Poetry

Tree

3 April 2017
Categories: Poetry

               Old English treo, treow, from Proto-Germanic *treuwaz-, from PIE *deru-

Being ‘firm’ and ‘solid’. And ‘steadfast’. Being also
bigger than life. And ageless, like a god,
whose shoulders are exceedingly broad
and good for heaving. Or stands defiant on a mountain top,
upholding, some say the world, or
the heavens, lugged like luggage upon its back.
Moreover, good for ornamental purposes, as in a garden.
Or The Garden: good for knowledge
of all kinds, but specifically of good and evil.
Or tucked away in the middle silence of a wood, writing in
concentric circles of rings ringing rings around
the first day of its stillness—the perfect silent
center of its singularity, which in time
will encompass the forest, stretch forever beyond
the reach of the woodsman’s axe.

                                                                   §

Spreading its tendrils. Its roots like
*deru-, the deepest root, which brings us
treu, ‘truth’. The Bodhi tree.
The Dryads. Or Daphne disappearing.
No one remembers.
The ancient, hardwood forests
harvested of their
old-growth gods. Or the signs
of their autumn. Yellow leaves,
ochre with golden edges for flames.
Or any signs at all. Or the scrawl
of words into sidewalks,
or onto stone tablets. Or carved by
naked druidesses into the trunks of trees.
We need the lumber. We’re told. We need
the room—this stand
of trees stands in the way.
Imagine the empty glade
uncluttered without its
tyrannical choking canopies.
And the allotted
tall fescue plots. We must
level and grade,
irrigate, seed and over-seed, pluck
the dandelions out,
mow and bag the clippings.

                                                                    §

Seedlings upon seedlings of trees that mock
the mower, mock the lawn care expert—march ever onward
like the march of forager ants
carrying more seeds on their backs—seeking to put down
roots. Seeking a grain of
truth to swallow. Once the ancient Mayan cities were
swallowed up because someone stopped
mowing the lawn—stopped listening
to Kukulkan. Who was fond of saying:
Rev up those mowers, boys. Kick up the din. There’s always
another forest on the way. Saplings to be kept at bay.
Teeming, true as: *treuwaz-. Can’t see the forest for—the Silence.

X

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

A shattering silence. And then the crude language
of machines. Lying on the table I am flat as the table.

I am lying. The body was born to obscure, to commit
by its being the sin of omission. What blue floats inside

of it, an interior of sky as unseen as the seen. When
the doctor says turn, I turn. My body follows.

The doctor is a technician. His language is calm metal
coiled as tightly as the coils that thrum through their work

above myself. Into my self. When Röntgen discovered the x-ray
he saw it first as a shimmer around his wife and her body. Then

inside his wife. She was her body and her body was
as visible as any hand. And then her hand became

a curled white cumulus of bone lit against the grisaille
of silver salts on a glass plate. I have seen, she said, my own

death. It gathered in the spaces and not-spaces inside
of her, then on the film that revealed her self to herself

as light, which was no longer a metaphor. Which is what we use
to see. There is an I inside every I. There is a shadow, a sea.

Birthing the room

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

Open bellows
bloom birch beams. Pump
cottonwood stain, spin linen
slips, varnish raffia. Mill

walnut planks, cedar shiplap.
Shake the soffit, prime the doors.
Sheath the windows in pewter
nimbus & wool skein. Hone

the lace white, blow mercury
lamp, glass beaker. Wire holes,
trim bulbs. Polish nickel knobs,
pulls poised. Silent

oiled bronze levers—keyed,
bolted. Eyebrows at the back
gable, seal the flat-felled seam.

Friday Night

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

and I am half-scuffed with grief

                  a red diamond on a red ground

drop of condensation from the brandy glass

                  my mother would give me for a sore throat

have you heard of Raoul Dufy and is it said like Duffey?

                  and I haven’t heard of The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 in too long, like, 18 years. No one’s spoken of it in 18 years

Franz Marc’s Blue Horses, though. Someone’s told me about them, someone said, “They look like half-plums or men’s butts in bed.”

                  and then the grief was like a yardstick sutured to my spine with baling twine

or like a truss to my resolve, which splintered in a million moon-sherds

                  and about my grief, someone said, “A child could have done it.”

