up the solitary hillock here where Georgia meets Tennessee, a sentinel spot overlooking the acres of cemeteries and memorial marble, where undead old cars from Chattanooga line the lane, Mustangs and Camaros and Firebirds and Corvettes, posing for a photo shoot with the salon Zombie Candy, whose employees pose atop the top-down cars, the girls’ tops barely up, their hair fluorescent, peppermint-red striped, yellow swirl, cotton-candy pink, all laughing fake hauteur, soaking in the autumn sun where the only unspoiled public place for miles is this site of two-day anarchy, fist-to-fist brother-to-brother rural rampage, deadliest in the South, preserved as backdrop for all these pretty human lollipops.
Birds of Oklahoma
Another April 19 Commemoration
We don’t know what the hell they are, sparrows, we guess, swallows? Anyway, they cantor and spree over the oaks and native pines. They keen overhead, melodies made up on the spot, unraveling ribbons of song.
Kids take to the podium above the memorial’s reflecting pools– ponds to heal a wound, to respond to the wind, the sun, the rain, to whatever comes next. The wound is Fifth Street, cratered to oblivion two decades ago. Certain grandparents were killed. Anti-government bomber. The words are grandparents’ names. The sound is a tender tongue each trying out one name:
Christi Yolanda Jenkins, say. They say she worked in the credit union. Or Michelle Reeder, worked in federal highways. Maybe one of the water resource guys, Robert N. Chipman, or agriculture, Olen Burl Bloomer. The Enemy, you know, Gov’mint. The Enemy, you know, bureaucrats. Which bureau, we ask. Social Security? Child Development?
We want to know about Peachlyn Bradley, learn the story of her fruitful name, and why no one’s placed a wreath on her memorial chair. But us, you and me? Wreathless, don’t know our hearts from a hole in the ground–Jesus, we can’t tell a sparrow from a swallow.
On the Veranda, Issue 1.8, 2016
EVERLASTING TRESPASS
Slag Pile at the Source As wilderness, the top of this glacial valley was pretty hopeless. Stunted spruce, tortured at timberline, lined a two-track path into defunct mining camp. Hunkered under the Great Divide, 1850s shacks collapsed side by side with 1950s steel outbuildings. Silver mine, we guessed, then uranium. Rusted warning signs, Cold War symbols, dark triangles within black circle: DANGER. RADIOACTIVE! The wire fence beaten, ignored. KEEP OUT.
Of course, we let ourselves in, tamping down the wire with our boots. Sandwiches on a dead miner’s imploding porch. Vista of the whole valley, subalpine fir giving way to lodgepole and aspen, woods punctured with orange slag, mine tailing piles wherever some seeking soul with a shovel thought to punch a hole.
We spotted a slag pile just down the path. A snowpatch seeped orange-brown slush, a trickle spurting who-knew-what, arsenic, uranium juice? The slag heap fed dead pools, cascading into toxic stream then coursing down valley. “The stinkin’ source,” one of us knew, “of the South Platte River. The wellspring of the water we drink down in the city”– source of the rapids feeding pine canyons, fresh with everlasting trespass, tainting the mess we have made.
Weatherings, Futurecycle Press,2015
“The solace of geology
arises from everything getting pulverized.” Eventually, he meant, in geologic ages’ patience and the fury of tectonic rages.
“Everything?” I challenged. The geologist and I stared upwards, sharing my whiskey, seated on his log. Sheer slabs, multi-
colored in wedding-cake layers of granite, sandstone, and shale–each an epoch of metamorphosis, erosion and grit slough-
ed, buried, rising again to be sunk again in flood and drought and lava catastrophe– climbed in our sights from redbud canopy
clear up to canyon rim. “Everything? Won’t humans’ layer consist of polyester, chrome, diapers, lard, petrified sewage foam–
won’t our short human episode be a stain of garbage between great layers of schist and gneiss?” “But nothing human’ll persist,”
the geologist insisted. “You must accept the grinding power of sheer tonnage and time versus the gunky waste and tuneless rhymes
of humankind, our flicker of futile acts in the vastness of a volcanic, fiery planet’s endless energy and urges. Geology’s a bandit
who commutes its loot back to raw material.” Maybe I confused whiskey haze with blind hope, but his words soothed. Was I a misanthrope?
“Everything? Meaning all orange traffic cones? Cadillac and Lincoln SUVS, No Money Down? The undeserving rich? Scary burger clowns?
The bones of officials who send young citizens to die in far, endless wars?” “Yes, their bones,” the geologist affirmed. “And mine. And yours.”
Going Down Grand, Lithic Press, 2015
FIELD STUDY IN DISTURBED SOIL
The new science teacher stresses “disturbances.” He fingers wispy whiskers meant to disguise his youth, then cautions the Biology kids and me, “We may not find a true vestige of native biotics.”
Invited to his field trip above our bursting school, I’m sun-blind in September noon. String squares mark biosphere samples, disturbances older than these kids’ parents, fields still unhealed–
toxic invaders took root after we scraped away our old skin of buffalo grass. A kid strolls up, twirling string: “Sir, I think I’ve found it–” He points past invasive weeds. “There. Oak. Native grasses!”
Each team leaves off stringing the weeds to follow their teacher to hidden patches of wild. Cool, he hides his ardor: “Class, notice the mounting size and health of the grasses and oaks as they amble upslope here.”
Surviving scrub oak seeks the rampart s of tract homes, clipped by mown lawns. Now we find spiders weaving. Mice dart from chipmunks. Wings sweep and thrust, chirps and warbled songs spin rhythm thicket to thicket.
In thrall of birds’ music on the breeze, the kids quiet. Teams of flax-haired sophomores note first gilded leaves. Past distant pioneer graveyards, bulldozers bury pasture, heaving earth for parking lot. I note how the golf green
slithers toward the new jail. When I started teaching here, deer scored the track, cattle studied the library windows, and antelope high-jumped where Deer Run Drive sprints past Antelope Ranch Estates, but I keep it to myself. We’re
fated for overpriced boxes dropped into disturbed soil, so why let the past interlope? The teacher holds up wheaten stalks, like banners of a doomed flamboyance, their fig- like leaves cover enough for our expulsion from Eden.
Weatherings, Futurecycle Press,2015
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
:
The younger tourists were laughing, drinking beer by the elephant wallow, so just the ranger and I waited for the herd to show trunks and tusks. But the sun went down before we glimpsed the elephants, now in retreat. The ranger pointed to a lonesome set of ears rising above acacia scrub. “Only that old one. He’s hiding, by himself, many paces behind the herd. Molars gone, that’s his life now.” The Botswana horizon went dark too fast. Bugs clackered in the thorn brush, as if feasting on nightfall. “When old ones lose their molars, the females kick them out. Even other bachelors abandon them,” the ranger confided to me. “They wander alone through old age, eating only the most tender shoots until the rest of their teeth fall out. Then they die.” “Isn’t that what we should do, we humans?” my travel mate asked in Johannesburg at a hotel buffet fruit-medley. “Die graciously, then leave the fray when our teeth are gone.” I didn’t really agree, but I was busy munching a pineapple chunk. In a chomp, the fruit became hard, unyielding, which turned out to be my lower right molar, severed from an ancient root canal. Back in the States, my dentist tsk-tsked. “Nothing can save it. We’ll do extraction and implant.” Would this be the first of many amputations from my being? Unstoppable, my dentist launched another big game hunter’s tale, the private shoots he conducted in Namibia and Zambia. Elephant kills were “easiest of all to arrange. We shoot old ones out of their misery.” These days, I guard my empty molar socket from public scrutiny, especially any females inquiring with feigned concern. Concealed, stealthy, I survive among the toothy youth, keeping well behind and hoping, if I can chew the tenderest leftover shoots, avoiding pineapple, and keep hiding far from my dentist’s sights, I may survive a while more, gracious, I hope, banished, I fear, solitary in the wild.
–Good Men Project, February 7,2014
The blue armchair
waits in the heart of Atomic, Colorado, its velveteen arms worn to clumped nubs, sitting where County Road 573 meets Electron Street. It’s free—complete with hand-lettered sign, TAKE ME PLEASE. Donna’s dad gave up work in the mine, his arms once deep in discarded uranium, then gave up the chair after he got sick and took to the front bedroom. Donna tries care-taking on her days off, driving home from Montrose, her arms propping Dad up so he can swallow ice cubes. She tells him some jokester put a naked-lady mannequin in the discarded chair, striking an arms-out, legs-up pose, both defiant and pliant, half-fighter, half-lover.
Overdue at City Market for the evening shift, Donna cries leaving town, her arms shaking against the wheel. She can’t stand that small, pleading sign on the blue armchair after the weeks of no takers, and now, that obscene mannequin. Or the big sign— the billboard from her girlhood at the town’s edge, the bunting tattered, the red, white and blue paint chipped: WE FUEL ARMS FOR PEACE. She would haul the blue chair herself, right now, take it around the whole Uncomphagre Plateau, if she could find anyone strong enough to lift it in his arms.
