The light fades late in north Wisconsin.
Long summer days linger over pine,
and the birch swamps wash in weak sun
like the sun you’d see in a movie
where a man or beloved dog picks
a path through the hummocks
toward home after being gone
a long time. By the time the light
is gone, no one’s come. You drink,
throw horseshoes, and only know
ringers by their clings and sparks
when the prong catches the pin.
Each muscle remembers what it did
and can do it again. They remember
clutch and release, the arm outstretched
after the shoe leaves, like it wants back
what’s sailing past your grip.
Poetry
Hyperbolic Bass Line
You’d think you’d hear it,
overblown, blowing up
your mind, the dial over-
turned, woofer flowing
flowing a fat vibrating tongue-
hum. You’d hear it if you thought
it could save you. You’ll do
anything for a bit of salvation,
anything to be wrapped in blue
neon, a smokebox basement
with a quintet of angels hammering
out chords and a few squeaky notes.
Forget them pearly whatchamacallits.
You’re here for instant rapture, here to melt
in the span of a tune, ice slipping
into brown liquor. You’ll hear it
blowing up your chest
after a few more rounds,
when the ceiling lowers its ninth cloud.
Leaning back on two creaky legs, you’d think
you’d hear salvation laying you low,
running its tongue through your veins.
You’d think you were being thrummed
out of this world or farther into it.
But what’s the difference, really?
In some kind of heaven we hear
what we don’t want to, here.
Code Violations
You are receiving this letter because your
house is empty. The window on the second floor
is open and the long white curtain is blowing
out. As we drove by we wept
and checked our pockets for lottery tickets.
Your neighbor has too many wind chimes
and we noticed a dead armadillo
on your porch. We suspect your house
is haunted vacant. The painted stucco is like mint
ice cream. They don’t make wooden shutters
like yours anymore. We noticed no children
playing on your street. If you are still alive
reading this, we ask you to pay your taxes.
Come back and trim the raspberries. Throw out
the Morris chair. Watch the bees.
Pianos do not make good buckets.
If you are reading this, tell us why you left:
There is a fine for abandonment.
We will come to your new house
and take away your memories.
Bear
A canyon of caves looms over the train tracks
like a city block, high rises swollen with lives
you’ll never even glimpse. Each bear’s breath
echoes from the rocky mouths, slumbering five short.
The missing bodies hang from a neighbor’s garage,
strung up to let blood. Last summer, a black bear hung
his head through an open window in the downstairs bedroom
and watched my family sleep. As a child, I found a fresh track
in the mud and thought human—saw heavy heel, swell
of arch, five toes, thought barefoot. To break a dancing bear,
trainers would tether her to an iron stage, shoes bandaged
over her back feet, a slow fire heating the floor. To stand
was salvation, survival swaying to the music.
Race
This morning I walked down to the cove, as calm
and hushed as if a ghost had spooked it. On
some nights, alone on the dock, I’ve seen his face
while gazing into the water; then it’s gone.
A natural-born duelist, those “double dares,”
how quickly I outswam him. (One summer day,
years later, implored to clear the woods “down there,”
from what remained of the boathouse came a noise,
his strokes on the rotted ribs of Cape Kidd’s Vamp.)
Swimming to where I thought I’d heard his voice,
I dove, sure when I came up that “Marco’’’d shriek
for “Polo,” reviving his dare. Then one leg cramped,
jerking like a bullfrog gigged or the sideshow freak
we’d seen at a carnival over near Kent one fall.
I’ve never recalled reaching the buoy, just the shouts
of our neighbor’s sons fishing off our dock, the squall
not yet visible out past the barrier rocks
as the splash of something across the cove fanned out
moments before I heard one oarlock
slam the buoy’s leeward, a coarse dark hand
firmly grasping me, pulling me into his boat.
Wish I Had a River
I miss you the way I miss mooring docks and bright blue boats
and the fine frizzled fray of a slip knot; or a wooden bowl
worn smooth by the daily spoon and cloth,
all the ways we did and didn’t cotton.
It’s on the frozen Thames I sometimes dream you,
skating your way around apple carts, hand-presses,
coal-heaped sleds. Once I saw your beautiful bald head
as you handed your cap to an old woman, limping, fast, after her dog.
That day we flew over the Potomac, you said, here,
take this; and it wasn’t a matter of life or death
but the clamor of their conversation as I pulled
back or pushed forward on the yoke
like the honeysuckle branch you brought close to our faces
that night we climbed two fences to be alone. You said, here,
smell this; and when you let go,
I heard the sound loss makes—the way a thing going away slices
the air. Maybe it wasn’t a dog the old woman was chasing
but a fissure edged with ice;
and though she spent her whole life not knowing you,
she made, within her bony fist, your woolen cap her last soft thing.