Someone said it was like a bean rubbed so the skin sloughed off in the bowl

Someone said, “Your grief is Rousseau’s lion looking over me as I sleep.”

                  Someone said, “The Four Elements looked better with older cars behind it.”

Someone said, “I see now why this book was free.”

                  and how I feel about Philip Johnson is

he designed the worst and best buildings in town

                  and how I feel about this brandy is

it’s the color of a soaked bean and my throat is half-soaked in it

                  and the other half feels like a red, broken stick

and all I want to do is sit in the grass at St. Thomas and bitch about its buildings

                  because that’s what Philip Johnson would want me to do

                                       because I think we both regret how much we’ve made glass

The God of Vestiges (Cauda Draconis)

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

Of leftover things. Of the place the bus used
to stop on the corner, here, before the express
route and how, dry or no, we would step out
into a puddle, the exhaust doing fog karaoke
around our ankles. Of the sensation of taking

a bath before my legs grew too long, before I
grew some silly dignity that wouldn’t let my skin
feel bubbles. Of Trinidadian roti on my tongue,
the warm potato smash, spices decorating my lips, you
using a knife because you’d need to be a snake

to open your mouth that wide. Of my jump shot
and my herky-jerky crossover. Of those early days
of independence, before the civilizing force
of hampers, when clothes lived in trash bags, when
antennae TV still could be had with the right

hanger. Of case studies. Of late night
paper sessions. Of cheap diner coffee
and long-term retail. Of 4 a.m. eyes,
wide before sleep. Of sleep.
Of the weight your head left
on my neck, how if I turn
it just so, I hear your breathing.
Of your breathing. Of these pocks on the ground.
Of the querent and the quesited. Of augury, impatient
divinations, the tail of the dragon.

Euclidean

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

Last week a pair of oversexed tree frogs oozed
a huge jelly ball of eggs on a branch of the young pine
too tall for eventual tadpoles to find the nearby pond
I thought but the pregnant pine bends a bit each day
with the weight of its foster frogs droning
until by now it compasses a line intersecting
the circumference of the water waiting to break.

Letter to My Mother from the Shuswap

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

At the lake, the water is
still. It doesn’t retreat as we do. Here,
I learned how to bury the dead

within myself. You scattered my father
at my feet as the sun bowed
its head. The sky, still. I remember

your hands closed around the boy
he was, skin once browned
in the summer sun as he played

with us near shore. You moved
around me then, low prayers
plating your mouth. His name, said

like he was accident, not
the accident we all are. You taught me
how temporary water levels are

as you moved within me, Chanel No. 5
lingering after you passed. O how I want
to be less tired of wanting

what’s lost. In water, nothing returns.
But you gave me a name
before I knew I needed one. A girl,

fraying with the intentional motion
of bodies—, the water moving us
further from ourselves.

The Moon Prophecy

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

For years, our Moon spins away
from us in inches, as if to slip
out of orbit, unnoticed. We
can’t have that— who would
we blame for our midnight
cravings and bloody rags?
So the white coats in their labs
create the longest hook
reaching from Earth to Moon.
They splice new materials.
Pxumonia: soft lavender but sturdy
cousin of rubber that bends
through dust and gas. Konilium:
dark-matter metal that endures
flurries of debris and exhales eternally
as space itself. The puncture
we intend to be minimal, but Moon
cracks more, the closer it’s pulled.