–-Poetry Quarterly, Winter 2014
RUMOR OF GRIZZLY BEAR
This all ends in a glacial valley, walled like a trap, jagged peaks its savage teeth. Still, the steep trail seemed worth hard breaths in flimsy air—meadows through spruce to higher meadows, clogged, agog with fall color–sun-gold to hungry red as if every shrub, every leaf, every blade, every weed
were squeezed from a palette of last-gasp divinity. Now, where I rock-hop the scree above the ice-blue lake, there’s only granite-gray and stunted trees’ black-green. In rocky chaos the summits seem just-born, still unformed, naked. Lake spawns no fish, no algae, pure element— as if water itself just got dreamed-up, news to Eden.
A couple rise from their picnic to head down-valley. But not before they share the rumor of grizzly— a teenager, hiking alone, saw it drinking at the lake. “That girl hustled right down the trail.” The man laughs. The woman bites her apple. “But when we reached the lakeshore, the grizzly was nowhere to be seen.”
They take off, and I’m the only soul in sight. Great. No beast that size could hide in these tiny trees, but I’m sure it’s somewhere in this rocky jumble, eyeing me. It could even be invisible, like God, whose power lies in how fear inspires belief. The bear does seem omnipresent, no matter how unseen—or more real because unseen.
I’m a new convert plagued by heresies, faithlessness— did that girl, teenage drama queen, improvise the bear? Was that couple lying, a dumbass prank to scare me, skunk my hike? On my way back, I curse all russet bushes for their bear-hiding efficiencies. When a grouse squawks, I’m even more squawky—what’s that bird sense that I can’t?
Raspberry thorns prick my fingers and fruit stains my skin. Nice. A sweet blood-red mess to tempt that grizzly into sin– if eating me counts as animal crime. Wilderness hikes always seem to rise into purity. But, down, down, this one’s creepy. I’ve dropped where I don’t belong, into deep woods’ feral laws, where the path leads to the omnipotence of claws.
Poetry Quarterly,Summer,2012
GUNSIGHT PASS
On my way up, a tearful little girl, bruised head on hands. A slightly panicked mom: “Are you a doctor, by any chance?” I regret that I am not but offer my first aid kit. Bandage, disinfectant, and pain pills help the kid feel healed and the mother calmed. As I start up, they head down: “Careful, sir, of jagged rocks. Careful of those sheer drops.”
The trail, like them all, lures with promise of some scenic goal, a lake, a crag, a vista. This one’s got a rock poised on ridgeline shaped like a gun sight (or an anvil, or a predator’s flat head?). I struggle, cairn to cairn, up a steep skirt of tumbled boulders. At the top, if I named it, it’d be Keyhole Pass– it squeezes me into its fitted slot, then turns me so I’m hopped onto a rock ledge
barely wide enough to steady on. Under my feet, a thousand-foot drop into scree and catastrophe. Beyond, a tundra expanse spreading clear to the Elk Mountains and the Maroon Bells, then snowfields in a Mother-Earth womb of bare granite. I cling to the ledge like a newborn too stunned to budge, tamping panic, no remedy from any mother under me.
Poetry Quarterly, Summer,2012
AMERICAN PASQUEFLOWER
Almost Easter at 7,000 feet, 70 degrees along this burned-out, re-borning bank of Buffalo Creek. Snow’s stubborn in shade and drifts choke streams so water tunnels under, gushing to a blind date with spring.
Snowmelt seeps into gray- white meadows, still singed from last summer’s flames. Charcoal snags and snaps scatter where paquesflowers pink the dormant field.Leafless, shameless, saloon-girl pasques herald the sex- ing, the birthing that awaits from today all the way to November.
Yellow tongues flick the breeze, soul-kissing the sunny sky in a meadow orgasmic with bees’ nectar-sucking, sexworker fecundity.
Pasques raise a six-fingered crown of triangular petals, their cup-runneth-over chalices pouring eternal life that’s bound to sink to withered stalk, to colorless retreat even as this dormant grass goes green, dies brown, then grieves in gray-white dormancy till next spring’s brazen tongues and brief- raised crowns.
Poetry Quarterly, Summer, 2012
FINAL ACT AT FOOTLIGHTERS HALL
My dad the dying retired janitor rests in a chair marked “Director,” grand under silver-white hair but only from a distance. Under his direction I clean this old music hall. He calls this “his job.” His last job–all other custodials long given up. Mom says, “He needs it. Makes him feel like he still got his hat in the ring.” He dozes there, saving breath, swallowing his pain. I swipe the beer rings, the pretzel debris, then jump onto the stage, bearing the broom like a melodrama sword, to push around little tufts from actresses’ Gay Nineties tails– this tourist play’s about whores much misunderstood, golden-hearted gals who play in love-for-pay until they reveal angel feathers in the final act.
When my brother starred in these plays my father dragged us to this venue every time we had out-of-town company so they could applaud our glory. My dad would rig getting picked by the mock-lewd ladies in the revue. They’d haul him on these very boards and flatter his virility, combing fingers through his strawberry waves. The push broom sweeps me stage left beyond a catacombs of false walls to the soiled doves’ dressing room– scents of caked makeup, perfume bombs, feathered hats dangling on metal rings.
Parting a racked wall of undergarments, my dad, lost, has wandered back- stage. Slinking between Carmela’s girdle and Bernice’s breastplates, he’s rigged another cameo with the gals– the stage harem titillates with silky hips and well-projected breasts. He’s as much ghost as man, the star of his own bafflement, caught in a curtain of quaking costumes. “Feeling restless, Dad? Where ya goin’?” “Just lookin’– making sure.” Of what? “Remember when your brother…” He stalls before the mirrors, quoting again what the little girl down the street– by now a cop or cosmetician–said of Joe: “He’s as beautiful as Prince Charming.” “Yep, the dude had stage presence, Dad. Especially with stage powder on his zits.” Half deaf, Dad can’t hear me anyway. Did he expect to find Joey hanging out behind plyboard walls, between the braces, pausing for his cue? Tomorrow, Memorial Day, we’ll visit Joe’s grave and shoo away the hungry deer from fresh-flower vases.
Never his Prince, Dad’s half-reluctant drudge, I’m sad we’ve never been pals. Wary, suspicious of each other’s role, we walked bloodless through our parts, passionate only when we stepped on each other’s lines. Dad buries his head on his splayed hands, a faded star with a killer exit scene. My hand drops the broom and flies to his famous hair, high-lit in make-up lights. “You gonna be okay?” Dumb question. Driving him to treatments, I’ve seen pain dispatch him howling to the brush, to shriek from his guts–and all I could think of, waiting, pausing without a cue, without a script, the engine idling, my father weeping in the trees: The poor old guy God where is your goddamn mercy? Then he’d shuffle to the car, stumbling, old, pissed off. Now–he answers my dumb question by raising his hand to clasp mine.
When Carmela and Bernice arrive to primp and powder for tonight’s show I’ll ask them to sidle over and prop up the old man, to close my director’s final show with amateur improvisations of love.
Memoir Journal, Summer 2012
SCARECROW SOUTH OF DELHI
Old, holey silk stuck on a stick in a field of winter wheat, wraith- like in the mist. Silk too worn, stretched to obscene transparency, too creased for any more chores for the family— slicing the mustard flowers, bearing the fire wood to and from the copse across the creek; not even good enough to carry bricks daylong to the in-laws’ barn repair site, just old fabric retired to winter wheat.
Golden, spangled still but faded, sagging, she joins the old-men sticks— those ragged wraps topped by turbans— fog-dripped and still in the chill, her caste below even the dressmaker’s dummy.
One scare-sari scares no pests as her spine snaps under the the claws, the sudden heft, of landing crows.
Ellipsis, Spring 2012
MIDLIFE VISION
Checking maps to a wedding, it happened— I lost sight of highways inked across wine country like secondary vines. Newly blurred, blind to California’s paper topography, I couldn’t focus on the tiny numbers of county lanes. I lost the poetry of village names. My weak eyes married scenic dots into a single blot.
The groom’s teenaged son pointed mid-forties magoos to the hilltop grove where the bride prefaced her vows. She tried to justify why now, first time, at forty-five: “I never believed I’d marry until I found this wonderful man in my sights.” The bride, gorgeous in white, grew indistinct in my back-row squint.
Next day, I brought blossoms to our recent dead. I shoe-swept fallen petals from my aunt’s new grave-plate and strained to read her life span and postmortem: “Wife and Mother.” Giovanna’s high heels wouldn’t ever hobble down the Italian cemetery’s sandy lanes again, but she would always glide through my mind’s eye (still 20/20 when sighting hind), always about forty-five, big-smiled, hands wedded to a Lucky Strike and cocktail.
Beside fresh concrete, our family’s unclaimed sites. Even though I couldn’t spy the time pulsing on my watch, how sharp I saw the future, resting at my feet.
1st Place Award Clarity Poetry Contest, Fall, 2011 Lucidity, Winter Issue, 2011-12
GIVING THANKS
This sky seems to write no promises– its gray sheet stretches taut, papering over the sun. Turkey gravy and pie juice bleed on my clients’ blotted-ink addresses, but I know ‘em by heart. The streets deliver me again, with meals for the homebound.
Opposite Freedom Park’s drained fountain an old lady totters to her next meal in robe and sneakers. Every other citizen braving this chill seems to be on crutches or skinny wheels: “Could you hold that door for me, Sonny?”
In her room near the emergency exits, Judith cries at the offered goods–enough for the long weekend, with pie and cake besides–and I beg off her gratitude, I who only brought and did not buy, did not package, did not bake.