The Road to the Jungle
The road through El Remate never went straight,
but the thought of moving
was slender and vulnerable, curling toward,
then away from us. All day,
the road conversed with the lake,
and the weather beat down on its tired face.
Sun clawed as if in a trance.
Around noon, we decided to walk into town
to the carts and the awnings we hoped
would be there. We spoke of distance,
then nothing, then processions of monkeys,
and other gradual musings. We ate in the drape
and sway of small hollow breezes,
with only slight talk —
asking for ice and again ice, which spiraled
around in our desperate bodies. On the way back,
the road moved more slowly,
the land blunt in the dangerous heat.
At the inn, a young man held out
large glasses of sharp sweet lemonade – glistening,
cold. We offered perspiring Spanish
with fitful verbs. A fan sent its quizzical smile
in circles. Around us,
the yellow birds and gardenia,
and down a long row of stairs, the lake
and its gentle frustrations. The heat kept to its welling
until long past nightfall,
until we felt haunted, inhabited, omniscient.
For Nothing Sounds as Much Like the Lost World of the Womb as the Motors of Our Machines
Even that bathroom fan, the one we talked of replacing
in those years before our daughters. But the first
came home in December, and that fan was all
that would soothe her, those weeks when we rocked
and sang and paced, until our feet played our old
oak floors like the keys of a mistuned piano.
All of us sleep-dumb and lost in those hours
she’d cry inconsolable, screaming her red-faced squall
through this house that was drafty and cold.
How she longed, I’m sure, for the womb,
its weightless warmth and racket the only
two things she knew. But that fan with its chirrs and whirs,
its constant clicks and hums, must have sounded
somehow familiar, like the bloodstream’s tidal hum
or the murmured pitch and timbre of her mother’s
off-kilter heart. It’s a comfort we can never recall
but I’m sure we all must long for.
And isn’t that what physics now says, that it all shakes
down to this? We’re mixed up dark matter
and star-dust, the breath and mud of the cosmos,
so that’s where we’ll all return. Finally
soothed and calm in a womb where planets collide
and suns implode every day, as an embryonic
light just clatters and hammers along.
Lead
There’s some dispute in the family about whether my grandmother
actually hit my grandfather when she fired a pistol
in his direction as he clambered up the downspout
to gain access through a second floor window
to the marital bedroom. He’d been locked out
(locks changed!) by his wife because of his carousing.
There’s no dispute about the fact that he fell
backwards onto rain-softened grass,
clutching his side and laughing.
The dog I had in that fight
was my mother’s sense of fun.
The good cheer with which the story
is told seems to require a winging,
a neat lovehandle through-and-through.
That’s the Irish-Catholic side.
On the German-Protestant side there’s
a horribly macabre twelve-gauge
story involving a door handle,
a phone call and some wire.
Indeed, among hard core enthusiasts,
melting pots are still used for ammunition.
The Banjo Player Breaks Down
The banjo player met the devil
and asked the devil if he wanted
to make a deal, but he talked so slow
the devil got bored and went on home.
The banjo player went to the mountain
to find the Maharishi but he got lost
on the way, had to pick his way down,
broken, fistful of nothing but fog.
The banjo player went to Hollywood
to see what riches were all about.
His fingers too slow to catch
anything but what he already held.
The banjo player was a nice man.
Nobody looked dumber in a hat,
nobody gladder to see the fifties gone,
no more need for hat-sized grins.
Lots of players with faster fingers
than the banjo player, the measure
of a player timing and not the speed,
left holding, right pouring. We all drink.
The banjo player is dead. His fingers lie
moldering in the coffin in a long pull-off.
That note rides the silence until the next
one is plucked. The banjo player never misses.
Talking Sophocles with Jason Koo at Jack Bistro
We were sitting at a table on the sidewalk
just down from Union Square and the massive
shoe warehouses, the crowds of people watching
a troupe of street performers, and I was telling him
about the passage from Sophocles in which Oedipus
says it’s better never to have been born,
but that, if you can’t avoid being born (as who among us can),
it’s best quickly to return from whence you came.