On the open ocean, Moon’s
cracked carcass floats. Humpbacks
bump knobby heads on wet lunar
shells. The whales’ gusts of mist,
muffled to a hiss. Moon shards
burrow into blowholes and blubber.
The crash churns out tsunamis
across continents. Some humans
stop drinking and join Sun cults.
Others drink more to max out
the truncated, dizzy spin of days.
Silver light missing, corals sway
in limbo—their mass spawns
postponed. Discouraged, doodlebugs
dig shallow graves for their dwindling
prey, while deer teeter through forests
where nothing falls
on firs like tinsel.

Pluck

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

If you should make
a bitter wine from my yard-
tear pieces of fuzzy green neck.

Pluck only the hair husk
and gather sun-cracked lace leaf

because
cat piss has drowned
the mint.

Our feet
are swollen
like puff pastries
but at least the yarrow
pulp steeping in rum
beneath piles of bikinis
will coo them quiet tonight.

As 5pm
streaks molten rust
across your nape,
you suck Halls lozenges
for aromatherapy.

As if sweat-crushed
tomato vine
wasn’t a tincture
you’d inhale from your
own damp fingers.

As if wafts of
earthen worm spit
and freshly
baptized rosemary
make your nose bleed for
drugstore eucalyptus.

I lap melted popsicle juice
from palms that dug
demon root until blistered
and soggy
and watch you perform
what your sister
taught you
in the overgrown
weeds
of your old
schoolyard:

1. to pop
the babies’ heads
off
and then 2. drink
their sour milk
until 3. dry heaving
makes you feel like
a dog inhaling
old marrow.

Tonight
when I bury my
tongue in your mouth
your teeth will still
be buzzing.

Pensacola

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

All year, vacation houses goose their skirts
up housewife legs, their stilts a tiptoed recoil
from the ocean edging toward them like disgrace.
These homes, though January lonesome, aren’t
about to let their garters down. Waves cowlick

the sand into a beach scarp, muss the shore;
gulls clump in water like white blood cells choke

a virus. In a coffee shop beside
the marina, locals mourn the loss of one
more fort, the road now disappearing, ghosting
their history, a barrier spit sizzing
to silence. The barista shares his sermon

notes with the regulars who skipped last night’s
service, the scraps that smack of parables

with unintended consequence. These out-
of-season men who kneel to Gulf and God
make mold of myth. The salt-clean air bows up
against their church’s stained-glass windows, then,
with mainland guilt, they still sit, pray, and rise.

I leave them for the shore again, sit blank
on sandy bas reliefs of wind erosion.

                                 ❧

Erode me. Be the bellows and the ballast
and the hull of me, and take me somewhere else,
not land-locked, burb-docked Birmingham, not home,
not industry and smoke, not brick and steel,
not the sweltering side of the color wheel.

A plane writes nothing in the sky, but I
still try to piece together letters in

the exhaust trail—noughts and crosses, dotted i’s.
A lighthouse vertigo blips every twenty
seconds through me, those miner’s-daughter veins
engorged with some hereditary need
to crawl and excavate. Since here I have

no past to enter, nothing I can ruin,
power’s stripped down to air and simple prayers,

a silence blanched like the cross stuck in these dunes—
another foreign object in curetted
land. I’m another set of empty hands
refusing water as the seabirds whirr
on scissor legs, their chaos testament

to motion, their lockstep some defense of rest.

THE LOBSTERS IN LAS VEGAS

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

A plague of crickets or an endless game of Yahtzee. Neon rainstorms and rat-pack martinis. Tin-foil hats and moon landings. She knows the game: you pays your money and you takes your choice. Enchiladas at Binion’s or veal Marsala at the Sands, a trapeze act overhead or Elvis at the wedding chapel, find the way to San Jose or just walk on by. The sun blooms like a nuclear blast. Someone draws up a plan for Paris. When the old hotels implode, such elegant debris, so many skeletons and shot glasses. The concrete billowing and glittering. For years a sky full of Liberace. For years a cart of dim sum rolling past. She sits beside the dancing fountain and says: it’s all a ghost town now. Heat shimmers as the Eiffel Tower leans in. She finds lobsters in a faux waterfall, in aquamarine pools of vodka, huddled on linen tablecloths waving feelers. Could anything be more alien to this world? She selects a queen from New Zealand and wonders about Trini Lopez, thinks about Caliban with his Sony Trinitron, feels exiled and washed up, like Paul Anka in a mezzanine lounge bar, singing to the drunks. She says Hunter Thompson was right, pulls meat out of the claw and dunks it in butter, flicks the brilliant shell with a fingernail, listens to it ring.