Through his door-chain’s widening wedge, Mr. Gomez forgets his reserve and shinnies up the IV of his dormant self-delight, then frees the door and offers his arms to me.
At the icy crack of noon, feeble shafts of sunlight tender a greeting to the street, throwing the chimneys’ steam into blunt relief against faint blue haze.
Life, I want to tell Judith, has kissed me on my sweet ass for so many years that I’ve forgotten the need for wishes on bones and lost track of any promises, kept or broken, scrawled in disappearing ink across November skies.
NOVEMBER 24, 2011, New Verse News
The Health Club
“I’ve been sick,” you explained, as if that phrase dismissed how you’d aged twenty years in the months since I’d seen you
here in this place of worship where great exertions produce no products, no prayers where rituals and regimens get practiced with monastic discipline for no transcendence, to no god
All those years you rode the stationary bicycle Sweat saturated your back as you gripped handle bars that couldn’t be steered So often I followed you gasping toward the measured miles bearing down on computerized hills toward that destination in the mirror
Years ago you and me between my sheets laughing kissing hands exploring all those hardened curves earned on those bikes to nowhere For no particular reason I remember refusing just a momentary perversity a little detour on our ride to nowhere which may account for why I’m still alive I think as I hug you goodbye
Q Review, December 2010
100 VITAMINS AND THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION
Purchased at a California Safeway one hot October night–they’re gone, today, One-a-Day, vanished like the autumn itself. Fast as this– his phone number’s alive on my bill, the last long-distance call to my brother, just before he died in late October.
I shake the last capsule in the bottle against my ear like it’s a magic rattle, an earphone to some supernatural portal. Less than a hundred nights ago, I could still speak to him, on that warm shore before winter wailed our way for good. I scan the bill for its other killing details–that number’s the hospital. That one’s the undertaker’s.
Meanwhile, as I consumed a hundred pills, an empire vanished in the East. One poor cosmonaut, circling the earth for whole seasons, can’t return to land in his mother country, which lost is name on Christmas Day. The Confederation of Newly-Independent Former Soviet States? Only the Lonely? He’s still up there while I spin down here, wondering where my orbit really ends, clutching an empty bottle and an unpaid bill.
Q Review, December 2010
168 WORDS :
Across Oklahoma, April, 1995
Pastures, green spears in standing water NATIVE AMERICA EXPIRES 4/95 “We gotta put that sticker on, Addie” Cherokees in a Cherokee at 7-11 Pigtailed girl craves a Slurpee “No, honey, later, okay?”
Headlights blur through rain OKLAHOMA IS OK A little copse north of Sallisaw already in full leaf
Clouds abate over Tulsa In fleet sunshine headlights guide the statewide procession through vacant downtown streets
Down at the capital’s airport the President deplanes Rain pelts tarmac like static in the broadcast’s live feed, eulogy that twangs against emptied city canyons, his accent like those of the silenced
On the river, the rain resumes, each droplet a sting for the swollen surge to bear, clear down to the all-accepting sea
At river’s edge, a grandma sings out, “Tom! Mandy! Let’s hurry back, now, we’ll catch our death of–” As if evaporated from sight, the kids don’t answer.
The downpour gentles. Grandma slips downstream through shrubbery. Lilting, pitched high, her voice still free of alarm, she cries their names
APRIL 19, 2010, New Verse News*
(*Published on the 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City terror bombing)
MY LIFE WITH CESAR CHAVEZ IN THE HYATT REGENCY
When he slipped beside me in the elevator’s glassed hush we talked about grapes, what else? Distressed that the latest boycott was unknown back in my town, he vowed to get the word out. Now it was poisons killing fieldworkers that ripened his protest– what could I do but agree? My whole life had been adorned by bumper stickers demanding BOYCOTT GRAPES–the Valley a boiling California Judea, with Cesar leading endless charges on the big growers’ money-picking Jerusalems in Fresno and Delano. And now, here stood this tiny grandpa at my elbow– it was like finding Marilyn Monroe picking through the lettuce at Safeway.
The glass cage set us smack into the Hyatt’s breakfast buffet, so we passed among the gleaming trays of grapes and cantaloupe and strawberry. Not one diner voiced thanks for the safe, tasty fruit that somebody’s mom had to pluck in that fertile inferno where it’s a hundred-ten in the shade on harvest afternoons. But I understood that Cesar never expected gratitude from strangers. He strolled, a free man, without commotion, to deliver the keynote address to our union, and as I left him at the podium, I thought, when I get home, I’ll stay off grapes and do my best to get our table manners back in shape.
MARCH 31, 2010 New Verse News
A VISIT WITH THE QUEEN
I keep thinking of that grandma in the Royal Arms projects, in D.C.– who, chosen to receive the Queen of England, laughed a welcome and yanked Elizabeth Windsor into a hug, so that the Queen, much flustered, had her Chief of Protocol kindly insist that the Royal Person must not be touched, most surely not by commoners. The grandma had another laugh at that—dry British wit—and grasped again, enfolding Her Highness in her plump black arms until Royal bodyguards restrained Grandma with gentle force. Chastened, she realized that she and Elizabeth were the same age, and came to pity her peer for all those hug- less decades, not to mention the spiteful in-laws, the pointless wars, the worrisome children, wild and/or daunted, and offered Elizabeth a stay in her cramped quarters— amidst the framed school pictures and fridge drawings, and Elizabeth nodded, and duly noted her host’s lovely grandchildren and apartment, so tiny and clean, whilst Americans everywhere came to realize that we, too, possessed a queen.
APRIL 08, 2009, New Verse News
OCTOBER FOLDEROL
“It peaks, crescendos for about a minute—we’ve got to hike there now.”
But you couldn’t, so I hustled there at day’s end, hoping for scrub-oak groves’
gilded yellows, amber-greens, oranges, orchestrated in this redrock amphitheatre.
But a blot of cloud, stuck in the western sky, silenced all color. What’s the sound
of brown? A stain, a discord, whistled in secret by Cain’s children, kicked out of Eden?
The sun slipped through once before setting, brief, bruised strains of scrub-oak glow.
Hell, I got here too late. True love’s nothing more than a naked minute—this one—
nothing to count on plan for— hard to set a tempo for—nothing to seize, a slip of tender light,
a lusty, lucky suite played for a minute on wild ridgetops before the dark sets in.
Improv 2008: Anthology of Colorado Poets
AFTER ST. PATRICK’S DAY
The green dye’s already cast among plastic beer cups, trashed. Steel wind lacerates, a lenten knife slicing all pleasures. Crows chase robins off branches barren as paper accords unsigned, dropped on hungover lovers in the park who rend remnants of loyalty and regard: “You’ve become a vulture, Patrick.” “And you, Megan? A parasite.”
The two played Irish last night, lucky, shamrocked, plucked from contention into Guinness and joshing and sentiment. The bar hummed with dancing leprechauns and shameless tries at broad brogues from those Kevins, Mollys, and Seans whose only Emerald Isle is a green-crepe aisle at Safeway pitching dyed daisies. Swilling from the passing pitchers, innocent of Bloody Sunday, Falls Road, Brit bombardment, fungal famine, indentures– they raised mugs and pinched the greenless, then bore homeward real Irish drunkenness.
Every holiday breeds its afterbirth, sterile tomorrows–say, March eighteenth. Like a fertile island waking to hunger, the day’s vector’s lost, its tide out, its pantries empty, its final treaties sunk. Pat and Megan prowl the park, ache-headed, locked in civil combat, when–begorra!– where clouds abate over the foothills, skeins of snow sift like trigger fingers unclenched to sprinkle sugar over the bliss of a union too sweet for rancor. Across a border long wired and mined, they reach to risk a kiss.
MARCH 18, 2007 New Verse News
ITALIAN REMEDY FOR SUICIDE
Since you’re determined to kill yourself before the credit bill comes due,
1) charge a first-class flight to Rome.
2) Head straight to Parma on second-class train with a cast that switches every stop as if Fellini mis-directed disobedient extras– grotesquely busy little kids, a toothless grandpa, overmodest local beauties, and a matron given to fainting spells who offers you a pear as overripe as a star fallen from the erotic cinema.
3) Carry her baggage–the matron’s, not the fallen star’s– while she melts into her son’s skinny arms and kisses you and raises hands to Parma, benvenuto!
4) Book a Vegas-style suite at the Parma Hilton, spa in the zucchini-shaped tub, then bolt (as soon as you’ve changed) to a family pensione on a cobblestone side street; find a funky room under back stairs draped by the maid’s stockings dangling from the windowsill above.
5) Pretend to be an American millionaire shopping for parmesan cheeses to import for your supermarket chain so as to spend the whole afternoon sampling slices, chunks, and grated flakes while Parma fawns over you, offering sparkling water and wine to whet and rinse and abet your choosy palette. Promise to have your people call their gente, but
6) bolt again for a day trip to Modena, where you join a tour sampling balsamic vinegars with the Sisters of the United Convents of Southern Indiana.
Back at Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, just say, niente da dichiarare, since you’re a determined suicide, remember, and you have nothing–nothing–to declare.
Back home, it happens to be one of those hot days that melt like a faint-prone Parmigiana into the arms of a soft, half-wilted evening. Your friend happens to have prepared a salad of pears at perfect ripeness, drizzled in balsamic vinegar, to celebrate your arrival. Pavarotti intones rhymes of home through someone’s open window, e una bella citta. You find yourself, exhausted, leaning, arm around your walnut tree, your cheek scored by its warm, wrinkled trunk. Unbidden, a vision seeps up, under your jetlagged feet, of tree roots sipping from deep below to slake the drooping canopy–which shelters a table heaped with sliced cheese. So
7) stop hugging trees, traveler, and
8) have some more to eat.
