For,

Have you seen

any

pictures

of us

lately?

I saw one behind some

dusty book tops

tethered lightly by

old gossamer,  

on a faraway shelf,

hidden from every eye;

even the wind

couldn’t find it through

the cracked window.

That picture confined

and held a moment

in the four corners

of a frame

of three people on a ferry,

the chopping waves cleaving us

apart; no, fastening us.

You

Me

A baby…

We have two of those now.

But where are

You?

And here am I.

Waiting in the picture

Looking out into

An empty room.

Backyards and Forts

He had changed his nephew’s diaper once and only once.  His legs had moved and jerked themselves into frenzy.  He imagined his nephew a cricket and the beautiful friction his legs would produce the sound at once menacing and masterful.  He gripped the boy’s ankles and lifted his legs.  He heard quiet laughter in the background as the shit rolled its way onto the carpet.  He pressed it into the carpet fibers as he tried to clean it up still struggling to hold the ankles in place.  His neck prickled with heat and his pores opened wide.  That’s what he remembered about changing diapers as he changed his wife’s.

         He had hoped for children.  Soon after he and M. were married she suffered a ________ and could not reproduce.  She had lost most function of her left side and all of her bottom half.  It was frightening to look at as he gripped her ankles and made every effort to wipe clean yesterday’s meal.  He had gotten used to it, he had.  But the smell and the wizened parts made his stomach turn at every wipe and at every breath.  He thought of how a newborn might look as it made its way along the rough edges of what barely resembled her part—scraped and burned from the dry and cracked skin.  Thankful for the impossibility of it. He looked at M. and smiled.  She hadn’t noticed.  He wondered what she thought about as she had her diaper changed as an adult by an adult.  He figured she imagined herself changing her own child’s diaper or walking again or remembering what laughter sounded like.  They had both forgotten how to laugh.  Before that they had lost the dignity of what had made them a whole.  Now they were a half of a whole made brittle by the indignation of life.  They believed life had not just been unfair but had treated them unfairly on purpose.  They believed that since the beginning of time the universe was surreptitious in its affairs and had schemed its way along all trajectories of space and time to land itself full force upon their once significant lives.  Of course they had fictionalized this account.  They had forgotten the place when they first began telling the “truths” of the situation and when embellishment of the minutiae of their lives became commonplace.  No one else forgot though.  It is unfortunate as they were presented with this insurmountable fact when company rang.  It was a kind of cognitive dissonance that had run wild and mad and they were on the wrong side of the harmony they thought they achieved.  But they never really got along that well.  Changing one’s diapers at thirty-five will do that to someone.  But the spaces between them had already begun to show themselves much earlier.  A ten-minute trip for a package of cigarettes somehow took one hour.  An hour trip to the grocery took three hours.  And M. had always seemed slightly jarred; she seemed lost at a juncture in her body.  He reasoned that it was something akin to when those dying leave their bodies and they float above or below or side-to-side.  Something anchored M. to their relationship but it wasn’t him and something powerful pulled M. to-and-fro at his every rejection of it.

My God, did her love her. He felt tremendous guilt though too, a pairing which never resolved itself.  Their first year of college had been… glorious.  Yes that’s the appropriate word.  He had promised himself that when he dumped whatever-her-name-was in high school he would just date in college and get laid—a lot.  He was about experiencing life.  (He now reasoned that the universe had steered him clear of that too.)  But no regrets when he met her.  

He walked to the trashcan to dispose of the diaper.  The framed photo of M. standing if removed exposed the hole in the drywall.  He moved it back ashamed to be reminded of it.  She had yelled something about pain and he had yelled that she was a pain.  The situation forced them to relinquish and maintain self-control simultaneously at all times.  As often as they hated, they also forgave.  But the hate drove forgiveness inward and captured it.  His anger had built itself into a frenetic state.

Thoughts on a poetry reading...

(Lune)

A clarity of purpose and

Phrase. Digging deep,

a furrow of the heart.

(Couplet)

Crossing a ford into a river of words,

Littered like mites on the wings of the birds

The flox and coreopsis bloom at their flight,

Nested into the night, into the good night.