A Reading from the Book of Jubilees

1 April 2016
Categories: Poetry

Begin with a brackish union. Then breathe space into salt. Then peel away the shin.

Or start with a page of steam, an origami moon, a mirror stained into memory, a lonely guitar in a small, slight sleep.

Or open with the parable of the drunken master who drinks only from broken teacups, or the hermit who lives in the horsehead clouds, or the anchorite who sleeps in ryegrass on the banks of the river.

Or rise in the pre-dawn rustle, the church bells ringing along the line of the bay, the trance of hollowness that drives a town from sleep to the beach before sunrise. And there, an expanse of carcasses in the shallowness, a found flounder gurgling in your mother’s hand, your father rinsing the mouth of a tiny catfish, water choking other water into peace.

Overhear someone say, “I’ll never join an orgy which would have me as a member.” Overhear someone respond to consolation by insisting that loss affects everyone in equal proportion.

Or remember the dream of asphyxiation, when you held the groundfish denser than your wrist, as if holding a tumor and whispering, “What secrets do you hold?” as when your brother took you to the sea and whispered a song into your feet.

Or begin with the rotting heat of morning, when among the carrion, a type of day break, the seagulls’ caterwaul, the beach disappearing under the weight of its own sand.

Double Memory with Train

1 April 2016
Categories: Poetry

Once, my mother cradled my head to her chest
& told me how she spread loose change
on the tracks that cut so close beside her house,
the good dishes shook when trains bellowed in.

She’d crush her belly to the yellow throats
of onion grass & tuck her chin as weight
& wheels smeared her pennies palm-flat.

I think even then she knew
how absence freights the memory:
her father’s chair empty at dinner,
his stethoscope always poised
over someone else’s heart.

In the memory I make for her, she leaps
from rail to rail, pockets clattering
with beaten copper. He waits for her

in the kitchen, hands open
to collect her bounty of ruin.

Heirloom

1 April 2016
Categories: Poetry

The sandpiper stares at the pickled sky,
whetted for tornadoes. Wind planes
off the plants, atrophied in their pots,

abreast to the thunderhead. I water,
and the leaves play harbinger rain
on my legs. Light washes the sandpiper,

knees high, white ruff to the wind.
A flicker on takeoff, then the screen
door springs open and I am in.

~

I finger the stems, the veins that pulse
blank chimes as a stream winds
from my watering can through the dirt.

Morning-gold leaves now skirt
the balcony, accordion from planters
to rail, like water striders.

~

And the limbs try on new souls,
scheme my hands to the soil that turns
my blood. I pick apart the stuck

buds, the spider’s lace of roots
tubed from the black, the original
feed. I bleed, strum the seed,

my fingers spool as if returning
from sleep. A white feather,
the fuzz of fronds, a green bulb, then
a small fruit—red as my thumb.

Almost Nothing

1 April 2016
Categories: Poetry

Two cotton slips, the larger hung on a hanger, lace at the bodice,
and the child’s, cross-stitched, draped over a chair.
Washed so often they are nearly transparent.
Someone must have packed them, folded into almost nothing.
That’s what my grandmother said—folds into nothing.
As if everything could be carried in a suitcase if the cloth were fine enough.