Divide: Journal of Literature, Arts, and Ideas Fall, 2006
She Belongs to Us,
the exploded contents of her toy purse as well as what remains of her brains after her skull got hammered
She belongs to us, plus videos of her prances at family picnics, plus dances at pageants and recitals, plus that dollar she saved from the tooth fairy
She belongs to us, privacy pulverized like her tiny sex– “left-over meat loaf” the reporters said– “The right to know is sacred, sovereign,” so
she belongs to us; her mystery spices our loafin’ staff lunches our theories about family secrets salt to season strangers’ wounds
She belongs to us because we felt so violated, so victimized No, we never knew her, not in person No, we weren’t there, exactly, but
she belongs to us Why, we could snap the necks of our kids we could fuck our own flesh and blood but we’re not that kind of people, no
Not even the killer gets final possession She remains with us Gimme that dollar, doll
AUGUST 30, 2006 New Verse News*
(*Published just after Jon Benet Ramsey’s “killer” surfaced in Thailand. It was a false confession.)
THE LOST HACIENDA
I thought I was the lost one, pacing a faint track on a volcano’s flank, just into the pines, above the manzanita and cactus, the century plants’ tight spikes. My slow ascent flipped random pages of the botanic joke book altitude recites to latitude. Tantalizing above treeline, the crater brewed, inside a snowy alp– in tundra, I supposed, Mexican ice laced with lava.
As the trail grew more green, grassy and leaf-strewn under my feet, I knew soon I’d have no new pages to turn, that the trail would decline to be any intruder’s guide book and hide its text in vines, underbrush–amid the squawks, the yelps of unseen life, yowls and indecipherable songs. Still, a faint impression, a whisper against the high grass led forward like English phrases scattered among dying native tongues.
Neat as a row of teeth, prickly pear appeared to line the upward route. Aloe spread their spears in clusters, rows fringing a grove of coffee trees. A tile roof asserted between palms– whatever the trail had to say ended at the steps of an abandoned house. Along the windy terrace, pronouncements of family–jungle gym, swing set, plumbed trough for the animals, working spout. Through broken glass I spied a hall scored with clean squares, phantoms of photographs. Encyclopedias stacked, askew as if someone had just sought Volume E., for “Ecologia Tropica.” How about Volume Q., for “Que Pasa?”
As if to answer, then not answer, one deck chair seemed turned toward me among a close-knit circle perched above a vista of wild ravines. The vanished family must have coffeed here in the evening, kids’ sun-scorched skin salved by aloe. They must have savored conversation, citing Volume E. to season disputes. Here on the volcano’s spine in intimate company with doom, they’d spelled the human phrase of reason into vine-tangled ground, their lost words like seeds deep-planted in this howling surround.
The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Vol 2., March 2006
ARMED RESPONSE
ARMED RESPONSE –warns every alarming sign planted in each front lawn, metal petals of SecureHomes,
Inc. Disarming, how only brown arms tend empty yards to provide the only motion, the only sign
that Beverly Hills bears life. Brown arms guide the tools and the whining, snippy machines
that manicure ever-green lawns in February, tangerine-sweet. Fruit’s a nuisance, though–
“Pablo,” Mycki wails, “that pulp on the walkways? Clean, please? Comprendes? Okay? I’ll be back.”
Sweeping uneaten fruit, does Pablo recall his predecessors, braceros? “The arm people,” whose manos never
knew manicures. While Mycki day-spas her fingernails, Tanya complains about “illegals–”
thinks they ought to be shipped to Mexico “in manacles.” Mycki says nothing, afraid of what
would jungle into her garden without Pablo’s shears, so…handy. Her Benz slips plush and silent
home, down the alley, swallowed by garage. Someday, she’ll visit her front lawn, she’s sure. Now,
though, Pablo mops up ripe pulp and Mycki must write that overdue check to SecureHomes, Inc., which
will plant a squadron of riflemen front and back if any brute dares pluck her Eden’s surplus fruits.
JUNE 19, 2006, New Verse News
CHAGALL IN CALIFORNIA
Donkeys and angels peer round-eyed, sly smiles innocent. They know cunning and sweetness coexist in real flesh. Chagall might compose the figures peeking above a breezy strait’s span, a golden gate, whose gilt paint rusts and chips. The bridge must bear the endless traffic of strangers in suicide and exaltation, must guide the driven arms of natives offering embrace or exile– who comes, who goes.
On Chagall’s canvas, donkeys impersonate wealthy men, detailed down to watch fob, sash, necktie, and vest. Then, angelic, donkey goes afloat over steeples, over the stucco houses stacking up the hilltops, into the naked refuge of a bride’s curving arm.
“You’d think a grown man could walk his own dog,” scoffs the housepainter as the master slinks away behind tinted glass, knotting his tie, smoothing his vest. His dog exerciser attempts to ballast five terriers, moor them to a lamppost, but, yelping, they’re aloft over Pacific Heights, a dogged clump in flight to the school’s rooftop play- ground. The dog exerciser’s clients’ children cheer the pets’ arrival and pluck each panting terrier from the breeze.
A native daughter, an old lady now, claims she’s tired, content to keep watch on the school across from her window, to catch “who comes, who goes,” but Chagall sketches her drifting, unbound, adazzle, all across the golden state, all across the old century, those picnics by the wild streams, those chores in the vineyards, those tangles with riptides and all the men who rose in her sights golden with promise–jackasses whose hearts proved sweet in seeking, then cunning in the retreat as each one came and went in her open, naked arms.
Country Mouse, Winter 2006
MY CONFESSION TO LUCY
African Eve, I’m glad to meet you. You’re smaller and more stooped than I expected, and much hairier. How fast could you have sprinted through tall-grass habitat, a world innocent of Slurpees and suicide bombs and dioxin? You precede the United States of America by several thousand millennia and can’t give a damn about flag-waving or flag-burning or Deep-Discount Jesus or abstinence education or absent education or Viagra. That’s why we think your savanna’s Eden. It’s like a vast blank chalkboard on which no one’s learned to write any cruel ideas. Lucy, when I ask what you’re thinking, you just gaze as if to say, “Of you, my child.”
I sought you here, at your museum diorama, to confess I’ve given up on humankind, Lucy– we’ll always embrace war and ravish our habitat. A violent backbeat drums in every modern heart. Our brief spell here’s just a gasp in Eternity, while we learn the world’s capitals at gun point– Mogadishu, Port-au-Prince, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Pristina, Kigali, Kinshasa, Kabul, Baghdad– places that mean nothing to you. You precede even the concept of consolidated power– your capital was your head. Your brains bred your rough survival. You outwitted the beasts and the men who craved to devour you. You ensured the fact of my presence here. I admit I haven’t amounted to much, maybe tempting you to wonder if I were worth all that trouble. I can assure you that I wasn’t, Lucy, but I tried, sometimes. I search your expectant, simian face while I plead for my penance,any Hail Lucys you require of me. They’ve set you knee-deep in fake grass cover. Please, forgive me while I kneel on this fake slate floor, eye-to-eye with you, my mother.
Country Mouse, Winter 2006
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFERD PACKER*
[*A 19th Century Colorado cannibal, Packer is reviled and/or celebrated for having eaten all four of Hinsdale County’s Democrats]
For soft visitors from sultry Texas it’s just one long day in Range Rovers to Colorado valleys, passing sego lily, fireweed, and cow parsnip blooming so thick we still cache our gold under the blossoms, and hide slag piles behind aspen hatched in nurseries to screen the gravel graves from Texans’ soft, shaded eyes, then guide their thick thighs, juicy, jiggling, toward the local barbecue, to coax open their purses and wallets packed with golden credit cards
For soft refugees from Oklahoma heat just one long day in cooled Cherokees to this town up a far gulley (not a month in steamer cargo Adriatic to Atlantic to New York Bay, not weeks among trains and carriages and walks up rutted mountain paths, life’s possessions in a canvas rucksack), no, soft Sooners shop on spruced planks (hewn by a Bohunk immigrant who dreamed of gold finds but labored in coal mines, who bought an egg for a buck and a girl’s company for a dime), just a little winded from the altitude yet healthy overall–good teeth and nails– so plump and pink we want to squeeze ’em
We herd the soft meat down the gangplanks wending through the gussied town, prodding them along corraled fences, fattening them at the Feed Lot– how much coal in their souls keeps them digging, digging for their golden cards?
VS: Critique, Vol. 4, July 2005
V.J. DAY
In a flash above our unsuspecting city I surrendered to the lush, ignited deliciousness of your kisses and forgot every battle I’d ever fought,
our healing flesh entangled, our rucksacks tossed. After we’d spent interminable years reconciled to solitary scraps amid strife, we land here face to face in midlife,
the rough miles, the forced marches erased like tactical plans scratched in surfline sand. Beyond your balcony the city lies asleep under August heat, dreamless, deaf on its soft sheet
to our elders’ victory, oblivious to the sacrifice that birthed this preposterous prosperity. We the inheritors seem peevish, wavering–small; too dull to be grateful for it all.
