Formally speaking ::
I like making a private game of form, to let the rest of the poem remain beneath the surface, sounding obscure depths until it emerges: story with form, verbal music with metaphor, premonition with memory. Form is the motion of emotion–its pace, its pauses–throughout the poem, and a structure the poem’s story inhabits: its walls, doors, windows, hidden wiring, its hidden but regular beams and joists. Form is musical, choreographic, and architectural: a tangible, gradual, building pleasure–unlike other work of poetry, the restless, associative, obsessive, elusive grasping after shapeshifting images/phrasings: the attempts to embrace a ghost in elysium.
Form is half of poetry to me, and though not reducible to one or another fixed form, I’ve worked extensively and elaborately in the sonnet. I’ve written hundreds in the last decade-plus–English sonnets, Italian sonnets, couplet sonnets, curtal sonnets, unrhyming/syllabic sonnets, long narratives using sonnets as stanzas. Most remain unpublished.
Here are links to web-published/archived examples. From time to time I’ll edit this page to add versions of published sonnets that are unlinkable, as well as sonnets not published elsewhere.
From Ander Monson’s wonderful The Diagram 10.6, “Executor” and “In Heaven”, an elegy for George Hitchcock.
From Diagram 2.5, “American Tire.”
From The Diagram 2.4, “Dead Dad.”
From The Diagram 6.6, “Little Deaths” (beneath the longer, syllabic “Where Are the Dancer’s Arms and Legs”).
From Prime Numbers Magazine 5, “Retired Logger” and “Seventieth Autumn”–followed by a brief interview.
From Ellen Dudley’s Marlboro Review 17-18, “The Book of Joel.” (An elegiac sequence of for a young friend who died just before his 19th birthday. The 4th sonnet, The Dyer’s Head, is title-jammed into the last line of Parable of Water.) This elegy opens the recently published The Kilim Dreaming. Check out Bear Star Press http://www.bearstarpress.com/or contact me about a copy of that book.
I’ve written many other poems that use sonnets–rhyming or not–as stanzas:
- The first two stanzas of a 35-sonnet narrative, “The Wire Garden,” appear in Del Sol Review 15. As of September 2010, this is available as the title poem in a 40pp collection from my own Arlo Press.
- Other sonnet-stanzas from “The Wire Garden” appeared in Cream City Review‘s recent “Memory” issue.
- In the “American Apocalypse” 21.1 issue of Green Mountains Review, a 4-sonnet meditation on nuclear pollution, “Bikini Confetti:”
BIKINI CONFETTI
Coming down from the sky all my life,
this night wind: black surround, spirit-breath
with me longer than words or child-faith
in a god who made death by torture proof
of love everlasting. A wind blew through
that belief, and the next miracle
to come: a girl. She stepped free of her shell—
a two-piece swimsuit—to dissolve all I knew.
Through her I swam to a beach twilight
better than heaven, but there too, the wind at night
shadowed each quickening kiss that sealed
our assent to the next. Waves lapped
the sand with foam, bits of shell, abraded
bone. In the dunes we slept.
The next day, a blue-green god, half sea half sky,
kissed the world with smoked jade, malachite,
celadon, and I said Yes to the way
those waves renewed promise. The palatial white
of clouds confirmed that simply to breathe
was enough. But in each breath, contradicting its faith,
was something falling from the day I was born.
It might show as a cough, a rasp in the bone,
X-ray apparition spreading like a black fern.
Maybe it was luck not to have seen
how many of us on that Sunday beach inhaled
its invisible filament, in gratitude
for being alive, in love. Swallowing night wind
at noon. Being gathered in its slow garland.
No one can say what I saw spill
from that shaft of televised vapor in the living room
replaying the cloud-birth on Bikini Atoll
the month I was born. I lay in my father’s arms.
Maybe I saw dust motes in the gray
cathode-ray where the island rose and fell
in a hydrogen bloom. Years later he’d say
“Want to see how we let the world go to hell?”
and blow Winston smoke-rings over his head,
and lift me up me to grab at smoke.
After the girl’s kiss, I’d have told him Drop dead.
If I could see him now, I’d say, It’s the black milk
of morning we drink at evening. And it’s too late.
He’s gray vapor, now. He’s smoke the night wind ate.
Because the Book of Psalms is followed by the Book
of Lamentations I must follow him. I shake
my head and the cloud palace dissolves and comes down
and we all drink it, with each invisible bone.
This is what I told my doctor friend, finishing
a round of golf yesterday: “Bombs should kill. And smoking,
and dictators with big plans for racial purity.
But not breathing.” He lined up his putt and smiled at me.
“But it can.” Can you see his Bermuda shorts
and sunscreen and Tommy Bahama polo shirt,
that casual hazard suit? What protects us all
from the wind? He rose to address the ball,
sighed, and stroked it. I watched it miss
by a hair. He tapped it in, shrugged: “And it does.”
- In Poetry 168, a 7-sonnet meditation, “Closing My Eyes in Heaven” (July 1996, page 187), dedicated to Jack Gilbert:
-
CLOSING MY EYES IN HEAVEN
Where the hygienist made me lie back faced
two large prints of a drowned canyon. In the first,
a man sat with her, waving from a shiny skiff.
“Is that Zion?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Glen Canyon,
near Rainbow Bridge. Honeymoon. I was married then.”
In the other print they were gone: downriver,
maybe. Turquoise sky and water, redstone cliff.
“Who took these?” I asked. She didn’t answer,
but slipped off my glasses. “Open your mouth,”
she said, “and turn toward me.” Her mouth
was masked, her hands gloved and looming
like an undertaker’s: “Close your eyes now
if you want.” I did. Inside, I was zooming
in on this couple whose desert Eden somehow
caught them waving goodbye to it, to marriage,
and now to me. In that otherwise windowless
examining room, all of it made an after-image
in my head: paradise as a snaphot happiness,
a mirage on a blank wall next to the same world
the moment love has gone out of it. The river’s
color drained from my eyelids, the canyon sky grayed.
Their skiff drifted farther into the night I make wherever
I close my eyes. A light touched my lips: “Open wider,”
the voice said. The pick entered me like a steel question.
I felt my body go out under me, how it would
be laid out, hands no longer mine folded
across the ribs. I opened wider. I exposed the one
living part of myself that can be scraped clean.
________________________________________
Once I watched two old women in an Amherst cemetery
clean a monument. Above them, a limestone angel held
the wrist of a soldier whose legs had given way.
Water sloshed in the pail, a steel brush rasped.
Farther off, geese circled a harrowed corn field.
The soldier’s wound was invisible. The angel grasped
his wrist lightly as a nurse taking a pulse; it seemed
to lighten his fall only because both were carved from the same
stone. Their skyward eyes were a hundred million years
of crushed shellfish: no sight, no memory or tears.
The women did not look at the soldier or the angel.
On their knees with brush and soap, they were intent
on scouring lichens out of the dates, the name,
the quote from a poet published nowhere past this monument.
