Uncle Richie

 "I was digging a grave when God spoke to me," Uncle Richie said

while pushing me on a swing, making the world veer crazily. "I told Him, 'I'm working. What's so important?' " Uncle Richie was lying on his side on the laminate, adding another Lego to our castle's tower when he added, "He told me that wanting love but believing I had never had it, was like sandpaper against my heart." I thought about that while offering Theodore Bruin some tea, though the teacup was empty. "Sometimes you have to pretend," I said to Uncle Richie where he sat, knees higher than my play table. "I was digging a grave for a woman named Helen Mendenhall," Uncle Richie continued as we lay on the fragrant lawn while the sun went down. "She was wonderful--quiet, self-contained, unavailable. My type." "What if God is like Theodore Bruin?" I asked Uncle Richie when he paused from reading Frog and Toad Are Friends to me at bedtime. He looked sad so I held out Teddy. "Your type! You can have him if you want!" Uncle Richie leaned in and hugged me, with Theodore between us. Then he closed the book, got up, looked back once and winked. "Love ya Uncle Richie," I said. "Yeah," he said, and left the door ajar.

Crows

 There are crows, like poppy seeds on a bun.

There are trees at the edge of a meadow like the hairs on the head of a girl sitting in algebra class. The girl is not popular but can perform bird calls. Along the classroom windows, crows. Class is disrupted, the janitor dispatched to break up the pageantry. Bakers have befriended the crows. They give them buns and laudatory anthems that the bakers sing. The girl becomes a baker. At the school, algebra class devolves into boredom and ruin. The crows call an assembly at which they crown the girl Crow Queen. Each student is given a marble. All of them become bakers. There continue to be crows, like poppy seeds on a bun, like bakers at their work, strutting and whistling in the dawn.

Henry

 A woman gives birth to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

except this time he has a hard shell and feelers. "Write something," says the woman to her newborn monster. The infant is placed in a terrarium with rocks and alphabet blocks. The woman feeds him pancakes with some sort of unidentified berries. Poems begin to appear, scrawled in the condensation on the walls. Literary journals from all over clamor to reject the newborn's work. However, a servant surreptitiously releases the babe into a local pond. In the fullness of time, in the mud, this: "The day is done and darkness falls From the wings of night."

The Child of the Future

 I walk in and The Man of the Past is sitting at my desk

dandling The Child of the Future on his knee. "Five tickets, five dollars," he sings out. This is a child, perhaps even mine, and my mother bone activates. "You can't raffle off The Child of the Future!" "I can and I am," says The Man of the Past. The Child of the Future has a scruff of beard, is six feet if he's an inch and clearly works out. He is well past dandling age. "Five tickets, five dollars," The Man of the Past yodels. The Child of the Future leans over and bites off The Man of the Past's head, torso, and legs in sequence, then belches and stands up. "Manners," I say automatically. The Child of the Future calls me "bro" on his way out and lets the cat escape despite the post-it on the door saying not to.

Bonhomie

 There is a funeral for a thing that was never alive

and so they had to create and then kill it. "Hold still," they advised it. "Don't you want what we are trying to give you? You don't seem to know who your friends are." Such bonhomie is rare, especially during the commission of a homicide. Finally the thing lay still, like a word on the tip of a tongue. There is a funeral, and at the funeral, weeping. "We gave it life, yet in return it only cursed us." Afterward, there are cakes and cookies, and hearty bonhomie.

Raccoons

 Raccoons bring me September.

They arrive in the night, like lovers who aren't in the mood. Raccoons my loves, raccoons my undoing, come to me. In Marrakesh, on Mykonos, there are raccoons. Japanese temples are overrun with them and they terrify the monks with their ratchet ways. Raccoons circle the stars, searching for the lost cosmonaut. As a child, raccoons came to me, rolling me away in a trash can, into a life of seasick longing. Ciao Bella, they said, turning to climb up gutter pipes and silver maples. Daylight comes and a buttery sun reveals me alone. That is the end of your poem, right there, advise the raccoons but they are poetasters and don't know Simic from Snoopy. September and I become a thing, our love still bearing the resale shop tag. Raccoons invoke the Golden Garbage Can and leave their tracts for me to find.

