Poetry

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.

Incunabula

2 November 2015
Categories: Poetry

In the story I keep trying to tell, there’s a woman
handcuffed in the driveway.
She’s thrashing against the officers, cursing, spitting

on them, her breath rising in the cold air until it
disappears, and they shut the Charger’s back seat door.
All seven of us kids

are watching from her bedroom window overlooking
the garage, our faces
shocked with police light.

When my brother and I were smaller, we found
a bird in the backyard that had pecked itself
raw, almost featherless, and continued

digging into its own quivering flesh.
We rushed inside to tell our mother,
her hands still dripping with sink water

when she swept us into her arms and said
to stay away from the diseased thing,
there was nothing we could do.

Reunion

2 November 2015
Categories: Poetry

A stayed partition, the unwelcome place:
I draped hide round the hem of the wild and was.
There were holes in the outside pasture, fool’s gold
in the handfuls of dirt. I could have barreled my fortune there,
but the day was bruising, and the cleaved night pervasive,
rare in its fall. In the woods near the farmer,
three fingers missing to a baler and his deference,
wild dogs wore passions on their chests,
the garter snake weaved and bound the mid grass,
and I ran under the power lines, blown in sway, home to our kitchen,
a cratered embrace and flame.
From the tree line, an inaudible birth echoed,
a near darkness humming grace like bone meeting bone
for the first time in ages.

Years After

2 November 2015
Categories: Poetry

…yes my mountain flower…
                   –Molly (Ulysses)

Each night our house
empties itself of trouble
as all the small things scuttle out,
beetles from the shag rug
silverfish from bookshelves.
As you sleep I patch wormholes
with plaster, caulk crevices
in pearly loops. Our bedroom walls
tremble with mastication:
cockroaches gnawing on fingernail
clippings, termites on pine studs.
As our house crumbles
I whisper in you ear yes—
as if it all could be
reborn like a grafted blood
orange sprig, rewoven
hymen. As you drift half-
drunk, I rummage through
junk drawers, pairing
knives and forks. I count
off my lovers on each tine.
My heart leans inside of
me, laden with unpicked fruit.
The earwig in the cupboard
shudders, squeezing out
the first of her golden brood.

Apple River in Star Prairie

2 November 2015
Categories: Poetry

The woman found the apple of the earth
in a river, not the earth,
a fruit from the mouth of the duck, the swan,
wapato, abundant,
and the man in his delight called
the river apple, losing the right words
in translation (river abundant
with earth apples), simplifying
what was white as swans
on the river’s edge, what were arrowheads.
Take it in your hand
and eat, and you’ll know good
from evil finally,
offered the river, slowly curving,
and the man and woman ate the fruit, sharing
the temptation of lumber
to the mouth
of the river in its head.

Excoriate

16 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

Madame X’s
          décolletage
                    stands bright

against her black dress,
          shining and cinched
                    at the waist,

and my shirt, cotton
          and crew-necked.
                    She balances

against the table,
          her hand a vise
                    around the edge.

I imagine her hidden
          fingers clawing
                    the underside,

and her leaning wrist snapping.
          The elbow’s turned out,
                    straining en pointe.

Her head twists
          away from me. Nape-curls
                    bezel her neck.

I stare, willing her
          to snap, or flinch,
                    or crick to distract me

from her exposure,
          her shock of skin
                    and its smoothness.

It arouses me. Her skin,
          so unlike mine
                    with its scar

as eye-catching
          as a diadem
                    on my shoulder.

I pose like her,
          shoulder tight,
                    the scar rising

like a pearl I scored
          into the nacre
                    of my own skin.

Worse still, it’s set
          among the seed pearls
                    of scabs and pocks

and scoured pores
          scattered like the syllables
                    of dermatillomania.

What shame I want
          X to have:
                    Sargent forced

to shade her bottle
          into that fan,
                    curtained rotten teeth

behind lips, or stare
          her bloodshot eyes
                    away on the backdrop.