 (Skeltonic Verse)

A poetry reading           

in all of the hustle

with all of the bustle

and even a minor tussle

the words have muscle

The words

made us move

we danced on our hooves

and we even grooved

certainly renewed

and we left

with a greater sense,

a little less tense

a space to recompense.

(List Poem)

Purple punch on the table

Cookies stare down diets

Fat strawberries chocolate dipped

Cheesecake rectangles with

Blueberry kiss

Open door on its hinge

Lights barely to tinge

Words do not impinge

Audience: do not cringe

(Ritual Poem)

I open my hands

And push my fingers

Together.

Locked and reverant,

Facing north and up.

Double-fisted hope:

“Please Lord, let our

hearts touch, if briefly.

Let me gaze up to your

Power, even if underfoot.

Lord, crack me wide as your

Lightning cracks night’s

temperate sky.

And Lord, give me what I

Lack so I too can be gracious.”

—Amen. 

"My Grandmother's Closet"

“My Grandmother’s Closet”

My grandmother’s closet held things I didn’t understand.

Things that were too big.

Shoes and purse straps and dresses

too threadbare to make public. There was wrapping paper angled

in the corners and rain nets balled in the pockets of coats…

Old makeup kits and curler sets

crowded its floor like broken headstones. 

Buried souvenirs from day trips and week-long vacations

deep in its crevices.  She also kept her overflow of sewing materials

in baskets and bags

careless and cascading among overstuffed

boxes and empty suitcases. 

Boxes of things unopened and new and forgotten or decayed. 

Something surely drew her attention away. 

She used her closet to keep secret birthday and Christmas gifts.

It was a place we rarely ventured. 

I imagine she kept these items because

she no longer

thought about them.

Collected

and amassed.

I wonder how often she thought of the things there

never moving and bearing the weight of new things.

Bearing the burden of time.

Layers of things compressed into sediment.

I suppose those things stood as a kind of archive

for her life

fossilized and hardened. 

"A Vacancy"

The dirt reminded me of

coffee grounds. Fine-

tuned. Loose and spacious. Arid.

Dry. Perennials once grew there.

The bed now

bleak by time and inattention.

"Tilting"

Those days we sat harmlessly

Kicking water at

the sand. The pelicans meeting

the sun in a head-on

collision. For what

it’s worth, they never did

make it. Neither did we.

"For Lillian"

That look, yes, that look

            Pierced even the shadows

The child’s sentiment shifted from

            What was to what is

Staring up at—us, our figures

            A frieze of a daggered Greek Chorus

What once made her safe provided

            The alchemy for what stood

The child’s sentiment shifted from

            What was to what is

And we bickered and fakely bantered,

            (For her sake).

What once made her safe provided

            The alchemy for what stood

And she drew the blanket and the animals,

            A talisman around her unlined neck,

We bickered and fakely bantered,

            (For her sake).

Yes, I broke the “Golden Rule”—I

            Cursed her mother and made fodder of my words

She drew the blanket and the animals,

            A talisman around her unlined neck,

And we left that room together, though

            We could still hear her cries, muffled, through the plastered wall.

"A Moment Still Folded"

The vinyl creases of the booth resembled the lines in my grandmother’s palm. Her wrinkle’s deep, free rivers winding and burrowing their way from the droop of her ears to her once prominent but now weathered chin to the rounded edges of her mouth to the cliffs of her forward brow.  A history.  Our history. Those wrinkles bore our history, told of comedies and tragedies, of births and deaths, of hits and hits harder.  A history hid itself between each crevice of those wrinkles that were once smooth, that shone and felt of marble in her twenties and thirties, now lay themselves as witnesses and storytellers between the two coffee cups.  Who are the witnesses?  Who tells the story?  Two children and two husbands dead. A crippled daughter in crippled marriage.  The ashtrays at Smitty’s Café had not been emptied from the night’s last shift. The smell of bacon and old cigarettes wrestled with a honeyed Sarah Vaughn’s “September Song” on the local station. 