________________________________________
Wherever, these days, I close my eyes, faces. Faces.
One at a time, closing to portrait distance. None familiar,
none strange, each immovably calm in a gaze that effaces
all that surrounds us: a blond boy looking over
his naked shoulder. A whitehaired woman. Often
the face changes in mid-gaze, wrinkles or softens,
hair lightening, darkening. Is it many, or one
whose alterings enact our convergences in death, in common
memory, in god? The gazes always approach
recognition, just before the faces turn away.
And then—fading in on their black screen—landscapes:
a line of waves bearing down on a beach;
pines twisting over a stormlit marsh; rivers, and skies,
and hills. These are the dead who want my eyes.
And in return, whenever I close my eyes, I’m given
a glimpse of them, and after that, a still, an out-take
of whatever country they confused with heaven:
a goodbye look at the place that saw them through the last ache
of conscious thought. They are heaven’s after-sight,
I guess, or the over-seeing of it. Trying to stop me looking for it
beyond my closed eyes. See this way, the faces say, Come there
in them. But when I open my eyes they’re gone—no farther
than my breath, maybe, but just as invisible. I’ve found
myself doubled up in bed, coughing “Where are they?”, my wife
saying “Who? What?” The children have caught me in the hall,
in the garage against the steering wheel. My daughter’s hand,
or my son’s, touches my cheek: “Daddy?” It’s because theirs
are never among the faces. My own is never among the faces.
________________________________________
A friend and I walked the granite paths of the Holyoke Range.
We stopped so high above the Connecticut River
that the noon bells of Amherst were faint as the trills
of cedar waxwings eating cherries overhead. My mouth
still hurt from its scouring, teeth too bone-clean to talk.
My whitehaired friend spoke enough for us both.
His voice guided me from one size of granite to the next.
The birds did not stop for us, the bells did not stop.
“Close your eyes,” he said, “and our talk makes a motet
with these other sounds, one voice with three parts.
We could lie down here,” he said. He meant for a rest
but I thought: for rehearsal. I lay on barely-grassed-over stone.
“Three parts,” he continued, “hunger, death, and love.
But one voice.” I was listening to the bird-voice
time uses to help us forget how fast it will be done.
“And to hear all three at once—love, and hunger, and death…”
He trailed off. Where I lay I could feel clouds passing;
my face darkening, lightening. Beside me, his white head
breathed in bells, breathed out bird-trills. Heaven does not
need us to imagine it, I was thinking: the eyes of the dead
are on it each time they find us. “We’re lying on the stones
and grass of heaven,” I thought, and glanced at my friend.
Of course he heard: his eyes closed, his lips barely moving.
The hands on my chest didn’t feel like mine, but I left them,
and closed my eyes again. The waxwings had moved on,
the bells were finished. A fine wind, the light high and even.
In the black chapel of my head the faces resumed their processional;
pausing to look in on me, then turning back, again, to the sky.
- In Shenandoah (2006), the sonnet-stanzas “Hav-a-Hart” and “Sava:”
Humane: to not snap the spine of the thing
you refuse to live with, but relocate it to strains
of Body and Soul, Amazing Grace. My kitchen
is mine. A family of eight I trapped one by one
in cabinets of Revere-Ware and teflon griddles.
One by one I delivered to Pioneer Cemetery,
dropped in periwinkle: Good luck. I never see
owls or cats, but don’t come at night. One I released
the evening a bagpiper walked the west perimeter.
For the fattest one—the mother?—a tenor sax player
scatted and riffed around fallen Civil War dominoes.
School-kids use the cemetery, too. They take rubbings
off the granite abstracts to bring home to mother
in smaller logging towns with few graves this old.
Not to kill them, but post them as guardians
of the groundcover over your own dead. Take food
for the transit to cold nights and no roof—corn flakes,
dog kibble, carrot peels—so when you die
a mouse may yank the thorn out of your heart.
Didn’t your daughter dote on the angelic mouse
determined to be a ballerina? Didn’t she love
to read of the misfit mouse on his micro-motorcycle?
Never kill another, or in ten years its death may
throw her off the back of her boyfriend’s Harley,
and break the legs she needs for point, the face
she needs for kisses. The runt of the litter I took
to a church with a shed and well-stocked dumpster.
I didn’t do it for my daughter: I did it for my mother.
_________________________
The name for their river, if you imagine it
taken from local usage, means That’s how it goes
—delivered with a shrug, out of earshot
of the wide white laughter over the rocks.
Or, if the river’s in sight, with eyes
averted toward the town square with its old men
and women seated around a weepy granite
fountain. Their uniform of various blacks
entitles them to revise each other’s stories
of children gone to the homelessness of cities
and wives, husbands, fathers, mothers gone
ahead but not, as the headstones like to say, forgotten.
The river is close to its source: no hydro plant, no locks.
The rain and snow of heaven is where it began,
and it flows toward an underworld they know
as well as who fell in gloriously drunk at which saint’s
picnic, and whose lover drowned himself to end one cold summer.
They stretch arms to show how big a trout was battled,
netted and let go by this one’s great-grandfather.
They don’t need to walk there anymore to show
each other what really took place on its banks.
When they speak, the hands lift as though to cradle
a thing that won’t be held, but their eyes
are kept closed to guide the recurrent stories
toward the silence where everyone’s story goes.
If one of them looks up then and happens to say
the name of the river, it sounds like thanks.
For what, who knows. It was always pronounced that way.
- in Poetry 154, the 4-sonnet elegy “The Third River” (way back in June 1989–first use of sonnet-stanzas at a time when I was mostly writing prose poems/flash fictions). This poem concludes The Wire Garden, available from me or from Lulu.com.
Paradise for you, father, was the slow
brown boyhood river, banked with live oak
and buckeye. Your river was my first picture-story,
it gave off a honey of leaf-rot, marsh-rot,
stormwater digesting and distilling to amber
its compost of silt, fish-scale and offal.
You’re the skinny blur—in mother’s old snapshot—
diving from an oak, about to break the water.
At school, pledging Under God indivisible,
I saw the war cemetery, a treeless baize tacked
with tiny crosses. At lunch I’d sneak across the creek
and vault the low wall. I almost made it a game—
seventh row, third cross, the black incision of a name—
crawling the grass to the war souvenir you left me.
_____________________
The story of school for me, as for you,
was chalkdust, and widows who fell asleep with Longfellow,
but home was Life’s Picture History of WWII
and albums of black paper framing you,
West Point, Shropshire, Reims. My ghost story
starts with the pilot who drinks absinthe on the roof
of the chateau HQ, then plunges—a human Stuka—through
a skylight to the general’s dinner table. You rise,
brush off glass and gravy, salute, pass out. Next, always,
comes mother driving to Emergency to get me
delivered the very night you crash-land: I’m like a pilot
balled up, too big, in a crushed cockpit.
The ground crew C-sections your fuselage.