Civil War Reenactment, Look Park, Massachusetts

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

The bridge needs defending,
choke point between swingsets
and water park. A gray soldier

tells me not to go beyond
the picnic tables. A stealthy
Union man checks his phone.

We’re front seat, lunch spread out,
and while the battle rages
I eat cold corn on the cob,

which always takes a while
and requires looking down to see
what’s been consumed.

Children, there’s watermelon. They eat
watermelon. A man beside a tree crumples.
Another fixes a bayonet.

I tell them what I know of war,
the battle charge to come. They want to know
why you don’t hold bayonets like knives.

I say, to keep your distance.
Still so close
the distance between two bodies.

I don’t say, for leverage.
To drive the bayonet deeper,
to force the point into the stomach of a man.

The firing stops. The yells of men and boys.
When two grapple and one falls dead,
I look back to my corn, which I’ve neglected.

Later they’ll help each other up, brush
each other off, but in the charge I heard them
wanting.

At the First Battle of Bull Run,
spectators dressed up.
Women with opera glasses. Women

selling pies. Far enough away
that when the big artillery began,
they applauded, sure the war

would be contained in one weekend,
in this bowl
of grass and stone.

Later we ride the kiddie train,
through the tents of soldiers and civilians
in knickers and long skirts.

Look, they took their kids! my two
exclaim, glad. The tracks hairpin
by the amputation demo.

I remind them about starvation and disease.
My daughter wants to know
about dysentery, smallpox.

Yellow fever! She likes the sound
of this. Her favorite color’s yellow.
The train rumbles through a tunnel.

Beyond it, men in gray – bandits, rebels –
are set to rob the train.
The children clutch

play coins given in advance
and hand them gleefully to a smiling man.
The children are not scared

and the children are not scared
and when I say you know this is not
what real war is like they say I know, I know

and when the train stops
they run off to feed the deer
behind the bars.

The Lily Dale Psychics Promised You

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

Each day will be the soft
susurrations of silk
against a window ledge.

All your cakes will rise bloom-like
over their cake pans and you’ll own
all the proper lawn care products. But

one day traveling through the landscape
of your birth, you’ll cup air
in your palm out the car window,

waving to where you left your childhood,
and under the colored glass
that has become your life, you’ll feel

unease—like smoke
from an unseen cigar. But that’s
all. You’ll keep driving. The days

will swallow you, and the many days
afterwards, like coins dropped
into a fountain, with the ease of wishing.

What They Left Behind

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

A carpet stain that will never come out,
a toy fire truck with no wheels,
a doll with one arm, naked,
one eye permanently closed,

four extra squares of kitchen linoleum tile,
a worn broom, straw tips blackened with soot,
an overlooked drawer containing
a tin box of assorted Band-Aids
with only the smallest size left,

one leaky D-cell battery, some rubber washers,
twist ties, bottle brush, a box
of strike-anywhere matches, paper clips,
and an extra stopper for the bathroom sink.

In a closet, a half-used can of Comet Cleanser
with a rusty lid, a dozen wire hangers,
most of them bent, a paper grocery bag
full of plastic grocery bags,
about eighty-percent of a broken dust pan,

one tennis shoe, child-sized,
for the left foot, still tied
in a double-knot with a muddy sock
stuffed in the toe.

After Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

She awoke
to an empty house,

the corn crib hollow,
ladder to the roof
untended, the tire tracks

ending at the house
the sentence

she can’t quite finish.
So she crawled
into the field

like a skink to sun,
her legs dragging

behind her like a tail.
She is pink
in the dying grass.

Tell Me a Story

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

Father, tell me about the Moor
who moored his boat in a moor,
how he ate petrified alligator toes
and hid his prayers in snail shells,
how he turned into a bear, refused to hunt,
spent his days licking the shadows
of crows that stretched before him.

Brother, tell me the one about the woman who planted
her husband’s pool cue in the ochre loam
of her childhood creek, the smooth ash knotting
into dogwood, the blue tip’s sobering blooms.
Tell me about the woman at the dump,
her eyes large and dark as a mule’s,
how she enters our dreams when she gathers our junk.