Props

 

Hospital

 This hospital is no place for babies

yet there they are. Hello, hopeful noobs. The doctors here all began as patients-- the sickest ones. They are told, "see one, do one, teach one." Primum non nocere is the motto-- first do no harm and yet harm is much of what we do. It's a teaching hospital and the teachers all appear in mirrors. Upside, there are drugs, downside, they're contraindicated like religion. Meet the chief of medicine, with his kind, tired face and bloody smock. He likes bromides, and offers one now: "Pain is the crucible from which our true selves are born." He posts a list on the board every Tuesday. If your name is on it, well done, his maxim is true. If not, feel free to apply elsewhere, such as a factory or a restaurant.

Copper Country

 It's beautiful up there, and you shone.

At home on the rocky shores of Lake Superior,

I was a smooth stone for skipping; you were sunlight on the water.

What I didn't understand was the night that far north.

Red-haired, speaking with a hint of Quebecois,

you drew me immediately, because I was little rocks beneath the tide

and mistook you for sunrise and a pleasant peninsula.

What I didn't understand was Gichigami's jealous nature.

Any geologist sitting on a stool in any tavern in copper country

can tell you that a rock can be both solid and fragile.

He could describe the smooth, sharp, shell-like fractures

called conchoidal. But he is drinking, leave him be. 

I brought heft with me, I thought, cases of books

and a hard restlessness, cold to the touch and longing not to be.

Laying eyes in you, I sensed your spark and mistook it for warmth.

Copper conducts, it borrows, it doesn't hold a damn thing.

I am a little of this, a little of that--a collector, I carry some of everything

that has ever touched me. I am worlds, a common rock, a human.

You are what you are, pure in your own denying way, charged but empty.

What I didn't see then was that I was seeking brightness down a shaft.

We lay together in the cooling nights, the snow came, ten-twelve feet.

I thought I was strong, and that you were worth every devotion,

but I was flint, cracking and stabbing as we loved, and you were 

never meant to be moved, turning weedy green in the northern air.

I miss copper country. It's real, though mined out now. I've moved south,

grown older, living alone, staring into the fridge at midnight as if at stars.

And you? You dug in deeper, a disused light on the shore, pretty and dark.

What I didn't understand was that we would hurt each other so much,

and that it would matter so little. The indifferent lake still shines and sighs.

__________________

for my friend Dora at Dverse Poetics: Lyric Petrologies

My father was fascinated with the history of our state, and took me with him all over, explaining and teaching as we went. There is nothing quite like being taught by a teacher who loves his subject. 

Michigan's state motto is, "If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you."

Lake Superior is vast, and always cold. The shores are rocky. Its wild, careless beauty is easy to fall in love with, and it does not care that you are there.

Music: Megan Dixon Hood "Drown"

Once In a Lifetime

 Once in a lifetime you get the Big Prize

but it comes wrapped in rainy days

and cotton batting, incognito if you will.

You stupid fuck, wake up will you,

all you have to do is throw out a hand

and there it is, shiny as the 4th of July,

fantastic as a first kiss, spinning like a new planet.

You'll look back like Girl Genius some day and say,

yes yes THAT was the day, the thing that lit you, burned you brilliantly.

Sure, the slog and grind will still be there, grinning with

its lopsided sour grapes grin, the days will still stick with thorns,

but the thing, the marvelous unexpected thing, stays lit, stays true.

Look, Bunky, what I tell you is true, and when it's over you'll

howl and want to die, that's part of it, the lit thing the fantastic thing

that comes once in a lifetime, but if you throw out your hand,

your OTHER hand just as the ship is going under, sometimes

the once in a lifetime comes twice, repeats itself like double sixes,

and there you are, lucky and lucky again, you shiner, you flaming star.