We’re both lifted alive out of wreckage.
_____________________
Between your French and our American hospitals,
snapshots fly. A baby. A P-47, belly
up in a rainy field. The story
of accidents is how inevitable
they grow in a mother’s voice. “Father gave
his life for yours,” she said, “so his grave
has your name, but not his body. He fell over Germany.”
I skipped school, because they kept calling
your name. I lay back on the grave, and thought how lucky
to be lost in the clouds, and always falling,
never home where you were just a wall display
of ribbons and medals, a dent in the seat of the wing chair.
Over the steaming meat of Sunday dinner I prayed
for your glassed-over air-cadet smile to fall off the wall.
_____________________
Did you believe we’d be pieced together
beyond the Methodist river of clouds? Clouds are
what you dove through, through the exploding skylight,
the border of air and water. I’m ready to meet
that snapshot summer fifty years gone
where a blur holds its breath under
a shimmer of Kodak emulsion.
I’ve skipped school, stripped, ready to dive—
body fuselage, arms wings. Naked
underwater, the blur looks up to me,
its mouth and eyes full of river-honey, its body
a ripple of lethal ambers, streamlined, boyish—
timed to spring back up to the surface
the instant I break it from above.
In North Carolina Literary Review 7 (1998), “Bargain with Transcendence” (3 sonnets) and “Brightness Falls” (2 sonnets):
BARGAIN WITH TRANSCENDENCE
Lay it open to me, Emerson. Open
your shirt and skin and slick coil of intestine
with its skimpy mash of two lunch apples.
I want to see the apple heart
that had to keep metronoming its part
after the ground digested the boy in his box.
It’s a century and a half too late for scruples
about that small portion of sweetest meat
that did not stick to your bones
but gave itself to the family of rocks
and stones and trees. Nothing atones
when boys cut ahead of the bloodline to meet
the eyeless granite angel who sells
the son his father’s berth to hell.
Just a few years older than he, his gravediggers—
untranscendental Concord potato-eaters—
backfill the hole like squirrels laying in a supply
of nut-meat. Emerson, over Boston Bay
the osprey rides thermals as it rode the summer
Lord Amherst hit on the plan of putting away
New England’s natives with trade blankets
dipped in smallpox. Did your god blink its
three-personed eye at that massacre?
If you had a choice, what would you prefer—
the family wiped out at once entire,
or soar above the random idiocy
of pneumonia, meningitis, TB,
like god’s fish-hawk, all wing and eye?
Think hard. Simply having your life killed your son’s.
Let me be fevered and burnt
if mine can’t outlive me. I don’t want a heart
hardening like a walnut shell around the absent
meat of my meaning. Nothing is apparent
but this: defending my boy’s life until I die.
I don’t want your mastery, your raptor eye.
My son weighs 70 and sings on his bike; he’s eleven.
What I want isn’t 90 days, a year, five.
Whatever it means or takes to survive
him I don’t want to know. There is no heaven
in this negotiation. I want nothing less than
an unconditional guarantee
of his safe conduct to a life that outlasts me.
___________________________
Yesterday, the manic teen in isolation.
Today, the Mexican schoolbus and the cattle train.
Each morning the slam dance of news and caffeine.
If I drank herb tea, canceled my subscription
and spent my earliest hour in our back garden—
but no. I read, “The phone in his cell was for suicide
prevention. He made a slip knot of its steel-encased cord…”
I inspect shoe-soles under a roadside tarp. My face hardens
to mica. So I pack the brittle edges in cotton
sweats and drive Sarah along untrafficked back streets
to school, making sure we sing I like to eat, eat, eat
eeples and baneenees.Carrying her lunchbox and mittens
up the steps, I feel like the big retarded one in this
elementary crush, and Sarah my quicker guide. I wish.
But I leave her—that simple, daily subtraction—
and driving home get ambushed by the busdriver’s quote,
“The children were singing when the train hit,”
and the jailer’s, “We were just holding him for observation—
he could have used strips of bedding, or the dental floss…”
Most days I walk the dogs in Pioneer Cemetery
but today I keep them fenced in the back garden with me
among the firs and spindly oaks, the moss
and wrecked raspberries where God found Cain.
The casual spider thread that wires each thing to the next
is shining. Some days my hard wiring connects
to nothing but distant signals of pain.
The cemetery is no peace-walk then, but a place
of dead mouths. All that loose white hair, turning to grass.
In Whiskey Island (2006), 4 pieces: “Girls Upstairs,” “Venus Pencil,” “Clove Pig,” and “Drummer Boy.”
Sometimes in my basement office I hear women
laughing through the ceiling, and it brings back long nights
in a basement in Chapel Hill, the year when
my companions are the wholly memorized notes
of Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe.
The two girls upstairs are big on laughter, TV,
frat guys. In my Romantic Poets text I draw
the face I grimly imagine I’ll have at fifty
in the margins of Coleridge’s “Dejection”
ode. Biking home one winter night, I’m hit head-on
by a car the laughing girls drive. “Oh God is he
dead?” they shout. “Hey, it’s the downstairs poet guy!”
Even they knew poets die young. Why didn’t I? Where
are those laughing girls now? Parked in my heart. I swear.
_________________________________
Now I get it, in the eighth year of your death: my love
of turquoise, which waylaid me from nowhere
when I drove West, 26. The first ring I made
my own was called spiderweb—a defect,
veins of black crackling the aqua horizon of
the stone. Your marriage was set in silver—
what could I know of that?—just married
myself, imagining my chance to perfect
the impossible. That day I’d been standing above
the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The river
gleamed half a mile below, cursive—pencil lead
on heavy paper. You’d sharpen me a Venus, strict
point in its crackled glaze: “Smell this—it’s incense cedar,”
admonishing, “Draw like you mean it. There’s no eraser.”
________________________________
Kill the pig, the mud-bloody boys sing, cook his flesh.
I palmed half-bit sausage biscuit in one hand
and flattened Lord of the Flies with the other:
first true smack of irony, poignant as the first
spear I honed from devils club to gig toads, summer
dusk at the storm ditch with Joey, Gary, a band
of barefoot killers in seersucker shirts. The worst
we did was stick firecrackers in the mouths of fish
we caught on the all-night pier. Puffers were the best:
tickle their bellies, they swell up, the Black Cat cigar
exploding them mid-air. Big laugh. Who can understand
those boys who quit killing once they learned to kiss?
—who now sell tires, teach poetry, love kids like the lamb
Jesus and—guileless still—stick clove darts in Xmas ham.
_____________________________
Dead uncle dead aunt, dead aunt dead uncle.
Dead dad. What dull drumming, the muffled tom-tom
of names by heartbeat past the zero hour of night.
Like counting off hide-and-seek, face buried
in my arms against a pine. Count until daylight,
one one-thousand, back forty years. Softly call
Ready or not! They freeze in picture frames,
home free, not it. I was the slowest, I cried
in rage when no one let me catch them. Four a.m.