I said there were times—not many, to be sure, but still—
I wondered whether Sophocles wasn’t right,
and Jason said he’d always hated that quote, that
it was ridiculous—“I mean, who wouldn’t choose all this,”
he said—making a sweep of the air with his hand,
meaning the mini crab cakes on the table
in front of us, served with a side of remoulade;
the greasy paper cone of hand-cut frites;
the two martinis, sweat beading their glasses—
his pomegranate and mine Bombay Sapphire
straight up with two pimentoed olives on a plastic sword—
which we could order more of if we wanted
(which just at that moment we very much wanted);
the way the shadows made patterns on the building
across the street, shadows which by this point
in the day were growing longer as the city came alive;
Union Square and the street performers I’d watched
who selected volunteers from the audience, lining them up
so that one of the performers in a neon spandex suit
could take a running leap and jump over them:
you might feel a bit cheapened and manipulated
by the display (the stains and tatters in the spandex),
but didn’t it feel good to be alive anyway?
And standing there, watching, one of the crowd,
who wouldn’t think of Whitman? who loved this city
and catalogued its riches and who, like Jason,
would also have hated that quote from Sophocles,
who was surely glad to have lived—as you were glad
he had lived—and played his part, the part,
he wrote, that is what we make it, as great as we like
or as small as we like, or both great and small,
saying that just as we feel when we look on the river and sky,
so he felt, and just as any of us is one
of a living crowd, so he was one of a crowd;
meaning that when we’d paid our check and gotten up
from the table and walked back through the streets,
or when we’d turned to say goodbye at the corner
of 14th Street—none of which we could have done
had we never been born—it was better,
better to have been born.
Richmond, Texas; Easter Weekend
I.
The caddies in the background stare
Down fairways at the latest lies,
And foursomes toss their madras ties
Behind their backs, shift feet, and square
Their shoulders. Another drive implies:
Exurban sprawl is everywhere.
Inside the clubhouse, seersuckered chaps
Escort in pairs each ribboned dress.
Rehearsing their nouvelle noblesse,
The Southern Belles sneak sips of schnapps,
Impress upon their beaus with the bareness
Of their backs to slow, quick, quickly close the gaps.
And down a hallway, past some doors:
Starch, menthylated scent of smoke
Is tracked beneath the help’s non-bespoke
Wingtips. Matte, scuffed, the hardwood floors
Echo orders: sparkling water, rum and coke,
some “Chivas Regal neat, two fingers.”
Propelled by weary daylight, make-
Shift practice fields, and prewar oaks and birches,
In the bower of decorative side porches,
Lacrosse irks the keepers of these historic
Trusts. Everywhere, spring crowds. In nearby churches,
Empty pews wait patiently with clerics.
II.
On repaved Main—past boarded antique
Windowfronts, train tracks, bad real-estate
Investments, the sugar mill, the interstate—
The local dive serves Colt 45 to Sikhs,
The underaged, and prison guards alike.
The sidling precopulate first date
Boasts matching patches, pocket eight-
Balls, love for Guthrie, glass rose stems thick
With tar and memory. What’s due
Is tabbed, walked, rarely paid, past, lent,
And long over— A true embarrassment
Of riches. There’s dry rot everywhere. Tattoos
Fading like a last call song descend
Into the night. One Shipley’s Donuts shop prepares
The batter, frying oil, Easter specials and registers
The line outside. One day begins, another ends.
Off Liberty and 9th, a toddler whines
For breakfast. God Bless Our Goodwill-
Furnished units, the Southwestern Bell bills,
Rexall blush, and popcorn ceilings defining
Home, the mother thinks. She scours
The shelves for cereal and powdered milk,
Her closet for her Sunday’s best sham silk
In time for our most sacred, segregated hours.
Rendering
This water did not call itself harbor,
yet here ships slumber, people imagine
books into breezes, children
splash breath back into the shallows,
one mad cackle beckoning another.
And I worship what I can’t control:
Can’t shape the way the hurricane turned
sky into a twin ocean, tore from the earth
like saplings trees a hundred
years of rain had raised; seemingly composed now,
these waters took to land before the winds came,
flooding roads; some kids drove their truck
into the new pools, screaming deliriously,
over and over, up and down the disappearing block,
each new spray of danger a fresh forever.
Nom
Every move I make is gestured
by a slight prediction:
I go down on my side
and roll up the hill; a cloud
wants me, so another cloud does.
But when I look to their faces I don’t
know them. Like satellites or cousins, their part
is small and dubious in the all-there-was that was
the past: back on that brown lake,
the fisher was the painter, and the rod
the same length as the brush—
the landscape bore upon the silver boat
which, with its small hatch for fish, configured
the thingness of the world—that blue and green
polluted frog, full of magma, soon to croak.