---------

for Dverse Poetics "Once in a Lifetime"

Music: Blaze Foley "Clay Pigeons"

Bad Eye

 It's the harsh angle of the sun in August, I think, that tricks my bad eye. In the stillborn space where the walnut tree smothered its  lessers with shade, a cape of weedy green masquerades as grass, as lawn, a trickster for my blind spot. 

In the magnified bright reflecting off the house's siding in afternoon, the mulberry stump sends up a fresh forest of suckers, higher by the day. This is fool's summer, when what was is gone and what remains puts on a play, wearing a harlequin mask, and kindly saves a part for me, I tell myself "There is plenty of time, to repair, heal, do more than was done today." 

This is my bad eye telling tales and the iridescent image swims through a mirror that flows  in and out of vision, in and out of me, like life itself. 

______

for my friend Dora who is hosting at Dverse Prosery today. Her theme is "Luminous Accountings" and requires the use of the italicized section from "King of the River" by Stanley Kunitz. 

Process notes : I seem to be losing the vision in my left eye due to a mysterious spot that showed up on my eye exam in February. Some days it is just blurry, other days all I can see with it is shapes. Fortunately, my right eye remains just garden variety nearsighted. As if to make a joke as I wrote this, my  eye decided that an ocular migraine was in order. I get them sometimes. Not to be deterred, i counted the words up four times and they came to 144 each time. 

Last year my neighbor complained, quite reasonably, about my big mulberry tree that was scraping his roof and dropping berries pell mell on his porch, so I had it cut down, Then last month my beloved black walnut tree split in a storm and had to be removed. In the bare place where its shade prevented much from growing, there is now a carpet of some sort of creeping weed. Things come, things go--including me sooner or later--and are replaced by something else. Any passing dinosaur can tell you it's true. 

Walnut & Mulberry

 My big black walnut tree is gone--the storm took it.

The stump is something like the white skin where a ring recently was. I'd like to have a funeral procession but I lack coffin, instruments, mourners. I would like to dance for my lost companion, but am denied. Being old is like being a kid again, in the worst way. I nag: Watch your step don't fall careful with that don't drop it. I goggle at the world and the thousand things I cannot do. My mulberry tree was thirty feet tall. Now it sends up suckers, keen to be what it was, again. I can reach out my hand and touch the top. Watch where the root cracked the walk. Look where you're walking don't trip better sit, crack your knees catch your breath. I'm the same inside, what happened to this flesh, this life? Like the mulberry, it was cut down. Like the back walnut--the storm took it.

Post-Apocalyptic Movie Buff Gimbal Lock

 After the last movie theater closed,

cluttering the world with popcorn debris and unnumbered Curies NASA reverted to using steam locomotives. The astronauts in their unexpectedly heavy white mummy suits sweated and itched in the smoky, manic compartments all the way to the youth hostel one town over where the older crew got the bends from dust in their blood. An old woman with the moon in her eyes served them soup made from hemp rope and lemonweed then offered beds requiring a series of keys and a free shove. A movie was shown, an old celluloid copy and the astronauts' eyes were like searchlights as Ray Milland manned the ack ack gun and smiled at them in their theater-style seats up in the air, astonished, easy targets.

Hrimfaxi

 

Hrimfaxi shakes and cold stars fill the sky--

His breath falls and frosts the fields. 

Like the currents of tide or wind,

his movement is his purpose and your life

is simply a road for his hooves,

a place where he will go and has been.

Nótt whispers and he slows;

she raises her hand and time stutters, every star goes still.

The firmament is the field through which he goes,

and his hoofbeats are the ticking of time.

His body moves through wheeling constellations,

and the stars are the grains of his pitch-hooved mill. 

No structure can hold Hrimfaxi, no time precedes him.