Death’s it now. Dead father, dead elders, how did
you bury childhood behind the stars, in plain sight?
Come back and finish this jigsaw puzzle
in the bathroom mirror. Where did you hide the rest
of the pieces? Stop banging that toy drum in my chest.
From the Oregon anthology Deer Drink the Moon (2006), “Cape Perpetua” and “Dead Run.”
_________________________
All other white noise falls beneath a private fire,
and wind in the trees, and creekwater aimed at the North
Pacific—susurrus of surf on lava as far
from me as any nebula. Where is my death,
my body’s manifold declines, all my failures
to listen to loved ones, speak their names, sing for no
reason on earth? Burnt to red coals. Blown past the stars.
Perpetua Creek bears it away, all I know,
all I will never remember, to the border
where water and fire and wind first met. Consoling
to imagine how many have reached that juncture
on a late September night like this. That feeling
named by Captain Cook on Saint Perpetua’s Day,
1778, as he sailed away.
_________________________
Dogs love Pioneer Cemetery, they have the run
of its clovery, plotted mile, happy to share
with students cutting through, late for Psych or dance class,
old joggers keeping one sore foot out of the grave.
No one here on leash, except the dead: theirs is grass
braided to a stony name. Old as Oregon,
a hundred fifty years of plenty rain, sun and air
enough to grow them eyes on daisy stalks, to face
this world that no longer runs from them. I don’t run—
more like slow dance steps through what my body distills:
the feel of one day waltzing beyond my last will.
My dogs run this thought into the ground. The young one
racing ahead is black; the old trotter is white.
Their names, too, like a life, a death: Magnolia. Midnight.
The late Deborah Tall was a fine poet and prose writer, and a generous editor at Seneca Review. She published a number of my sonnets/short sequences in the 1990s, including the following: “Slightly Closer to the Sea,” “Home Visit,” “The Cure,” “Truce,” and “Two Drives.” “Home Visit” and “The Cure” are included in The Wire Garden (Arlo Press, my own imprint).
SLIGHTLY CLOSER TO THE SEA
Where they have gone they have done without
children, the woman says. There was no sending
the children away, the man tells me, but what
they did sent them away. A small car idling
on a snowy logging road. The river downhill
from the condemned hospital. None of this will
they admit together. Confessions arrive
and depart separately, when children sleep
or go to school. She seems most alive
on a Sunday walk along the steeper
side of their river, in a smaller town slightly closer
to the sea. The man’s style is to roar up late at night,
tires flinging driveway dust in his headlights,
to hunch at my kitchen table, and drink, and swear.
It never took us farther than minutes away,
he says, but far enough. He takes both hands
off the glass, waves his words away,
grips air. By the water they had too many
words, in the snow too few. Too few. Words
would not, she says, take them past the momentary
difficult places. No directions: she
looked at him, at the sky. In the car, with his finger,
he drew a line across her palm. The map from me
to her, he says. If she stares, in bed, at her
skylight, he appears, floating in sleep. Obsession!
he slams the glass down. No, an addiction,
she whispers: The too much that I understand
too late. I shrug; I give her my hand.
I’ve held his, too. What they want is an endless
hearing. The night he begs me to contradict
follows a morning she requires silence: a strict
unforgiving sequence. We must have shared at least
one past life, she insists: Sister and brother, can
you see that? At my table, his hands shape what they can
neither seize or release. I have to watch them,
he claims, when I’m driving near the river at night.
By now I am behind him, kneading the knot
in his shoulders. It’s hard; it’s two a.m.
I feel like a grave. What do you have to watch? I ask.
My hands, he says, lifting them like a paralytic’s.
It’s all that water below. I have to tell
my hands, Just don’t let go of the wheel.
___________________________
Look at the crossword asleep on his chest. The recliner
handles his sprawl like an offering to the angel
of prostate cancer. The nap is doctor’s orders—
seventy years of Sundays really were a rehearsal.
The TV remote regulates weather, waking,
world events. Power to shut things off is a gift—
the angel’s quiet as a swimming pool filter. Taking
his father’s glasses so they won’t crack when he shifts,
the son wipes them on his sleeve. He would not call
this a rehearsal, but memorizing this face is all
he wants now: to study the angel’s work. To stand over
his old man and take in the diminishing strength
of pity and terror. Let him believe his power
is tender. That it has even an hour’s length.
______________________________
God’s eye on me the last fifteen years
was a Zuni ring of spiderweb turquoise,
worn on the callused go-to-hell finger
of my writing hand, except when I swam laps
in summer sun at the Amazon Park Pool:
I did not like tarnishing the silver setting.
In that Olympic-sized, turquoise buoyancy
I was a mote on the iris of an eye,
backstroking the synaptic ripple and flash
as my father, a continent away, completed
his half-hour treatment of paddle-and-float
for the leg swollen by radiation.
Imagine us, held in water the same size,
same color. Sliding the ring back on,
then, was like seeing God’s eye
on my father’s hand: it started my car
to drive me home, stroked my daughter’s hair.
That sensation faded like the chlorine whiff
from my palms, until I swam laps again,
until the ring was stolen from a locker
I had no change, that day, to lock.
Since then, I’ve spent less time in the water.
Since then, all God’s eyes are closed.
I bite my bare knuckle. No exercises
of mine distract death from focused fret-work
on my father’s leg-bone. And it’s too brittle,
now, for him to risk breaking on slippery steps
leading down into the crowded water.
_____________________________
If you never soil, never wash this bit
of linen again, it still will not hold
the scent of her neck, her gone breasts. Lay it
over a coil of her pearls: the distilled
mother-odor goes. It doesn’t breathe; it goes.
Shut it in the jewelbox you also inherit.
Like a sickbed hand, the handkerchief yellows.
In one corner, a stain—no bleaching it—
small as an IV bruise in the tender meat
of the elbow. This is her offer of surrender
you accept, this white flutter covering her retreat
into you. Has the country changed? The border
is stitched with initials, hers, yours, the hem
no stronger than your hands. Let me hold them.
____________________________
If love can be a line let it be a line of lights.
A line driving through a darkness of corn green
when the curving light sweeps it. Love like that
wakes a redbird in its juniper, sends it startled
into the starry indigo that calms it down again.
Love’s engine makes dogs bark miles after it
has passed, and its light belongs to stars again.
My lights aim toward my wife: if love can be,
let it be drawn by her grief in our bed’s blue dark.
Yesterday love lined up our family to light
noon’s highway for a rainy funeral. This story
has a line but the line made a hard right into
the gated place, and stopped. Redbirds sang in
a pine beyond the hole so deep it should have howled.
Off went the whole black line of light. We stepped
from the funeral engine in night colors, rain-chastened.
One line of ours ended there in a light trap
of dirt tamped down by the stone of a name.