He imagined that the ninety-first birthday left little to be desired but he made his way north for her party.  Simple.  A dinner and a cake.  But something had been forgotten.  A trip to the IGA for the candles and she insisted she go with him.  They lopped down the walk toward the store where his brother broke his ankle after a hard shove. He turned back to look through the large picture window of the tiny ranch house.  The old television antenna they climbed to conquer the roof and the neighborhood, its masthead sacrificed to cable, loomed still. The cherry tree had long ago died and the brick façade yielded to an inch of space between the house and its own weight.  She had kept up the perennials—lavender and yarrow, day lilies and columbine—and the annuals—black-eyed susan and impatiens, petunias and marigolds—but they had long ago given way to a plain of dandelions. No doubt a decline of spirit, a shift in philosophy about her beginning and her end. The robust rose bushes that once peaked against the side of the house were thorny stumps that resembled the upturned hand of a skeleton. The broad and majestic silver maples along the rough-hewn berm had long been removed to make way for the garish though neat cement curbs.  The shade had provided respite from the sun and the sun provided too much.

They left the IGA holding hands.  She had gripped his hand too tightly as a child on the night walks they had taken and that had not changed now.  Snatching him back from the curb and from a noise.  Safe.  Older, he had laughed about it.  Just beyond the IGA was Smitty’s Café.  Looking at the café front she inhaled deeply and stopped.  This café dredged arthritic memories from every part of her body. It was here that she sat some sixty years ago.  They entered and sat.  Smitty’s had witnessed and told its own history. Proposals and rejections.  Hellos and goodbyes. Smitty’s had forced the hands of management and unions over banana cream pie and had softened the break up of the “Marys and Tommys” of the town. It had overheard truths and half-truths that could never be uttered.  A blind but eager listener.  Smitty’s had become a kind of secular confessional.

1971.  She and Neal had sat with their only daughter. They offered her an envelope of cash and papers to sign. Her son had lost his life, the lake taking every last one of those daring and beautiful twenty-one years. And she had already lost one child at birth.  Her body throbbed for another child, her daughter’s child. How dare her daughter fashion herself a mother.  She at the County Beauty Academy still wanting to be a girl, still wanting the independence that being eighteen gave her.  The baby’s father a shoeless loser. They both prodded and they both jabbed. Please say yes with our eyes open she thought. (Please say yes with our eyes closed.)  Her daughter answered. 

2007.  She wanted this admission to be her final confession and sought a reprieve from the boy—the man—that sat in front of her.  And the moment had arrived. The moment of truth she sought. The moment of release and reverence for a misinterpreted history.  The blinds were half open.  The coffee cooled.  The moment passed and folded.  She smiled.  He smiled.  She took his hand and squeezed.  Safe.

             

[Untitled]

My heart is pressed 2x4s

                  Did you not marry me for love? (Of course…)

Sandpapered rough on its edge

And in its right angles;

I smell the burnt etching of your engraving, hot

On my fine grain.

Mary stood at the Bridgestone Barn, its

Ancient ballasts at ground level, supporting heavy, knotted

Arches with an unfilled space between. Did I say

Pressed? Not pressed, but hidden,

an obvious gift.

Words like “cool” or “whatever” don’t apply

Here; unserious words for our serious work.

Some say love is a first-sight; but yours happened

Last (sight), an after thought…

How do you understand a love, an

abstract that we try to mold and frame;

A bold tangent crooked in its space, intersecting

where it shouldn’t.  Rough edges unplaned.

*******

He set the Bridgestone Barn ablaze at its moorings,

the old pine in resin shadows, the limestone laughing.

Jacob hoisted the ladder to the famed loft and climbed, and he

Sat waiting for burnt dust of the hay, the scent

Knowing its direction, up and through and over.

Will you burn like the stone and timber and the ash? Will you burn

                  like I burn, a far and a deep smoldering?

You will watch a black plume rise; you will taste its toxic flesh

From a mile away or two or never.

The barn, a laughing phantom, a pantomime of time.  

It screams out in its own derisive misery,

To at last laugh at our own failed history.