Not her family Bible, each page thin as a slip of cotton
but so many pages, heavy with inked dates,
births, marriages, deaths; the cover unyielding.
Nor the deliberate sound of the fires,
their bitter odor, their flames engulfing the village.
Could not be folded away, then unpacked and aired on a hanger.

after the sun goes down our imitation

1 April 2016
Categories: Poetry

after the sun goes down our imitation
              of the sun turns on
              and someone must measure the distance between these street
              lights—to assure ample road coverage of the jaundiced light and the mixture of the pitch
              ground
              into the deep gouged ridges of the roadway’s bony
              back—they balance
              illumination against the night
              blindness that passing light causes: even before Achilles we
              learned
to keep one eye
              closed at night the other always
              open and scanning for the enemy—the closed eye
              to preserve itself from the shock
              of flare the incendiary the tracer the Greek
fire—this is ancient wisdom that I share
              with you
              out of love that will keep you alive
              when you may not want
              to live passing through each revolution
              of the lathe—reduced in mass but more
              fully formed and brutal on our bellies
in our in-held breath
              and blood coursing through your eye
feel it saturating—dilating between each streetlight
              that you rush past this throb
              you feel between each enemy each everyday
              glory: the salvation of making
              the rent getting ourselves dressed
              and fed—then at last of cessation
the gravel and soot of the killing
              field pushing its way into your pants under
              the binding of the tight
              belt around a final wound feel the roar
              of its loosening of the dispersion
pinned under the work of the machine
              gun—on our backs now and looking
              up—the passing of the tracer rounds
              like the afterglow of streetlights only makes the scar
              of night more beautiful.

from Unmanned

1 April 2016
Categories: Poetry

In the natural history museum
paintings on the wall illustrate
the massive wingspans of certain
birds. The woman I am with is less
than a golden eagle + an Andean
condor. Outside it is hot + breezy
+ she turns in circles watching
real vultures, her head craned
back, circling on a thermal +
casting fast moving shadows
in the parking lot. I wonder what
is the oldest common dream among
modern humans. Though I suspect
it is something more basic than
flight, she continues to crane.
Behind the museum are chainlink
enclosures, as part of a raptor
center, housing injured birds
of prey, or those otherwise deemed
unable to survive out there, up there.

The Relics of Eulalia

2 November 2015
1 Comment
Categories: Poetry

A hundred men bear one girl’s bones
to catacombs. In her sarcophagus,
loose legs clink against a halfling pelvis,
pebble hard. Through cobbled tributaries,
bearers flow along a riverbed last lapped
by her red waters. Their alabaster cage
rides high and light on sea grass finger tips–
gleam of bone wafts through murk of dawn.
How each man aches to have a piece of her.
Hard bits gift the best kind of forgetting:
No more a knuckle but a worry stone,
marble light and smooth, to be rubbed raw
in the deep pockets of the pious, so many
boys with un-remembering eyes.

Before and After a Letter in English 9

2 November 2015
Categories: Poetry

She thinks Jimmy is a dolt,
all cows and Fords,
typical of her tenth-graders
retaking English 9. She could back
him into the sink and scrub his head with shampoo
and maybe some flea dip.

His Assignment 4: letter to a friend is to Blake,
dead a year from his own rifle.
Went to his dad’s field, shot the cows and then himself.

She can see him walking in grass waist high
touching his forehead to the soft, brown neck fur
brushing a fly off the rump.

She can see Jimmy casting a fly
into the river
smashing a rock against the skull
of an already dead fish
crushing the fine bones that socket an eye.

He writes
I wish I could see you once more
in a firm, childish hand why
did you take the cows?

Enough

2 November 2015
Categories: Poetry

Brother, we once walked through night snow,
past our childhood’s fast food joints.

The parking lots were deep with white fables.
Beyond the hum of yellow signs

and street lights, the moon wore a halo,
which meant the snow would start again,

you said. We went searching for something—
a hill to sled, the last mound

we could stand upon and dream upon—
the earth transfigured at our cold feet.

Collinsville was so still I can imagine
I remember the sound of your breath.

I’d like to say I held your mittened hand.
(You probably wore one of dad’s tube socks

instead.) It is enough we saw a world
that hadn’t been walked on.