There has never been an hour when he was not there,

carrying Nótt away from and toward Dagr and Skinfaxi.

Day, loud bright harlequin on Loki's leash, I give you no care.

I wait for Hrimfaxi, who stamps and stars tumble unmoored,

whose sides are bellows for a cold fire, and who treads the moonlit air.

for Dora at Dverse Poetics. 

Also in honor of my shieldmaiden BFF, Joy.

 

Death

 

Death--the capitalized one--

in his cosplay hoodie

holding his skateboard

is as dull as junk mail.

It's lying there dying that's terrifying.

That's when the real demons throw down their smokes

and get to work,

their feet up to the ankles in mud.

It's being left behind that's gutting.

It's the empty mug on the other side of the table

white as any skull,

that sends an earthquake along the bones.

Death--you know the one I mean--

is just a messenger

an ambulatory text

an intern dispatched to do the grunt work.

Save your fear for the stupidly almighty hours

killing that kiss, that poem, that dream

you had on the tip of your life

that's never going to come to you now. 

When You Love a Doomed Thing

 

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win. 

Friends say, can't you feel

the tremble, can't you see the lean?

but love is a bird that can only do as birds do

until the day it dies.

There is a fire and split inside me now

with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would.

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win.

Stars

 When I was just an olive sparrow living rootless in Texas,

I met Kris Kristofferson and some hay-blond woman with a kind face. I asked Kris, "Are you going to Willie's picnic?' and in that train engine rumble of his he laughed and said, "Hell, I see Willie at his house!" I never saw Kris Kristofferson again after that, except once, last night, around 3 a.m., in a cemetery just off Woodward Avenue. I asked him, "Where's Rita?" He said, "Oh, I couldn't rightly say, but wherever she's at I expect she's singin' " We sat together on a marker for Howard Greenbriar, husband and father, our beers at our feet, brown glass sweating in the grass, their gold-and-yellow labels giving them the appearance of votive candles. Looking up, I said, "I can't see the stars." Kris told me, "That's the lights, babe. We're like belled cats lookin' for angels." It was bright when I woke up. I wondered what happened to the hay-blond woman with the kind face. Her hair wasn't dark like Rita's or mine or turning gray like Rita's or mine. A friend texted, asking if I was going to the Kristofferson show that night. I texted back "Hell, I see Kris at his house!" But the truth is, I haven't seen a star for a very long time.

_______________

The part about meeting Kris Kristofferson in the first part of this poem is true. Or maybe it was just some rando who looked and sounded exactly like him.

Verse/Us

 

Verse I loved you like window glass loves morning light. Cats envied me my easy silence and singularity of heart. Perverse If I found you dying by the roadside, my eyes would be as blank as china plates and my silence entire. Verse I wrote a bloom of poems for you an origami of your face, your voice, your scent. My love reshaped into rows of you, riots of you, and every shape of you. Perverse Pearls before swine is strange jewelry. A thing is worth what it's worth to the one who receives it, so receive my scorn, my bitter spade, and these branches broken. Verse Look, the moon, your twin and avatar. I blazed for you, and shed light with every loving gesture which you reflected back, quarter-strength, and only in the dark.

Mount Pinatubo

 There's a thing, some sort of

eruption

on my skin

and it

vibrates

 

every time the autobus bounces

and the chickens flutter

as if, dreaming, they are back in their shells

desiring

rebirth

 

as eagles or raptors or some undreamt-of symbol

rising

through the roof of the autobus.

 

There is a blemish,

some sort of eruption

on my skin and boiling beneath Mount Pinatubo.

 

The day is hot,

and I am dizzy,

as we go around the curve

on this mountainside which has no

guard rails

and never did.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

 

Santorini Island

Don't talk to me about made-up things,

someday things,

not now. 

I am only half here.

Every time I close my eyes,

I am back in Texas,

twenty-three again,

and looking for a dump I can afford.