Once there was a mother who could wait all hours
in living room dark for her daughter’s headlights
to startle the wall. It’s by her light I drive toward
what’s broken up and dispersed, a million faint stars
in my wife’s redbird heart. To bring desire close
to grief that each may last, because the last,
our oldest book of light says, shall be first. My lights
sweep the corn. The dogs are scared of what carries me
full of open-windowed music and want. How strange
it sounds against the stars. How fast and bright it moves.
From Marlboro Review (2002), “Black Dog Fall” and “Just Imagine.”
The black dog Midnight writes circle after circle
around me in burnt October grass: blades beaten
to nibs and nubs by dogs larger and dustier,
by dogwalkers exposing as much arm and leg
as they can bear to the thinned-out warmth, oracle
of cold sky-writing to come. Marks of depression,
objectless as light, fall like manna whiter
than one soul can swallow in this earth-bottomed keg
topped off with star-drizzle, the icy cuticle
of a day-moon. Each breath draws where we are eaten
alive in a salad of yellow trees, pepper
of dirt, salt of pollen. We’re identified by a rag
of likeness exhaled like smoke, guarded, animal.
The name I call breaks toward my breaking circle.
______________________________
The death of the children’s bookstore woman
was Woolf-like: a kid’s middle-school backpack
loaded with forty pounds of rock. Into Moon
Reservoir she waded. Goodnight bike rack
on the Subaru Outback roof, goodnight
store accounts more red than black. Ditto girls
on school soccer teams, doctor spouse who fights
junkies’ failings with methadone. Those pearls
her eyes said goodnight to stars and air, sunk
under tons of hypothermic moon calm.
No goodbye note. Word is she got stagger-drunk.
The car heater ran out of gas. Irish Cream
lullabied her to black waters that close
all books. In three days, more or less, she rose.
From Pacifica (1995), “Dog Park” and “What Carries Me.”
She came to shit, I tagged along to write.
She studies acres of grass and sun, sniff by sniff.
The notes she makes are glandular, brief
and for any dog to read. It’s sociable and polite.
In my lap, the notebook’s ruled green field
is dotted with bits of self discarded from the yield
of language submitted by all my kind
to the blind and odorless silence of
an oblivion my dog has no sense of.
Grass outlasts her: she doesn’t mind.
At the bench I’m imagining what shit
and sun and wind and grass my poem
and dog and all become. Don’t get me wrong: I’m
glad, really, to sit in the sun and keep doing it.
_________________________
—if it is not my wife’s face
held inside a glassine frame
protected by the black leather flap?
Or my few good songs mastered to tape,
zipped into the same
shoulder bag in a tighter place
near the turquoise and silver clip
into which I fold the minimal green time
and credit I can afford to waste.
Or my habitual tools: the red Swiss
knife ready to slice, trim,
screw, unscrew, punch and rip,
and the microcassette tape
where this rhythm first tried on my voice—
not to preserve it, but to erase
the silence dividing utterance
from its writing, and from the hope
my hand tried to map
into something direct as a psalm that lies
crossed-out, revised in the workbook in my lap.
It’s safe at 43 to say the home
I have in this world is these few things
I carry, this black bag of tools
that precisely time and name the moments I was
given to go through, and then give up at some
legendary place where they’ll keep
only fragments that speak to their eyes—
and the rest is old breath the wind harries.
From Poetry East in 1999 & 1993, two very different tonalities in “Anniverse” and “Spit.”
Let’s leave the century at the edge
of the bed, let it fall in with the pile
of bathrobes and towels. Now we are cleansed
of its holocausts, we are wet mammal hair,
the white pool of your belly, a bone bridge
of interlaced hands. Now bring the meanwhile
of our forever, that interval we’ve kissed
our unreturning way into over the more
than seven thousand nights in this marriage
of impediments and true admissions. Kill
your regrets in my mouth. The good blue lens
of your eyes is sky enough to hold my prayer
for ten thousand more nights where we refine
this one form of forgetting, this body: yours, mine.
_______________________________
In the middle of darkness is a light, and darkness
has not prevailed against it, Father Laveau said
on Sunday. That’s a good one, I said to Mama.
Mama said, Hush up, go take communion—
so I did but I used the cane. Mama knows
I never use the cane. I banged pews
left and right all the way to the rail, it made
old ladies cluck. Father Laveau clucked too.
He tapped my chin, which means Open, and stuck
the wafer in. It used to taste like the moon
because Mama said the moon was round and white
like a wafer. But the wafer is the body
of our savior. It tastes plastic. I wadded it
in my cheek and waited for the cup to come.
The father tapped my chin again, and I
pretended to cough but really I spit in it.
Spit the body back into the blood
because Jesus spit on a blind man’s eyes
and made him see. But he won’t do it for me.
I prayed for a year. The other man did not
even ask. Mama squeezed my fingers hard
and hissed, What did you do? Mama, the thing
got stuck in my throat, I said. I must have smiled.
She grabbed the cane. Go, she said. She hissed
like a talking snake: You want to play the fool?
Play the fool without a cane. On the walk home
she stayed a block ahead. I had to follow
her baby powder smell, and her loud heels.
She yelled, I’m going to take the crucifix down
off your wall and hide it. I yelled, I’ll find it
and spit on it too. And I would: it’s silver.
I can smell tarnish. I got so mad I walked
into a tree and ripped my pants. Mama
gave back the cane, but said Stupid. Let her
hide Jesus, I won’t look. I want him to get
good and tarnished before I go hunting him.
I want his eyes black as mine so when I spit
on them he’ll know he can’t rub darkness off.
He won’t be able to unstick his stupid hands
and I’ll squeeze his head so hard he’ll know
inside the darkness there’s another darkness
and the light, the light can’t touch it.
From a recent issue of Denali, two sonnets from the Bush II years, “Allegiance Revoked” and “Rain’s Return.”
Twilight park, canopied with firs. Thrush song
among the heights, empty picnic tables parked
in lush grass, laurels blossoming. Over the ridge
a river of headlights, north and south on I-5,
as though everyone is hurrying to a funeral
without a clue where it is or whose burial
they must observe. Now and then a siren
sounds its reminder, now and then a crow.
At the sole inhabited table a man writes,
My country dreamed of being the greatest
suicide—then strikes it out, walks downhill, out
of the park, imagining being changed into
a crow. No, not even that. Maybe just the space
between feathers on a wing, iridescent
and venerable, where a feather is missing.
____________________________
Imagine us all getting crowned, November
1st. The crown descends in pieces, evenly paced,
like a stage-prop chandelier (molded jewels
of sugar-glass) drizzled on cue through candystick-
thin fingers of dead orphans. That’s Oregon winter:
crown of cold clear thorns, worn alike by the richest
and the homeliest on Day One. Then, whoever dwells
in a house can decide whether to take rain’s potluck.
Rain on the roof lullabies the dozing embers
in the fireplace. Some folks jog through needling gray to taste
its minute clarities; some cope via withdrawal—
TV, Scrabble; some fly far south and never fly back.