So let’s dance for remembrance, just you and me, and keep on kissing under pacified moon, freshly enlisted for slow embrace. At midnight’s strike, August 15, in sweet peace: let this love convene.
The Neo-Victorian/Cochlea, Summer-Fall 2004
MY CONVERSION
When I was little I held the common belief that all was fixed. The old were old forever, and had always been. Even my own bones, no mattter how my relentless body stretched, seemed steel-forged sticks cast in concrete. My elders held bone-deep belief in static hierarchy–the Father, the Son, my dad, me– and diffused all doubt with the miracles that punctuated the fixed, eternal text.
Now that I’m grown, bones slowly shrinking toward my own demise, abashed, I’ve converted to the faith of flux. Nothing has ever stayed unchanged, especially the things I loved, but also the things I despised, and, in fact, the vast substratum of all I barely noticed. The novel inscribed by my high-school love sits, yellowed and brittle as the muzzle of my brother’s stuffed chimpanzee. The chimp scowls on, ancient icon fixed on his childhood bed with its moth-munched cowboy spread. That boy, however, is dead.
My new faith grows rich, its body of worship dense as those delusional concrete bones but lightened, ignited by live-blood marrow. I waver in the visible vapor of a snowdrift, my arms upraised to praise the stratus born in deep noon’s blue, my shoes sinking through to green grass in khaki mud. Later I jog along the logging road until it crumbles, chomped to a h alt by the hungry tsunami tide– still, I stagger on, down the newborn shelf of exposed earth, stumbling onto the dunes, drifts of sand smothering the chunked asphalt’s corpse. The road ahead disintegrates into fog. In this faith of flux, every breath makes a prayer. In its shrinking bones, the body of evidence grows.
Above Us Only Sky, Michelle Rhea & Anita M. Barnard, Eds., 2003
HOLY WEEK IN THE MOJAVE
Random geology, sure, but rocks piled with such seeming design and deliberation,
a clean-swept uproar without any swathe of green to disguise the wind’s erosion.
Chollo and yucca and Joshua tree form simple trinities everywhere; bleak fruition
of some invisible gardener whose divine ingenuity makes beauty out of driest devotion
to life itself where water’s as rare as heat is certain; life like silent elation
where lizardly flicker of tongue and tail between hot stones is testament to jubilation of a survival
never assured, neither stray nor deliberate but hungry; in habitation
tough as an upheaval of desert stone offering shadow’s refuge, a savage exaltation.
The clerk finished her words with the prior customer, “I wish it were over, Edna. Just come to a stop, right now.” She caught my eye as mine caught hers going to the clock, 10:49.
I thought, well, it can’t be easy working so late when she’d rather play cards with her grandkids or soak in the tub with a hot toddy. Maybe schoolgirls at the pay phone reminded her of her own girlhood and all the boys and all the kisses and she wanted to get home to Fred, and fast. But I was strange here, with no business but my purchase– I never should have asked her what, exactly, she wanted to stop.
“Why,” she said, “the whole thing, dear,” vague eyes following Edna out, or imploring mine toward those phone- giddy girls. “The whole horrible world. I want it all finished, now. I want Jesus to come and put a stop to it.”
Through the canyon, under moon-lit red-rock cathedral spires and pines looming like saints against star -lit grottos, not two miles west of that store, I wondered what birthed the clerk’s malice against creation. Maybe Fred was mean, or her grandkids got stranded in juvey. Maybe those girls scared her, outside in the mocking, hilarious dark, brittle against arrested dreams.
I was driving home accelerated by kisses waiting across the Great Divide, the novel I had to finish, the poems I had to teach, the old seduction of a song new when I was in school, my car smooth on a concrete ledge so scooped I could only praise the pavers who sped my way across this whirled-blue orb. The canyon walls opened and the far taillights wavered on the horizon as if held– votive–ignited–by pilgrims alive under the bright wreckage of long-finished worlds.
ER: Exquisite Reaction, Parker A. Towle, Ed., Fall 2000
DISMANTLING HELL AT THE OLD DUMP
We swerve toward the sea bluffs laughing about when this park was the dump and we’d be stashed in back of Dad’s pickup– itself a candidate for the scrap-heap– hunkered among the week’s trash as if we ourselves were candidates for expulsion over those slimy, guano-topped rocks.
Tidied in the hands of wary heirs, the beach of broken glass, of beer-bottle ambers and sea-greens, rough edges soothed by twenty thousand tides, has smoothed into local attraction, “Glass Beach,” where tourists rove barefoot over a crust of shards– our parents’ and grandparents’ discards too worthless for the penny deposit.
As if in crusty mockery, twisted, rusted almost through, stubborn fingers of scrap metal stretch like old men’s claws from the tops of sea rocks. Fat seals doze on the lower ledges. Today, locals yammer about the seals “taking over”–transmitted on the AM feeding-frenzy of fact-free disdain, callers equate “environmental law” with Satan.
But Hell was actually dismantled here when the eternal trash fires were doused among smoldering rags and cat carcasses jumbled down bluffs to trash tides of shoe-polish tins and condoms, seasoned by a fresh stream of raw sewage, puked airborne into the Pacific like talk-radio spew, the shuck of unpolished families who didn’t know from Shinola not to defile our home.
The Kerf, Fall 1999; Re-published in Hunger Enough:Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society, Nita Penfold, Ed., 2004
FOR MR. PORTERFIELD
Only weeks before your retirement you’d already dug deep the bedrock of California Geology before one of us found the voice and nerve to ask, “Sir, are you sure you’re not giving the wrong lecture? We’re World Geography.” Stunned into slapping your gray head, you first thanked the front row’s “courageous spokesman,” then apologized with a courtesy hardly known anywhere in our rugged, uncourtly hemisphere: “I’m afraid I’m quite lost! But not, I hope, hopelessly.” With flustered flourish of note cards, your reliable twice-weekly expedition was once again on schedule, back upon the world’s great cordilleras, breathless in the Himalayas, charmed in the Alps, but not overcharmed: “Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking Switzerland has anything over our Sierras.” Your smile urged us to love those distant, snow-shuttered barriers to interstate speed. Without you, we might still be lost, heedless in the fast lane, not charmed by landforms blurred in our windshields, not finding our sights by taking your lead.
Nebo, A Literary Journal Fall, 1998
COMET-CRASH REUNION
Now–July–wild nasturtium adulterates your father’s garden, dooryard invader between the paving stones, sexy sun weed decorating the impression no one’s tended the place for twenty years.
But inside the rooms clatter, raucous as ever. Your boy begs me to play “Speed” then suckers me to easy victory. In the computer room, updating my star chart, your stepmother shouts a warning. My love sign’s in Jupiter– and “Jupiter’s besieged this week. Certain comet crash!”
Your dad says he always feels thirty-five, then groans when “that puffy geezer” surprises him in the mirror. You and I have reached the age when we talk all day, under plum trees’ shade, about stupid mistakes we’ve made. You embellish sagas of days when you traded cheap wine drunks for Benzedrine–“speed”– before you rose from narcotic slumber to a keening alarm, spouse and son crying “dry-out or ship out!” You decided to harbor yourself, moored in their arms.
Not mine, for sure. Our old love is second-growth today, durable and valuable but not–as ever– quite grown ready for plunder. That sly restless urge pulled us to recline side by side, legs touching, under the plum tree, but all the kids, and the spouses, and the parents take turns as chaperones while the trees shake off fruit like a sweet rain of asteroids.
All the old light revives in your sober eyes. After dark deepens, we scheme to get away, alone, “a walk, just a walk,” under stars, sure that games and jam-making fatigue will allow us an hour of privacy. But no–the family follows us.
Jupiter’s bright despite the moon glow, and we all dream to see the comet collide. Halfway down the lane, a rowdy parade, we laugh when a midnight fog overtakes the sky, etherizing the firmament in gauze: “That’s nightlife on the Coast!”
“It’s better to have loved and lost,” your father always said, “than never to have lost at all.” I have no other way to explain my steady joy, rising like a comet’s arc, fixed on collision course with certain, lonesome obliteration. I stand here, ecstatic fool, hugging myself as the fog erases the moon and Jupiter is extinguished.
Wormwood Review January 1998
STRIPPER AT THE FUNERAL
No one thought to read “To an Athlete Dying Young,” while tearful orations crackled the speakers in the overflow room, though homely poems of youthful philosophy plucked from Mark’s midnight scrawlings gave voice to the dead athlete himself. I strained to concentrate on Mark’s words in a church game room where I’d been ushered with later arrivals and found myself lost among two epochs of boys I’d taught.
A morning’s teaching called to sudden halt, still dusted in chalk, I’d fled into an October noon trailing clouds of blackboard quotes and now I faced a suited line of linebackers all twenty-five, like Mark was—multiplying their high-school selves to the third power, wider shoulders, stronger jaws, their eyes, narrowed by years of midterms, scrimmages, love agonies. The tallest, directly in my line of sight, wrote memorably of his sojourn in Hell for my Creative Writing class and now journeyed famously as “Chazz,” the headlining stripper in jack-off spas, masturbating on stage for the men who’d pay to watch. I refused to meet his gaze, across the rows of younger boys, the ones Mark had coached, the ones who’d just sat in the same plastic desks as Mark and Chazz had, enduring my pre-funeral lesson, skinny kids of fifteen, their beardless faces all screwed up from trying not to cry, their manly stances betrayed by twitching knees.