I, Casimir Zorawski, a Mathematician of Poland,
met Manya on spring break in ’86.
In studying more advanced arithmetics,
“Maria” was her birth name; “Manya” stuck
the most important law is one that took
because it had a gentler sound. She was
millennia to put in words because
my baby brother’s nanny: blonde, smoke-eyed.
it seems so obvious, one wonders why
it need be said at all. It states that if
Two teens in love, we itched to wed for life,
you have some pickle jars, you can select
but Dad forbade it, saying, “I expect
one pickle from each jar. The Axiom
that no-name slut will end up in a slum.”
of Choice, it’s called: the basis of set theory.
She’s married now; her married name is Curie.
Lucero Peak Cave
(The Woman Who Rode Away by D.H. Lawrence)
First, a fence, then a gate.
Alone in the morning’s bright imprecision,
you know when you find the cave of the woman.
Last night, Lawrence had murmured long clauses
that lined up in your head
when you should have been sleeping.
The intimate alphabet, invaluable
hours, infinite regress of endings kept
blurring your vision. Even after the clock
molded minutes thick into hours, you twisted
and meandered through fragments.
The pages coated with dew. Now, flint light.
Small splinters of wind. The cave is wet
in odd places: ledges, silver cavities of rock.
Many long drips of water — not together, not fast —
leave a white line in nooks.
You are alert to the upright pine against glittering aspen.
Still alert to the sentence.
Someone would die here without anyone saying
a word. The sky lays down blue, with gray in its center,
and fingered with madness. Overhead,
the same sun, no longer tender.
You have never before climbed into a paragraph,
or a conclusion. Leaving the site, you read
summer’s flat light on the road.
The sun is unpunctuated, but reveals its opinions.
The Gypsies Singing Good-Bye to Their Child
When we stole you
we also took the kitchen’s largest pot
and three round loaves of bread.
The pot you slept in sometimes.
The loaves became your favorite toys.
One you tore in half and used as a coconut
to recount for us Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
But we read the papers. We’re not such fools.
That’s why we’ve left you in this park.
Your front tooth we pulled so we’d at least have something.
It’s the only hurt we hope will never heal.
We take turns sucking it at night.
Each time it grows smaller, less distinctly bone.
I don’t know what we’ll do when it’s all gone.
My Grandfather, Dying of Alzheimer’s on His Ranch in Ganado, Texas
Some nights, you sing, in-tune and off
Your rocker, keeping time with two spoons beat
Against your thigh, a sweet
And husky “Down in the Valley”
Until an unexpectoranted cough,
A gasping grand finale
Reminds how near I am to death.
You sleep diagonally in bed, cry out
All night for S—no doubt
Still haunted by her QVC
Deliveries, her baby’s-breath
Bouquet, the sun-brewed tea
She’d spill on any surface—your words
A schizophasic garden I want to tend.
I pray for fear and send
Each intercession up like the thin
Three-harmony Sabbath hymns the birds
Out-sing each week. Church, kin,
The land you cleared each fall for cords
Of winter wood and Balm of Gilead:
All gone to seed. Half-mad,
An avatar of age, gone piece-
Meal, you sing someone else’s words.
Tonight, when silence has lease
On you and all I can afford are lamp-lit
Dreams of planting cognates in the hollow
Of your mind—steed and swallow,
Wife and breath—let me go
To a secret place, un-understand, and admit
The words I do not know.
Fountain of Diana at the Louvre
Arm draped like a debutante’s
around her stag’s long white neck,
she’s not so school-girl gorgeous after all.
No swift strong hands to brush back
the hair from my eyes or stain my mouth red
with berries. Her eyes are emptied of seeing.
Her bow, an afterthought; her quiver, gone missing;
one of her dogs, very angry.
We circle her for a hint of moon as the day’s last
lean-in light sculpts its quarry: the two of us, bereft
of one another, hearts beating fast to slow
the mute recriminations of marble and fine dust.
Transplant
In seats mud-rusted from the years of use
we perched, drawn in the wake of the blue
tractor: its tires, black and deep-cut, tread
like chiseled stones. Between us, steadily,
the transplanting wheel turned and turned
and turned, took our seedlings to the dirt.
They seemed small and limp in our hands;
they held strange pallor. We knew the land,
harsher than a seedbed, was made of hazard.
The sacrosanct sun, we swore, would burn
these roots. The field would yield few leaves.
Still, we gave ourselves fully to the machine.
Nothing will live, we told each other like a song,
and each year, at the harvest, we were wrong.