If wearing a crown of rain could dissolve worlds of hurt
the homeless would wear it like an emperor’s shirt.
Duke Medical Center has an exemplary program, directed by the poet Grey Brown, to promote the healing and consoling powers of writing among patients, employees and visitors. I gave a workshop there some years ago. In 2005, the poet Gerald Barrax picked the following sonnet–about my father’s last week in the hospital–for their annual prize. This poem is included in my 2010 collection, The Wire Garden.
Swallows crisscrossed your 8th Floor Cancer Center
window like syncopated eighth notes. Who could hear
what I saw there? Eyes closed, you followed a score
the dying sight-read on their eyelids minutes before
the music ends. Summer lightning over the Cape Fear
outlined the distance you were becoming, past the flare
of swallows writing their pages of air.
Last hours like the words you lived by: no thunder
or wing-flash, at once opaque and all too clear.
How long ago the music of poems engineered
my flight from your life. In a blue visitor chair
by your bed in the sky, I kept watch. Touched your shoulder,
rose. Father, when I left, I walked on air over
the edge of the world: swallow-music everywhere.
From RATTAPALLAX (2004):
WHY KEEP A JOURNAL
At the fountain pen’s zenith the sexy cuts
of the gold nib angle toward something like the eye
at the apex of the dollar’s pyramid. Beyond the tip,
nothing but what you invent line by line. Is it only
air? Breathe out. The perfect navel siphons breath,
reservoired in its night-colored barrel, until the green
notebook page takes on the look of paper money
invested in song and memory. If the poem returns
you to a hillside where a spring hummed
as you dipped your hand in, what is it worth?
What if it yielded time to listen to a fountain
of breath ancient as night? Night, too, aims
its whole strength toward an airy moment called,
in a hundred singable languages, sunrise.
From Cumberland Poetry Review (1993), “Material Witness” and “The Past Master.”
How small is the chance of violence
like this—small as the girl’s leg
police hook in their pond-drag?
Small as her shoe? No violins,
no choir sanctify the recovery
of the waterlogged rest of her, piece
by piece. Is death, Jesus, a peace
passing all understanding? Did you see
the man yank her out of the mall
like a harried father—Time to go home?
Was it then you washed your hands of him
or in the bathroom stall in grade school
where he crayoned his dream—a girl’s red
mouth, red crotch, lips parted?
Did some invisible voice, like yours, keep
teaching him—while his family lay asleep—
everything his deepest wish
needed to grow into the knowledge
he applied with a serrated edge
to the arms and legs that had tried to push
him out of her? Your image, Jesus, your kin.
No more questions. Only her shoe,
on a rock by the water: the small Oh
of its mouth. For me nothing but the violin
string of her voice snapping in his hand.
He sleeps in a red heaven his crayon drew.
In a movie, the sky-choir would sing now.
And you’d be a swirl on the pond. A helpless wind.
Backs away when I approach, spins left
to my right turn. His hand—smooth, small—is a gift
he keeps in his pocket when I hold out
mine, spotted with use. If I pick up a baseball bat
he drops his glove, lies in the grass to read.
I kneel, reading over his shoulder aloud
and he jumps: off to the woods with a BB gun.
I want to explain the word unison
to him, but how translate myself to someone
never listening? All we have in common
is a past—presenting itself daily, but past
sharing. First is the worst, second is the best,
he teases. I try to walk away. He stays behind,
stays so close I hear his teeth grind:
Did you ever look like me? I forgot.
Still make believe you’re something you’re not?
You’re gray, you’re made of smoke and water.
I’ll never be what you are—the ghost of an imposter.
“Your grandmother,” I remind him, “would sit in the grass
with me—I was your age—and this repose would pass
into me: like not having to speak, or move, ever again.
It didn’t matter that the summer sun
was going, and night coming on, and fall, because
I felt bigger than the sky with her. And that was peace,
she said, the heaven she wanted….” He grabs my finger
hard, like a father: No, she wanted it over.
It was heart disease, and you’re lying
if you say she didn’t make a religion of dying.
I’d like to walk him into sorrow like a salt-water
tidepool, and lie there talking…what else would matter?
But he rolls eyes, silly-walks, yells fake laughter.
Each try at making peace makes him grow wilder,
so the quiet inside me grows wide, and he kicks dirt,
whirls, yells They got me, I’m hurt,
the mockery whirling and rising until
he’s nothing but a dust devil
that spins dead leaves up through the trees,
and then the one dead leaf that flies
as the rest fall, and then the white sky
it vanishes in. A blank wide as all of my
forgetting: that much late summer light.
A non-sonnet version of the following poem was published in 1984 in the now-defunct Davidson Miscellany, a nationally circulated journal at Davidson College (where I first began to publish in the 1970s). This elegy is for William Miller, a year ahead of me at Davidson, who killed himself after being expelled and refused readmission. I did try to get him to go to London with me. When I came home to the US and learned what he had done, that was the moment that made me a poet of loss.
Spring term done, I hurried. Left Carthage and Marcus
Aurelius locked in a trunk, and ran. Across campus
a Greyhound idled. Ready to run me where I would fly:
England, backpack, guitar, blank book. All these
Presbyterian boys packed for flight: George to the Greek
islands, Kenny to Acapulco. My black guitar buddy Will
was staying, though the town was dead all summer.
Near the post office I found him, slumped against
a myrtle, looking stoned. The letter he held expelled him.
His voice came to me, small, slack with disbelief:
“Where else could I go? I can’t go home.” I aimed
a mime’s camera at him crumpling the letter and clicked
my tongue: “Smile,” I said. “That’s my good Will.”
The bus door hissed open. “Come on!” I grabbed his arm:
“Gonna fly to to London, play the lowdown blues.
Eat that English jellyroll, drink that English beer.
If that jellyroll too sweet, we won’t come home at all.”
Two minutes the busdriver gave me to sing
and harangue Will to go: Will held back. Noon light,
and the shredded pink canopy of myrtle: that’s what
I see when I remember Will’s choice. By August
he was a piece of bad news. He did to his head
what his finger had done to the dean’s envelope.
His sole vengeance, stinking up a college building
for three days. But that green spring before he failed,
he put the fire end of our joint between his lips
and blew the smoke down my throat like a deep religious
kiss. Our guitars talked us through the same blues.
My hand, his arm—different degrees of sun-tempered
brown; smoke’s kiss; the twelve-bar slide; his sourwood
honey voice: for a while Will and I held something
in common. But in memory’s overcast Will refuses
my hand as though it’s a blindfold; stays locked in his
disbelieving stare at a picture grown too black
and white to bear: good white boys flying to Mexico,
England, Greece, goodbye, the Presbyterian wind
suddenly gusting, stripping the myrtle, stripping
the dean’s short white dismissal from Will’s hand
and Will running after it as I climb into the Greyhound,
looking back. Petals seem to blow past his head,
though the myrtle’s month is not May but August,
when I was not there, when my good Will blew away.