But Chazz kept staring, as if to strip me of my chalky cloak of normality— for years we’d traded glances in the gym and all the bars, and I knew that he knew that I knew what his ex-classmates might ever know. I’d never seen his jerk-off act—the huge fact of his body embarrassed me—he was supposed to remain a schoolboy in plastic, chaste. Standing there, cornered by my students of fifteen and twenty-five lined up among ping-pong tables and croquet mallets, I bore the surest fear that Chazz would strip right there— shimmy hard and naked while Mark’s ex-history teacher eulogized Mark’s grasp of ancient civilizations and modern civility.
I gripped the pool table behind me, then altered the angle of my gaze, over to a jumbled line of third-grade boys, tiny critters in stiff suits—Mark’s own students— who’d long before given up all resistance to tears. Their strong, laughing new teacher died of a weak heart and now one little boy surrendered to his loss, fainting and falling full-force forward. A grasping circle of grown ups surrounded the boy while Chazz hustled across the linoleum void to cradle Mark’s student in his arms, stripping off his jacket to make a pillow for the boy’s head. Chazz unbuttoned the kid’s dress shirt, exposing the baby-flesh chest, and leaned in, his jeweled ear meeting every beat of the boy’s broken heart.
XY Files, Poems on the Male Experience, Judith Rafaela and Nancy Fay, Eds., 1997
POKER ON ST. VALENTINE’S DAY
Losing is the surest bet I’ve got– I want to hold close this flush of hearts, splayed in disorder, and treasure bare-faced royalty. But when desire stares back at me in that smoky mirror I laugh, spilling my whiskey.
Before the game I called my love and got my love’s new lover: “How sweet of you to call! Sure, I’ll pass on your Happy Valentine’s Day. Sorry–got to run–we’re late for a candlelight dinner…”
But that beat the Valentine’s Day I was expelled, left for dead, a carcass frozen on a foreign street because my charms had expired before my visa. Even that beat the Valentine’s Day my love and I were cast from our cafe table– a scandal over funny money had followed my sweetheart to our candlelit repast.
One of my poker buddies is certain that St. Valentine was a hoax, invented because Anglo-Saxon dolts couldn’t pronounce “will-you-be-mine?”
This noon I delivered lunch to the dying, most casualties of desire if not love, the meals packed with Valentines, construction-paper I LOVE YOU’s scrawled in schoolkids’ big unsteady letters which I bore over barren yards, across wire barricades, to pass to fleshless hands and effaced faces.
Now, tonight, after I wipe the whiskey from the face of queen and benighted Jack, the joker and humble two’s twin wild hearts, I reach in my pocket for the ante and, finding only a card asking WILL YOU BE MINE? in a child’s hand, I fail to disclose any change of heart and poker-faced, hold close my question.
Metrosphere, 1997
METAMORPHOSIS IN MARCH
The crocuses, as breathless as condoms, expired, emptied under this hard March snow remind me once again of what?–the love?– felt when I planted these, sure of each bulb I birthed in hand and cradled deep in clay, along with sprinkled phosphorus, instilled in hope its powder cast a spell for us. Beware, though, these illusionary energies, of nature’s heedless immunity to desire. Mere snow smothered each flopped blow, their silken skins metamorphosed–latex mass-infused into artificial hues, deflowered dooryard debris of what?–sex?– discarded with the love I held for you.
Metrosphere, 1997
SPRING WITHOUT BLOSSOMS
The dandelions, beautiful but dumb, stay brave, surviving to decorate a weak winter’s grave. April freeze, heedless as fertilizer terrorist, just blasted every waking bud. To mark this, I guess, a harvest of thistles–blow the seeds and you’re midwife to a generation of weeds. God’s jokes grow trite: a roiling shroud fitted to the city’s limits spits from clouds not to nourish, just annoy, while the suburbs bask in sun. We long for lilac, an ambrosian urge denied, along with orchards re-born in pink– it’s past time for that. Black blossoms sink from weight of too-early birth. We cultivate the wish that, like spring, salvation’s only late.
Metrosphere, 1997
BLIND BOY IN THE RENAISSANCE GALLERY
Too loudly he says, “The problem is girls. Those fickle bitches won’t marry the blind. They think we can’t make the money they love.” Of course, girls may have other reasons: this boy’s slouched, fat, unshaven, and cockeyed, peer- ing past Giotto into empty space. “Can’t they see? The blind can do anything.”
Demonstrably untrue: this boy can’t see the swarm of nuns being ushered round Michaelangelo’s Pieta, five seconds flat per sister. “Please to notice illusion of suffering,” says the guide, “now please to follow me to the Mary Magdalene.” Nor can the boy see even one of the forty-seven Last Suppers, thirty-five Annunciations, twelve Depositions–nor the twenty appearances of Saint Sebastian, stabbed and serene.
Knocked, Fall 1997
The middle-aged people are sleeping
over a Midwest which looks nothing like the wine-stained airline map the woman to my left studied before she turned from her low-cal lunch to Redbook’s diets and a column on the delicate art of living alone. She made sure my tortellini survived the turbulence before she fell into shallow, upright sleep. What does she dream in the shrine of her kind, plump heart? Her fingers, squeezed by jewels, fan out ever closer to my arm.
The man to my right exhausted the business pages over Columbus and sleeps, arms crossed, neat as his briefcase. His reading, “The Delicate Art of Staying Afloat,” flaps gently in the airjet almost in time to his breathing. I try to read his dreams, but receive nothing– not a more erect Dow Jones, not boardroom intrigue. Beyond his bald pate and across the aisle, a father sleeps under earphones, his hand resting on his baby’s belly. He’s a bearded new-millennium Madonna, haloed over Indianapolis by floating grandstands of cloud.
We’re past the turbulence, serene, high into the indigo, but my own magazine quakes with the turmoil below, where the Princess of our TV childhoods confesses to abuse and booze and whoring while fame urges felons to vie for mass-murder world records, each boast unearthing more bones from Ohio ditches. Up here we slide smoothly from the impervious blue into a cloud glacier which conceals all the evil in Iowa as it nurtures all its corn, ripe for harvest and a destiny, maybe, vacuum-packed in at Three-Course Sky Chef Luncheon Deluxe.
The whole hop-happy blooming blue Midwest is being butchered and picked: summer’s over. There’s still sand in my sneakers which I half-believe will spell the end of my youth when I spill it into a backyard clump of wilted yarrow. I submit to sleep’s seductions as the middle-aged woman finally grasps my naked arm, as if tugging me gently into life’s next phase. Dropping over Kansas, the pilot aims for an Oz of distant haze.
California Quarterly, Spring 1997
CUSTODIAL
At seventeen, half-deaf janitor’s third son, I lowered the flag according to strict rules. I fought the north wind kicking up at dusk around the courthouse, praying no school fools
might cruise down Main Street right now to jeer at my benighted task. In ‘Sixty-Nine no flag felt casual in American hands; red stripes meant fresh blood, maybe mine,
meant massacres of Asian villagers. Patriotism drifted by on Cadillacs– compliance, I thought, not love of country. Pointing at her car’s flag, this old battleax
honked, as if my folded flag pledged allegiance to her war-lover’s confederacy. Growing up among such casual killers! Bad enough disinfecting toilets without throwing up
on linoleum floors I had yet to sweep. After stashing the flag, I emptied ashes from Selective Service office desks. Yes– while Dad was sick I had access to caches
of draft-board assignments for my classmates, in Asia, consigning boys to slavery. Yet worse fate restrained my sabotage: Dad’s wrath. Was his sickness really worry
from pondering his clumsy son’s bloody rice-paddy demise? Or worse, that same son’s sympathy for flower-power traitors? My father hadn’t instilled love of guns
in any of his sons, each a volunteer for peace. Dad failed at breeding violence– we only studied his creed of love and labor. I swept on, in furious compliance.
Neo-Victorian, Winter 1996-97
CHRISTMAS AT RUSSIAN GULCH
Like tombstones for buried deities the campground’s outhouses lean into ragged grass. After half a century the lawn still seems smashed into tanglebrush, California State Parks’ old bulldozer victory slowly eroding into fantasy. Beyond, the old road’s closed to all but feet and claw.
After I hop over rusted gate, I’m entangled in the earthbound topple of alder tops. Freeing myself, I conceive how this place practically incubated me, where my dad, the baker’s hand, met my mom at a CCC dance. They fell in love right here while, fueled by my father’s biscuits, the Civilian Conservation Corps carved this park into a wild fern canyon deep in the Depression’s dead dark heart.
The life abreed in this five-degrees-from-deadly frigidity keeps astonishing me. Fans of fern waver on canyon walls, first green of newborn grass alchemizes, gold under charcoal skies, red fungus imitates blossom on rhododendron, a bloodburst. The orange rot of fallen redwood erupts in time-lapse rapidity, fertile with decay.
The road’s rotting too– damp earth reclaims chunks of asphalt while the canopy drops ever more leafmeal over the disintegration–here, at least, human hegemony’s some ungodly joke. Mildew and maggots undo the work of hands. An oncoming Pacific storm howls, offshore– the road seems to dissolve as I sprint back to the safety of a seaside shelter built by Depression boys.