Mother, tell me about the bricklayer who was taken away
to rebuild the city of God, how he didn’t need
a plumb line to lay the golden courses,
how his trowel turned into a crappie when he was done.
But this time let me finish: his son mixed
what he’d learned in Sunday school and comic books
to try to make sense of it all,

wished he were Thor, winged crown of tinfoil on his head,
his father’s brick hammer dangling from a belt loop,
how he descended into the underworld
of the basement to find his father
after the burning bush was just burning brush
and the rainbow bridge was merely
the long frown of the morning storm.

Removal Act: Native Preacher

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

A cradle still warm… a bubbling pot with no lid… So swiftly did
Government troops sweep down that the Cherokees hardly found
time for a last look at home.
                                                                                                                     —Marilou Awiakta

locked inside the camp    at Rattlesnake Springs    styed    unwatered
unfed    muddy    night sky star-pricked    lit by a smear of moon    David
with splinters in his hand    tracing his sore palm with his finger    tracing
the eighty-five characters    Eliza once held his aching foot    plucked a

thorn    with shells so thin    he thought they would break    his child in her
belly    she’s blanketed, snoring    curled on her side    some people with
deer-hides for beds    some the hard-packed earth    cupped in his hands,
the holy book    that he keeps in his tobacco pouch    if he had ink

for translating a psalm    he could print near the English verses    all the
words    he knows in syllabary    his words pouring down the margins    if
he had slippery elm    touch-me-nots    wild ginger for Eliza    tomorrow, if
he asks softly, meekly    if the officers permit him    to baptize his

people in the Ayuhwasi    some chance, then    for the medicine elder to
sing    carry out the old ways    help Eliza go into the waters    from wood
scraps the officers gave them    David’s converts make    rough benches
for the old, the sick    a place for preaching    hymns    holding church

inside the camp    tomorrow, if the officers let him    dip his neighbors
standing in the river    he will read a revelation    his feet planted among
mussels    who spin grit in their wet mouths    calling for the holy ghost,
the cloud of fire    he will stand    among stones tumbled smooth

Turtle Story

15 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

Small for his age, hunger-hollowed, smudge-eyed,
                    whittled thin as a withe of oak, splint of ash,
the boy slips through the wall, through the wedge
                    of light where log warps away from log,
and runs through fields, down a wooded slope,
                    to the seeps whose place his mother told,
made him repeat, told again until words hung
                    as a map between them, a map she touched
with her hand, saying near this tree, by that stone.
                    Each day, he creeps back to the wall
and passes to her bear lettuce, pokeweed, cresses,
                    sorrels, mulberries, cattail roots,
hen-of-the-woods, tall so-cha-ni with yellow flowers,
                    food for your sick father, she tells him,
your wasting brothers. Always he scurries, darts,
                    stays low, still the soldiers catch him,
drag him into the stockade, tear off his shirt,
                    bind his hands and lash his back.
His mother washes his wounds and tells him
                    snakegrass for bleeding, and do not cry,
jimsonweed for bruises. And then she says,
                    when wolves seized the turtle,
the turtle used his wits, said he would sink fast
                    and drown if they tossed him into the river.
When they threw him, his shell struck a rock
                    and cracked. The turtle sank to the bottom.
His cracks would mend, become the orange dots
                    and lines that pattern his shell.
He fixed his eyes on the surface,
                     swam toward the least glimmer of light.

Sitting Centerfield on the Night Game of Your Suicide

14 April 2015
Categories: Poetry

Tonight, no stars, just miles turning
to light years before our eyes: You, on the mound
gesturing home, who cock your head
and flash that crooked grin. Then,
bizarre news: small dogs thrown from speeding cars;
flag-less moons; rhinoceros bones

that come unglued
from dinosaur lies; and
still, devotees, here we are, in our own conspiracy,
caps on tight, hot dog night,
feigning happiness in the bleeder seats.

We know the frivolity of throwing up a glove.
The hollowness of a bad call.
The vanity of trying to run.