The Denver-based High Plains Literary Review ceased publication in recent years, and I miss its sense of the West. Here’s a sequence of sonnet-stanzas published there in 1996:
THE FLUTE END OF CONSEQUENCES
On a cliff in the San Juans he’s finishing off
Colorado with a flute. Reservation borders
of Ute and Jicarilla he blows away in four
rising notes. He inhales Highway 25’s meander
and sends it skyward, a dissolving contrail.
All the Christians in Colorado Springs
compressed in a Bach trill precise as a burst
of milkweed. He descends a minor scale: each step
darkens a town—Grand Junction, Gunnison,
Greeley. In the last low note’s fermata, Denver
unbuilds and scatters east on mules and oxen.
His scale reverses, a slow major climb.
He plays the return of wolves and basketmakers
to Mesa Verde, fingers precise on the cold stops.
Night rises out of the river, mosquito-winged.
Iridescent notes bite his wrists and neck.
The taking of Colorado required blood,
finishing it requires blood and he has just
one body. If the song lasts, tomorrow
should be mountains the coyotes will never name.
Willow-lit whitewater, buffalo wallows
the magpie consecrates with laughter. If his legs
last the night, if his arms keep the flute angled
between the apocalyptic grid of the stars
and the earth’s power to lick itself clean as a bear.
His forearms tremble; the ground itself bears up
his swollen feet; his head is charged with bites
of star-voltage, and the flute goes on vacuuming
power lines and phone lines, map lines sucked
in the tube breath by breath and dispersed as patterns
of hoofbeats, wingbeats, making the one sound
that solves everything it touches, the sound of water
running. Tomorrow mountains would be described
by snow, by avalanche and thaw, if he did not stop.
But the black hours last too long, he is no god
of uncreation, he must stop, eaten by insects, drunk
by sleeplessness and thirst. His mouth shuts, he sits
hard in the dust and dismantles the flute into a case
gilded with initials. He can’t even finish himself.
Out of his diminished range, Colorado dawns:
butter-light on the Bank of Denver and Ford dealers,
honey-light on beef ranches and gated suburbs.
The path comes back to his feet: it leads down. His car
reappears, parked close to the roar of the sunrise trucks.
All that silver power gone. His day job starts soon,
he must go back, clothed, housed, keys in his pocket,
wallet thick with numbers the state accepts
in place of him. But between trucks, he can hear
a magpie, and the river. And south on the highway to Cortez,
a woman drives with her knees so she can finger
a mandolin. In Rifle, a mechanic blows his harmonica
into the sage arroyo behind his garage. All it takes
is a trumpet dusted off in a Leadville attic, someone
whistling in Durango’s unemployment line: as long
as the song is overheard, passed around, hummed, it lives
and in the span of its life Colorado is finished.
Another defunct, Asheville’s The Arts Journal, published the following sonnet-stanzas in 1985–a sort of love poem to the western Piedmont and mountains of North Carolina, where my Hill and Long ancestors are from (and where my younger brother Anderson has settled):
Summer I missed his passing through. Fall he’ll shake
the goldenrod, and I’ll sneeze and suddenly see.
Amity Hill, Deep Gap, Blowing Rock: my face weathers
in these names while I go looking for him, ghost-brother,
sentinel in the fog of a Blue Ridge barn. He lights on
Grandfather Mountain, see, a wake of firefly flares
sifting down through stands of sky-laurel. His alphabet
is strung between the antlers of a deer skull, in the gut
silk of the writing spider. Split shagbark hickory
and find him, receding into the white core—nothing
like me, but everything I need to say where my own
hands have so far pulled me. His trail’s easy enough:
cross the Divide near Asheville, his password will pour
through your throat, down over cliffs and gorges:
Swannanoa, Nantahala. That ah! bounded by waterfalls
of consonants is what he stands for—Appalachia,
Pisgah. While summer hunts conclusion among
yellowing tulip trees, and the rain-fed candles
of mullein and chicory burn yellow and blue on
gravel-shouldered roads, I feel myself seasoning
like firewood laid up for some great private occasion.
While the wind is blowing, adore the wind,
that’s the first sentence in his Bible. He’s a creek-jump
ahead now, hair dusted with goldenrod. In that fine
coppery haze of dust rising off every earthly dying thing
he stops. His prayer is water in cupped hands.
Breathe the names: Wayah, Ossipee, Altamahaw.
The rest of his life held out for us to drink.
From one of the late issues (1996) of another defunct little magazine, Pivot,the following sonnet:
If zero was a cymbal in Nothing’s trap kit,
it would make no crash, no splash, just a slight
shivery ping like a slice of moon in dawn’s
watercolor wash. Insomnia made your bones
sticks in Nothing’s hands. Now it tom-toms
your heart, lets both bare feet go chick-a-boom
in the kick-bass and high-hat feel of sunrise grass.
One eye goes from crescent to full in that cold space,
then ping the other opens. Double zero.
Insomnia forgets the name of the thing it sees,
but the drumming’s good, hitting all the birds now.
They’d be Nothing’s accents except your ear says
robin, white-throated sparrow, and your mouth follows.
Nothing’s solo is over. Your turn now. And the day’s.
A rather different version of the following poem appeared in Southern Poetry Review in 1996:
AT A PICTURE WINDOW ON THE OREGON COAST, NEW YEAR’S EVE, WRITING WEST
On the other side of the window—the Pacific side,
where salal grips outcrop rocks so greedily
the surf takes few back, though wind and tide push
so hard I can’t really hear their letting go, falling in—
a pair of hands moves opposite mine.
On this side, a bowl of apples, leather bookbag,
bed, easy chair, writing desk against the glass:
meant in muted ways to make Yachats, Oregon
home enough for the last night of the year,
last year of the century. Out there the hands
raise a knife, a pen; seem to perch on a cedar fence
then ghost between rails among black plovers
over the surf’s whitening line. Almost
invisible hands, mirroring all I do with mine:
slicing fruit, tearing bread, writing the dead
grandfather and father whose portraits sentry
the desk back home where poems are made
of nowhere-stares and shallow breathing. A shell path
curves under the hands, down to the cliff where
black wind works black water, west edge of a year
that did not bless or wreck me. Hands like puppets,
disembodied wings flying under the wavering
lighthouse of a candle where, hours ago, the sun
of the last century sank. Who in the night writes me back?
Bodiless hands like these closed on mine, once, twice,
long ago, seizing through air-colored emptiness—
when a head-on wreck threw me against unyielding
windshield, when the liquid window of a wave
broke my neck. Whose hands can explain that, but a father’s,
grandfather’s, writing invisible retrospectives
from the far side of death? —Thrown in a highway ditch,
in shallow surf, I learned the pain song
in ambulances, alone. Why can’t they leave
that song alone now? Their hands hesitate, beckon;
they unwrite each minute I breathe in a world
no poem can make home. This world, whose gusts
flick the year like a rock into the Pacific. Put down
the pen, blow out the candle. What’s out there has no hand
in your ending well or ill. Turn down the covers.