Northwesterlies raise whitecaps horned and ornery as mountain ranges. Too young for swimming lessons, my mother got dragged out by a riptide here, bruised by driftwood, saved by one breath from a tangled death. She always feared the sea would take one of her reckless sons, and, just up on the next bluff, when we spilled my brother’s ashes into the waters he loved, I realized–not what the coast had claimed, but reclaimed–how puny our creation is, even the concrete span over which traffic roars to ignore the gulch below, how almighty the microbes, how inscrutable the sea, how slow my progress from the black womb of blank infancy to the shelter of this drenching light.
Hawaii-Pacific Review, Spring 1995
MORNING EDITION
From London this morning, evening commuters
Sheep on the pillowcase, dancing into the jaws of tulips. Hell, the sheet’s come loose. Sun’s already piercing the blue spruce.
disembarked from automated subway trains and climbed unsuspecting onto escalators in London’s deepest underground station, King’s Cross, where an inferno trapped
Red petunias on the balcony seem to shake off sleep, and bees.
victims midway between platform and street. Charred remains were conveyed on the escalator which inexplicably continued to operate.
Thousand of birds chant that undersong. Lisa’s dog growls over the fence, scattering jays. A squirrel tightropes along the telephone wire, poised between the perils of dog and compost bog.
We can be certain they died of suffocation before they suffered any severe burns
Bees continue doing kamikaze landings in that glass of flat beer. Jan must be frying bacon next door.
although the computerized cars continued to deliver passengers automatically to the gas-fed flames. That report courtesy of BBC. Now, good morning from Denver
Poets On: The News, 1996 Ruth Daigon, Ed.
WASHED-UP
Suddenly we’re all huddled, familiar at the surf. A skinny kid says it’s a forgotten mine from World War Two. But no. A sleeping, infant whale? Yes–we agree–some creature, imperiled in rough sea and rock walls. Two surfers swear to save it, swim out, and find it past salvation: “It’s just a tortoise, a big one! And dead.”
A surge spits the corpse near all our close-packed feet. Upside down, its fat arms still flail– illusion, from surf’s tug and pull, that sets a dog to barking, i ncessantly. Intestines trail beyond the conquered shell back to sea, gleaming, a train of veins, humiliating.
“What could’ve killed it?” the kid asks. “That shell’s so thick.” He sets it upright to reveal its perfect armor. None of us answer.
Silent, we disperse, lost to separate blankets and rival radios, sudden boundaries of old and young, thin and fat– our preposterous flesh unarmored, helpless against the sunshine, let alone the sea.
Turning back to paperbacks and bickering, we try to ignore the dog’s barking fury, fury at this being that looks invincible, that seems to reach out, then sink, then reach–surging, helpless, against the tidal breach.
Hawaii-Pacific Review, Spring 1995
STOPPING BY FOR EVENSONG
In a Time of Plague
We had an hour before the train, and it kept raining, so we stumbled in for service, each handed a Book of Common Prayer. We sat in back, too tall, too wet, foreign among the scattered score of faithful. I planned to move my lips to hymns, eyes heavenward–for the architecture– but the pages, the words intruded on golden stone six centuries old. Stone-rib buttresses formed the merest shelter, the framework for the voices, the words.
Faith bewildered me–I visited cathedrals awestricken by the human effort spent to deny the simple fact of certain death. Tonight, though, the book’s weight, its freight of words felt alive in my hands– its cover living skin, the same texture as your fingers gazing mine as they traced the words.
When the pastor rose to say the sermon, I meant to share a groan with you– it took me back to those back-pew evening Masses wi th my brother, how we’d roll our eyes. But I knew you believed in a God of some kind, just like he did before he died, so I kept my peace and eased back to receive the words.
The theme was my favorite: grace, how we didn’t need to deserve it. The leitmotif was unjustified suffering– those sweet souls strangled by disease or knifed in alleys–and how grace was just the other side of this, unjustified salvation. The refrain: “He set His heart on us.” His tone intimate in the over- grand space, the pastor chose his words with sumptuous reverence for our presence, we few on a workaday night–what had we done to deserve his eloquence? It was as if he had set his heart on us, and I braced myself to absorb each word,
even when I felt you crying softly, leaning against my shoulder. I knew you thought of the friends you’d lost to this ten years’ plague, that its knife- in-the-alley had been the slowest and cruelest of bloodlettings, over and over repeated, grace long withheld along with brute luck. I knew because, new friends, we’d confessed the fear we shared of making new friends only to witness their agony helplessly then lose them, gracelessly. A question formed our temptation: was it better to live without love, that damnedest, that merest of words?
Strange to our New World eyes, late light blinked outside, the nine-thirty sun of the English July, cool raindrops glinting like a blessing for blazing night. While we hiked up the golden Georgian street to the train, a smile dried your eyes as you praised the view, and I decided, after all, to set my heart on you.
Hawaii-Pacific Review, Spring, 1995
IN A GRAVEYARD ON ACHILL ISLAND
Kildownet, Ireland
The abbey had been roofless for centuries, but some graves were recent, their shining slate memorials alive with my surname. None of the names really connected to me–we survived along a severed branch of the tree, my great-grand- father’s antecedents blank, a mystery. So–who, and what, was I? Idling in whiplash wind, yet another intruder in sight of yet another pirate castle, I’d hit the point in travel where it’s all too damn picturesque, every green reek and high-colored cheek a parody of expectations, Ireland, Inc., a Kodacolor hoax. Where the directory led to Famine Victims I expected some noble monument, solemn beside the gray-slate bay.
Yet on a soft slope edging an inlet, the inscribed tombstones scattered, disappearing in a field of rocks, nothing more. No marker, no signs–just stones heaped like dug-up potatoes until I saw that each marked a single mound of uneroded sod, each gravesite still clotted with stubborn integrity after a hundred-fifty years. Some of the mounds writhed, crooked, as if corpses had restless sleep, some sank, sucked-in like stomachs eager to devour the sentinel stones. Some were stunted, shrunken–whoever had the strength to dig infant graves left too weak or wordless to scratch names into these bald rocks. Here silenced stones told me I belonged to this untenable cropless place, barren in everything but catholic fertility, exporting only excess humanity– flotsam like me–from an engineered catastrophe: allied with a fungus, famine had been social policy. Where evil was borne, rocks disclosed my noble birth; one severed branch rotted, nameless in the hungry earth.
Hawaii-Pacific Review, Spring, 1995
TERRA INCOGNITA
This should be the way home but where the Mother Lode flattens, the landscape’s alien, altered. Those foothills were never anybody’s mother–how could these drought grasses have sustained us? This almost Ethiopian October heat breathes wildfire all across California. Beyond plowed-under farms, the lion-colored Buttes claim to be the seat of gods. Piles of ash, mute erosion, what strike can they make against evil? What stake in good?
Shadows linger in the dying shade of oaks or lurk barely seen, just ahead across the highway. Predators? No, don’t lie with metaphors– it’s a virus. God, please, what the hell’s become of Eden? Is that Eve setting the table in that farmhouse window? Or is she the one, miles and miles farther, leaning toward her dying son? She’s had so much to grieve: his sight, half his hearing, all his mobility, the company of his laughter, and finally, tonight, the presence of his mind. And yet, for the love of God, her grieving hasn’t even begun. Where the highway finally unravels into darkness, my high beams scan redwood ridgetops crazily as lost brothers’ flashlights, switchback after switchback dropping me closer to the shore, home to harbor where in the morning my mother’s on my arm at Mass and the sermon falls like ashes: “You’re not good enough.”
After lunch, my father takes me to his church–the river– where the blackberries still cluster over his dock. I haven’t been home in blackberry time for years, feasting as I clamber down to take my brother’s place, helping my father move the boat to its winter mooring. We jump–the summer dock’s towed out from under us. I fumble with the knots. My dad doesn’t mind: “You’re doing good enough.”
Blackberries spill on my brother’s tray. Can’t get his mouth around the damn spoon, so I help him shovel in the last mouthful, then yank off his sticky t-shirt and help carry him to his daybed. “Those berries…I picked ‘em for you,” I mutter, wondering how much he can hear. “They were good,” he groans. “They were good.”
What’s Become of Eden, Stephanie Strickland, Ed., 1994
THE DECLINE OF SERBO-CROATIAN ON MC PHERSON STREET
For all we could see, our mother’s old language garbled a jumble of j’s and too many z’s. Where the hell were its vowels? The Slavic society insured each of our lives but its newspapers stacked by the woodbox, j’s and z’s silenced, recipes uncooked, deadlines expired.
Did all the old Slavs always whisper because they’d grown so worn out? Or was it out of shame—as if mouthfuls of consonants suited only displaced peasants, whose missing teeth disgraced the Land of the Free’s expensive dentistry? When the gap-toothed old Slavs whispered their last, Old World recollection died, too. The Adriatic Sea flooded no one’s memory.
We grew up facing fogbound Pacific which absorbed all immigrant idiom, first ours, then Finnish and Portuguese. Even Italian. Bewildering consonant clusters just evaporated like tidepools off Pudding Creek Beach, marooned.
Today immigrant houses hugging the harbor shelter only tourists, Driftwood Inn, Wayfarer Lodge…coy, serene, urbane. I can see why none would keep the family names— Sverko House? Zmac Hotel? –but I’d love to hear that old cacophony in desk clerks’ mouths, constant commemoration. Because it’s gone— even my mom’s losing her Slav, and she’s the last.