You are talking,

but I am thinking

about Santorini Island, a place I have never been,

where the domes and railings

are the same bright blue

as the sea.

Then I am back in Texas again,

the landlord waving his hand,

saying yes, yes,

that can be cleaned/fixed/hauled away

and do I have the deposit and

next month's rent?

I wake again and there you are,

still talking, holding a bible like an admonition

and rattling on about forgiveness.

I wish my dog were here,

He never spoke but was a kind of Jesus.

all love and no faking it. 

In Texas I was hoping he would be okay

in the new dump, 

Downstairs was a tired blonde with a young son

and upstairs a hypochondriacal Mexicana

and an older gay man in a linen suit--

my new family.

I will die soon,

you can have my cutlery and framed art

if you go away right now.

Made-up things, someday things 

bore me, cause me pain. Let me drift

into a grove of Mesquite trees

somewhere in the Texas hill country,

or down a stone walk to a table by the sea

on Santorini Island, where I have never been,

where the domes and doorframes are that marvelous bright blue.

My dog will be there again

after all of this time and searching

like a sentinel

or a Maître d, 

as dependable and fine as the arc of the sun in June. 

Texas bluebonnets under a mesquite tree

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

For Dora's Something Borrowed Something Blue at Dverse. Poetics

Blues & Calicos

 Exes should have to wear a bell

like blues and calicos, so us birds can fly.

But all right, I'll handicraft a smile,

me in the role of a civilized adult when we 

happen to cross paths.

Raise a glass to the past--

vinegar was wine once,

so drink up,

you little arched-back pussycat.

Baseball

 He wore a felt hat

for his early morning beach walk-- an old man as regular in his habits as any tide. He moved slowly, carefully, in incongruous leather shoes under an anvil sky. Later, the oddest thing-- he sat on the sand as if resting, but his shoes were gone and he was as dead. His felt hat had fallen nearby cockeyed, between a cracked shell and a dead fish with a blackened hole in the crown about the size of a cold drink coaster or a baseball.

The Days Left Behind

I asked the mourning dove

where to find the days left behind. 

"In the dew," she replied.

"In the wild grass

 on the slope beside the river.

Hurry," she warned. "Winter already whispers."

I asked the vulture

where to find the days left behind.

"In the fire pit," he replied.

"In the ashes 

full of hands and faces.

Go slowly," he warned. "They will wait."

I asked the falcon

where to find the days left behind.

"In my nest," she replied.

"I used them

for my children, bald and bottomless.

Go now," she warned. "My talons are teachers."

I asked the gentle mourning dove.

I asked the grim vulture,

but the lesson lay

at the feet of the falcon

in a slurry of time, need, and blood.

Grackles

 The grackles have returned

because Detroit is not San Juan Capistrano and they are not swallows. Like Spanish grandmothers wearing mantillas they walk with dignity born of pain at spring weddings and morning funerals. The grackles have returned like circuit riders to small villages carrying bibles and handguns down lonely lanes. I find the finest one and lure him into a dance. We are corn kernels, matching cutlery, a marriage of local beauty and somber bird. The grackles are back and have not killed anyone so far, in the scramble beneath the feeder. They only did that for one summer, years ago when I held a dead fledgling in my palm and the sun shone brightly like a smiling dandy.

Moonbird

 I was speaking, a moaning call,

a spreading gray constellation,

a smoke of words

but you weren't listening anymore.

It is the only language I have.

I live in the interstices

between seed and fruit,

seed and earth,

sea and air,

love and absence.

I have come a very long way, and yet

I am as gray and unremarkable as old lumber.

My love expresses itself inside the earth

and produces a single emissary.

The way is long, the continents pass by.

We meet again only at intervals, but on the same ground.

I was trying to tell you about moonbirds

in their secrecy and their millions.

They seem to vanish, they glide without effort,

but are always there, like love or frailty.