What last year’s words don’t grasp, sleep and silence know.
Century of dead fathers, I’m closing my eyes.
From the Green Mountains Review in 1992, the following sonnet-stanzas:
If it lasts through this year’s leaves, I said,
if the handle doesn’t crack past last fall’s
gray tape, or the black tape of the fall before.
If I eat less, get a job that lasts. If we keep
the house, the marriage. Such supplications
drove the rake hard. These northern years,
I said, cost enough without me breaking
the good rake. In the near-dark I revised
my stroke until it was gentle as brushing
my daughter’s hair. But it was frostbit grass
I was combing. That night, I had to mend
the bamboo teeth with string and hot wax.
In the basement’s compressed quiet
I could hear how the handle might break—
a bone simply giving way. Could hear
more leaves letting go. My night hearing
had grown past reason—timing sick baby
breaths a room away, forgetting to breathe
when my wife begins to cry in the shower.
No good sleep through these provisional years:
each night sound, night thought, a dry chip
in the clock that goes If, if, if.
Leaves ticked the roof and windows. Did I
mistake a sunlit tree for strength? Strength
is leaves. When it fails, it fails in all directions
at once. Next afternoon I was at it again,
a householder keeping wreckage in check.
Keep the raking simple, I said, but as I raked
I watched my children downhill, their breath
rising over their leaps and shouts like white
safety signals. I admitted how king pines above
the river hold me to diligence when all I want
is an ache, a blowing away. Finally
I laid the rake aside. Spread a sheet
by the first wet mound, lifted an armful
of falling-apart weight. An image detached
from one leaf: a school photo, a boy grinning,
baby teeth gone. Limp, bleached, moldy.
Not my son, I said, not me, and sat on the sheet
wiping its ruin on my sleeve. If you ask for signs,
signs are given. In such gray light, it didn’t help
to hear geese crying as they flew upriver.
With a slightly different title (about the Umpqua River), this sonnet was published in 2004 in Portland-based Open Spaces:
KINGFISHER OVER THE KLAMATH RIVER
Bring the rainbow with a rattle, bring
its steel head and tail fin like beaten tin.
Dig under the fluent green skin
of the god’s length, be a retrieving
of the old covenant made young
in one fingerling of the spectral whole.
Proof is what I want, not title
to your sky—promise on the wing
made in a flash of live wet scale.
Be over me and with me, then pass
and that is sign enough, that is all
the signal I require on this spit of grass
where the river bends today around
the liquid days changed into one Pacific wind.
From a 1995 issue of Fireweed, “Same Wall” and “Dulse.”
The sag of my living room’s skin, its failing rose paper,
set me back in the century of waltzes. In each great house
a ballroom; in each dancer, a word for the woman without
a man’s inviting. Not that dance was beyond her.
She was to hang back by the damask to study the whirling air
of partnered ones. Was she poor? not pretty? She was not
to ask. To prop against silk briars until claimed or not.
The stags fattened on punch and cigars, and elbowed their
opposing wall, bugling laughter. Her shoulder-blades
dug at the plaster beneath the silk, Oh, let me in. In those men,
fear of the whirl where nothing held them up but a woman.
The wallflower’s hands danced between her breast and waist,
small steps. She hung, itinerant portrait in bad light,
for the study of men who would not let their eyes be taught
how to take in each mortal stroke of her. Into danceless
flowering ground she was invited, alongside their hair oils
and smoke, gold timepieces stopped in rigor grips. The waltz
century is a stone full of names the rain eats. And the briar rose
pattern that grasped her shoulders is gone: I stripped my walls,
painted them white. I host a dance party once a year—
wall-shaking boombox, couples, singles, plenty of beer.
Our dances make do with a circle, or a line, or alone, a press
of bodies all can join; our hip and head moves mean
to dissolve us in a huge tribal music. And still—as I fling my arm,
or whip my hair inside a guitar explosion—still, one remains
unmoved. One against the wall, as though to force its blank
open, and seal her off from our flail. The wall is flowered,
or the wall is not, but one has her back to it, not dancing.
______________________________
The word’s pass at sweetness makes up, almost,
for the bitter actual thing itself.
But you need to be a fool to believe raw dulse
generates new body and soul. In 1975
my body was flab, my soul a botch of Thoreau,
of Heraclitus, Keats, Montaigne. Hippies I knew
were turning, one by one, into miniature Zen
temples; my tall friend Rick swore that dulse soup
had simplified him. His house on the oak bluff
above the waterway was purged of old Rick-stuff:
now there was a bare space, jars of dry beans, a futon,
bamboo implements, the I Ching, a photo
of Baba like a fat pastry chef smiling Don’t Worry
Be Happy. And Rick kept repeating “This is me.”
And my dockside shack? Crabtrap on the piano,
fish-scales and mouse turds seasoning the floor,
old books blown moldily open everywhere. I cleaned house.
Then, like a novice Zen forager, knelt in tide pools,
tearing out wads the hue of wine-vinegar
to haul home, to pot-soak and hang on a laundry rack.
Fried brown bags are tastier:
I had to add pepper, garlic, scallions, ginger,
to build up a broth weak, salt and bitter
as the bad mouthwash of the Atlantic.
I had to, Rick forgive me, add hamhock.
Dulse crackled to parchment on the shelf with jars
of mung beans, bulgar, lentils. I went back
to corn bread, tequila, BBQ pork.
Whatever red tang of simplicity I required so
much just then, I got from boiled crabs, a bottle of Bordeaux,
the gills of a flounder jigged off the dock at sunset.
The better life I tried to wring out
of a scarlet seaweed bothers me less
than why its word grows sweet at this remove, dulse,
packed in the blood-salts of memory, permeated
by oyster mud, heat-shimmer and the aroma
of shrimp boats dragging up the waterway toward
those guano-whitened rocks where I bent, half-naked
and dumb as Adam, to rip out a rumor
of wisdom, claimed to possess a thread
of bearable savor if only you could get
the hang of how to let it age and cure.
The next sonnet first appeared in Willow Springs (1993), and was later anthologized in Naomi Shihab Nye’s What Have You Lost?
HOW FORGETTING WORKS IN LATE WINTER
Fog thrown over house and pines, flimsy comforter.
Under the pines, mounds of snow exhaling.
Out there Seth kicks the rotting cold, punches holes
in the snow’s breath. Over his head the sun is a white hole;
he scares a pine dove into it. Night-frost spines
my window. In the fire-grate, ash swirls, a flock
of gray wings. The air near me is so still it’s childless,
like a room fever has designed to finish its work
under the sheet. I finger the ache between eye and ear—
I run a hand through graying hair, like Seth runs out there.
My father was stationed at a window cold as this. Behind
his father’s house, a hill of frost and brier: doves hunched
on iron spears fencing the family graves. I ran at them
waving hard. I made small clouds of breathlessness.
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