When we go home we tease Ma with locu noc, “goodnight.” And we’ll still cry out, Stretna Nova Godina, “Happy New Year.” But we’ve all failed to memorize “goodbye.”
Poets On: Forgetting, Ruth Daigon, Ed., 1994
DRIVING YOUR MERCEDES-BENZ TO STORAGE
That was you—a honky-tonk cassette left behind on leather seats. I slide it into the slot, wondering how long this twangy singer’s been silenced. Long months’ salty dust on the Mercedes’ hood scatters when I steer this steel from carport’s dark onto open road. I’m supposed to follow Dad to the garage in town, but out of the woods, now— on the raindashed coast highway—I have the urge to unleash this horsepower, to fill the empty passenger seat with your company and cruise Main till we pass north of town all the way to Abalobadiah where the road’s suspended high above surf, carved into sky, nothing between us and death but our brakes and the hulk of the latest car to plunge on the slick switchbacks. We’d have burgers from Stoney’s in our laps, a basket of fries balanced between us, the Okie song about lost love graphically equalized and rattling windows way up in Rockport. I’d picture for you the newborn green in the pasture land, February’s flowering plums—and you, the only mostly blind guy who owned a whole fleet of automobiles— would smile and nod, verifying my report with a blank gaze out. “Yeah,” you’d say, “I see what you mean. It’s sure pretty out there.” Hurtling to the headlands where you taught me to drive, I might just keep accelerating until the final twang. But I won’t. I’m part of this procession, just behind our father, and my route is fixed. At the garage, he signals carefully, helping me guide your last car into this sightless, narrow box.
California Quarterly, Fall 1994
JUST AFTER THE COLD WAR
Whidbey Island, Washington
This trail promises a pond with lily pads, a “walk through four distinct ecosystems” in this wooded headland above the strait. But after the fir grove, the fern bog, freshwater pond, and grassy bluffs, dead hands erected an unnatural fifth: the U.S. Navy light station, unmanned but thick with threats. Its concrete walls front the thicket under coils of razor wire, each barb anvil-shaped, sharp as a stiletto. Casting cold beams over waters innocent of war, megawatts transmit an eternal circuit beyond grove, bog, pond, and bluffs to spy on fish, ferries, and the far, undefended shore.
Green Fuse, Fall 1994
Without Love, Sex
is like the ecstasy of insects the static thrill of stinger against shell, the electric confusion of ovipositor, cercus, and gaster; two delirious bugs humping in a bed of fresh manure.
Without love, sex is also mammalian, the sweet heat of another warm-blooded one, an ecstasy of invasion in the barn’s soft straw, the hot forgetfulness of other hungers; nerve–endings between legs genetically plotting thoughtless rapture, a “little death” for the brain.
Without love, sex reminds me of your room, all my long lonesome studies of the orange dried straw you like to call decorative hung on your sheet rock walls and that bloodstain where you once reached out from under my ecstasy to smash a flea.
Men As We Are, Summer 1994
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HEARTLESS
They adore me for my misplaced heart. It’s even lured the radiologist from her lacquered nails. Doc arrives, all beard, reciting surgical litanies like an unctuous Messiah. He positions me sacrificially on the torn paper sheet. The nurse reminds me a little of you before you left me, before I could leave you and like you, distains my veins: “He’s awful young for coronary pains.”
I came in for a chest cold— they skinned me down to my secret. She had me in X-ray, stripped me half-naked, then bore my portrait, proud of my flaw: “Strangest thing I ever saw.”
“What have you done with that heart of yours?” If I could find it, I would hide it, proffered but forbidden, a glass-locked alarm. But the glass is busted—my heart’s vanished— that’s the picture. They shake their heads, scrawl instructions to Cardiac and ask again, curious, in chorus— it’s almost the refrain of a bad song— “How’d you survive so well…so long?”
Mediphors: A Literary Journal of the Health Professions Spring 1994
CRADLE TO GRAVE:
Notes on an Excavation
In the deepest layer, settlements are simple, ample homes of equal size. The few goods– clay cradles, tools, carved toys– lack evidence of ownership or tribute.
Royal quarters dominate the next layer, ringed by smaller dwellings. We uncover gold jewelry and a crude, embellished shield. An elaborate code in clay, genesis of all writing, compels repayment and exacts taxes. Upon tombs, the deceased in bas-relief each bear some individual likeness: baldness, a mass of curls, a less-upturned archaic smile beneath a warrior’s helmet.
In the most recent layer, weaponry grows more elaborate and richly decorated while all civilian ornament vanishes. Gold is stacked in bricks. Grave sculpture, too, has disappeared, as if identification were deeply feared. This impulse for security spurs a regression in design: depressed bedchambers without windows, armored cages for doors. The vaulted architecture at this late stage so favors subterranean rooms we can no longer distinguish their homes from their tombs.
We Speak for Peace Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Editor, 1993
A BLACK AMERICAN IN PARIS
Dear Gerri, you’ve come to this: leading your fat Parisian “client” to American cafes overlooking Notre Dame where you remark on whole wheat’s virtues and how much you love the willows while Fatso grumbles and wonders why he should care. He thinks America’s sprouts, sunflower kernels, health breads and even her self-exiled beauties are existentially silly. This plump toad who pays your bills is unworthy even to touch your perfect earlobe yet you treat him gallantly—what would he like? Nothing. Well, isn’t it good to try new places? Hell, he doesn’t care. Why let his heavy fussy corpse lead you back to that battered Peugeot?
Oakland misses you. It lost Miss Stein to Paris, too, and look what happened to Gertrude: she turned mean, and European. Geraldine, please come home— you’re still alive, and all is forgiven.
Massachusetts Review, Fall 1991
EMERSON’S JACUZZI
Sure, he would’ve had one. There’s the perfect spot behind his big square house in a stand of maples. Emerson would’ve dared Thoreau to drop in–and laughed as he hopped out, naked and refusing as a half-boiled frog.
Summer nights, under that cathedral of trees, steam would rise as if from the cauldron of Concord’s long-silenced witches. Carlyle, watching from upstairs, would wonder if his pipe smoke commingled with the steam from all that hot air and whether Emerson expected him to roil again tonight in his damn overheated pool.
Emerson would’ve invited us, too, and despite his preaching on self-reliance, would’ve met us at the station in a fat General Motors car. We’d be asked to join the ferment beneath unconquered stars for tonight’s open question, “Have we not yet wakened from American dreams?” punctuated by jet streams.
Massachusetts Review, Fall 1991
When Everything Is Goneril
what wouldn’t you give for something Foolish, for blazing double-entendre and illuminating wit as sharp as a servant’s truth? What wouldn’t you give to weave a garland in your young daughter’s hair and spend the whole day under the wide sky in a field where wildflowers beckon, unpicked? Then, tired, giddy, all you’d yearn for’s home.
But there stands Goneril: hospitality has claws, duty’s barbaric with ancient grievances, and she does, after all, hold the deed by birth, by law. Though love is often declaimed, it’s really disowned, houseless in this ungenerous land–sent to wander in bald lots, sent to sleep under cardboard punctured for a glimpse of smudged and savage stars.
Threepenny Review, Summer 1990
Re-published in In A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare, David Starkey & Paul J. Willis, 2005
HUMAN SACRIFICE IN MEXICO CITY
At midnight, the boulevard’s floodlit Aztec raises his arms to the taxis, a plea: hey, this rain is killing me! Lovely, cool, the shower penetrates the monoxide haze, ever more deadly as it drops into the city’s heart, a toxic bath on the hanging garden, on the dancers at the Plaza Insurgentes, on the special Blue Police assigned to enforce the local illusion of polite order. They smile–and fail– and run for shelter.
Steam rises in the early morning, mingling with fumes so thick old senoras bring gas masks, like revived, smooching lovers, to their lips. At Chapultepec, rowboats glide over mucky water. But the sweethearts paddle and laugh.
The capital floats in foreign money like a lover ignoring the sewage. Beggars, spying blue eyes, yen for me, raising cupped hands for dollars or pounds. A baby sleeps, naked, face-down on concrete. The Revolution only seems remembered by street signs, Reforma, Insurgentes. There’s Shirley’s Cafe, but I’m lost, under the influence of collapsing cars with Jesus bumper stickers. Christ must have guessed he’d end up on that Chevy when they nailed him up naked as an Aztec.
Review Interamericana, 1984
CROSSING THE MISSILE ZONE
In the Last Chance Casino, in this town where all the children have birth defects, you poke at your queasy square of hash browns, certain only toothpicks are free.
The cross-eyed cashier calls her kid a “mutant,” deaf, one-armed, slapped to life for this: to exist, drugged, mute, drooling, blind. This momma’s your age, born the year her momma watched the Army Corps detonate at dawn. “Hell, they spit south Nevada across the sky.”
The billboard Indian rusting on the ridge points east, aiming you over two lanes of tar rising to Nevada’s slice of paradise: God’s dawn behind a pine summit where Basques still tend sheep on green gashes in eroded hills, once islands in a prehistoric sea where nothing swam but brine and doomed, golden women.
All you can get on the radio’s a prayer for the Prince of Peace brought to you by killers, Jesus, killers.
Nuke-Rebuke: Writers and Artists Against Nuclear Energy and Weapons, Morty Sklar, Ed. 1984
STRIPPER AT THE FUNERAL 