I was speaking, a moaning call,

a smoke of words between sea and air

but you, you love the smell of milled wood,

and weren't listening anymore.

__________

Asters

 Here is a gift--it isn't much

like an analgesic for a lost limb.

Still, the shape of your ears

and the asters in your voice

make me long to become a gardener

or a choralist.

Sadness like bad whiskey takes me when someone speaks

without your regional hard "R"

that made me want to sign on as cook

on a doomed vessel full of haunted sailors.

I love you. I did then and I do still. 

I am a quivering aspen , slender

with black scars, a recorder playing only one tune.

I play it for you, for the shape of your ears, and the sound of your voice.

Paper Pennants

 When I was a young child

my brothers had a hockey game

with metal men

and a marble.

Each team had

a paper pennant

like a challenge laid boldly

before the other teams and the larger world.

I liked the Toronto Maple Leafs

in their sweaters as blue as God's eyes.

The goalie's smile never faltered

though he was hit with the marble a thousand times.

In a dream

I see that goalie coming up the tunnel

in his blue sweater and big brown pads

fearless, changeless, continuously happy.

He takes to the ice

to tend his green mesh net

while we stare up from beneath the surface

like ads or circles or lines or dots.

When I was a young child

there were Red Wings and Rangers

Blackhawks and Bruins

a marble, a goalie, and tilted ice that seemed perfectly fair at the time.

_____

Now

 Now,

I kiss ice

I kiss the wind

I kiss the wounded whose souls have rattled loose.

I have found

that brew is made of boneless angels

gathered from mountainsides where monkeys roam.

There was a time

when minutes spoke, gods lazed,

and I loved you, in pure honesty, like a novitiate.

Now,

I listen for leaves caught in river ice,

and run my fingers across the skin of a sacrifice.

My skin flushes firebrick red

from this cup which holds my fever.

I kiss ice.

I kiss the wind.

I kiss the wounded whose souls call from distant hills.

The Cat

 The cat is way from the office.

the cat is away in a manger.

the cat can't talk right now.

the cat hopes that you have a pleasant flight

   but if not, oh well.

The cat cannot sing nor play any instrument.

the cat crapped in the neighbor's flower bed again.

the cat made your bed and is now lying in it.

The cat has won the election and is now speaking to its supporters.

the cat wants in, no out, no in, no out.

The cat can explain everything.

the cat never meant to hurt you.

the cat has been caught in another bald-faced lie.

The cat hates this shitty food.

the cat has claimed the window sill.

the cat has made more cats and they need homes.

The cat will appear at the Royale on Thursday along with 

   the Dakota Danzig Trio.

the cat is lighting out for the territories.

the cat asks that you direct all inquiries to the attorneys.

the cat scratched hell out of the drapes

   while you were indisposed or out with that idiot again.

The cat is hip to your petty deceptions.

the cat refuses to serve in this, or any other war.

the cat is in love again, no wait, well possibly.

the cat has signed no papers, sworn no oath, made no pledge.

The cat thinks the bird will be fine without a head.

the cat has bendy bones and second sight.

the cat has forgotten your name again.

The cat is into avant-garde.

the cat sweeps all awards.

the cat cannot be seen with you anymore, its impossible.

the cat says wake up wake up wake up.

the cat is about to barf on the Persian,

knock your Peabody off the shelf,

and run hell-for-breakfast down the hallway like a lunatic.

Such are the ways of the cat.

Behold them and do not interfere. 

Dollies

 Mama dress you all in lace

smack you hard across the face

loves to seem so fair and fine

serves your dollies turpentine

Daddy left by fast express

to take up with a baroness

who cries because her roses died

watered with formaldehyde

Chalking signs on sidewalk blocks

a bloody hen, a happy fox

when it rains the neighbors say

the chalk sticks rise and walk away

Now you're grown with one desire

to set your mama's house on fire

and dance across the blackened beams

to serve your dollies cakes and creams.