Wish
What I want is to lie
with my back on the grass,
staring up at the sky
shifting shape with the clouds,
this vision narrowing
to that small sphere of life
out on 491
on the way up to Boone.
I would watch the water
in worn grooves trickle down
along the carved sides of
a cliff where men cut out
the highway. I want to
toss up dust from the ground,
swish my head among weeds,
smell the mist, pen a poem,
both to see and be seen.
And the Word Became Flesh, and Dwelt Among Us
locution to a mirror, the arc
of words returning back (mini
geologic echoes stretching
infinity) unvoid, but lo:
Christus victor, Christus sol.
The World is Coming of Age (or:) Tarzan and Jane
I was young and we climbed trees,
pretending the blades of grass
were a rainforest. For a moment
she hung
in
the air,
almost gracefully fluttering
like another leaf spent of energy,
flung outward from the tree.
We did not have cherry blossoms
where I grew up:
only the dried up carcasses
of leaves, brownish and
miscolored, the rain
ironically mixing them into slush
like the burly forearms of
a butterchurning marm;
a sluice of greenless mud.
It was mid-autumn.
Her fall looked fatal to me,
a descension from near-infinite
height, until the childish pretension
faded: the fall would not kill
– only hurt.
Her chin kissed the top of
a protruding root (it was a French
kiss, the root plunging its
tongue with sensual desire
into the red-brown orifice
where chin-meat used to be),
and she was unmaidened,
perforated in that instant.
Our mothers’ wails outdrowned
her own as they escorted
her to: the restroom.
The last glimpse of her
I had was of a
leaf
, birthed out through the undercarriage
of her jaw, the brown
carcass of a stillborn
summer.
An Audience
The cat was orange
and pitiful, its mewling
subdued but sharp.
It led me across the road,
its head twisting back
every few steps to make
sure I followed.
It had patches of hairless
scabs like kneepads
on its hindlegs,
and wandered into the ruins
of an old trailer home.
Reddish planks seemed
hung on strings of insulation,
waiting to fall inward
with the slightest shrug of wind.
The cat perched up on a stump beside
the dying hovel.
The poor thing didn’t ask for help,
but with a widow’s pride
licked its paw as if to say:
this is my home, little man.
it’s not much, but I have
the ruling of it.
I laughed to myself
and walked away,
the cat’s eyes like a king’s
watching my departure with solemnity.
Hypostatic Union
The very thinkings of God,
his own logic.
What pressure it must have been
to have the Maker contained
in walls of light pink flesh!
The thrum of blood pulsing
through tissue, vessels, heart –
every cell infused with Heaven’s
ether. What a mystery!
What new mystery is this?
The king requiring diapers
and breast milk,
a toddler in swaddling clothes.
The smell of myrrh to mask
the retchings of horses, cattle;
evidence of biology all around.
How fortunate the Man
refused to vibrate away, but
instead insisted on living the
contradiction: to have the Maker
contained in walls of light pink
flesh. And 30 some-odd years
later: what a whooshing sound
it must have made as he left
his flesh behind,
lower case t holding
Truth and meat
combined.
Homeostasis
“
”
What are they to me,
the words of old poets
and dead philosophers,
if the internal constancy
of life maintains itself?
Confucius says:______
but what does it matter
if yin
and yang
must be eternally balanced?
The system is closed ?
Then there is no meaning.
The dog barks.
The flowers bloom.
The sun burns.
The people breathe.
Until the sun burns out
and turns cold and the
Earth dissolves into
particulate nothing
and no amount of
spaceships can save us
but just prolong
the inevitable.
And the galaxy sucks
itself in
– a vortex –
and the universe follows
inward
‘til the spinning
mass becomes a point
so infinitesimal,
so pointless,
and all the weight
of all the worlds
in all the universe
presses in, and
there
is
nothing.
Nothing left to bark or bloom,
Nothing left to burn or breathe,
no one to drive the car
Groanings Unspeakable
Feet like hymnals
carry us inevitably
to the same asherahs
as our forebears.
This, too, is vanity
and a striving after wind.
‘For I will visit the iniquities
on the children
and the children’s children
to the third and forth
generations.’
Thus says the Lord.
Shoes
My old ones were cracked apart,
a single faultline running like
a Nike check up both feet.
The soles degenerate and thin.
I bought a new pair today,
the black of them unsoiled felt.
There’s joy in such easy exchange,
though I’ll bet the future will see
these shoes broken on the same planes.
Our gaits are unique as fingerprints.
Grandpa (2)… or (1), I guess
He would sit in his chair,
a battered old recliner,
and prop his feet up
not one over the other, but
side by side
(they were wingtips,
nicely polished).
I’d sit in the corner
as the grownups talked
politics and gossip,
religion.
And me in the corner
reading comix.
I didn’t ask my mother
why his anger sat so deep.
She told me willingly,
half-embarassed.
She told me
his childhood:
-how as a little boy
my great(?)grandmother told him
she’d have preferred
miscarriage.
Or, perhaps,
abortion.
-how as a teen, even,
he’d made a rough time of it.
No ego, no esteem;
warring with others,
quitting jobs.
-how the USMC
had saved him,
but only for the Vietnam
atrocities, and (later)
alcohol.
-how he’d lost his family
to the bottle
and ¾ of his heart
to the cigs.
It was years later when
she told me (through cupped hands, whispering)
he thought salvation
a work.
A work for which
he was not cut out.
He thought God a closed-hand man,
fists full of gifts you have to earn.
He thought “God damn”
could ruin the grace.
I understand you better
now you’re gone.
I bit your nose
when I was teething, remember?
at the elephant-circus
where trapeze artists
flew through the air.
I realize now you felt
you had no net.
The smell of your
kitchen still
lingers in my
soul.
I eat the fruit
of your table.
Grandpa
I like to think Nam made him
the way he was. He was a cook then,
as he would be til he died.
Making food for people with expiration dates.
It must be how Death-Row cooks feel
when the time comes for that Last Meal.
That’s what he did, really.
On a mass scale.
It’d mess anyone up,
turn em into brooding,
angry, callous men.
Men with blisters on their souls
and fire in their eyes.
Men in pain.
Which is what he was, while I knew him –
a man in pain.
A man who’d long since lost sight of Grace.
Do you hear me?
Do you understand what I am saying?
A man who believed in a god
more like a lawman than a father.
A god who’d take your prayers in good faith
and then drop you at the first sign of weakness.
Like we were meant to move mountains on our own.
I like to think that Nam made him
the way he was. I like to think
it was all in his circumstances.
Cuz then it’s not in the blood.
Then it’s not genetic, and I can escape the machinery.
Do you hear me?
I feel a pull, and it frightens me
because I’m becoming more and more
like the parts of you
I didn’t like
and less and less like the ones I did.
Riding Alone on a Road – Sept. 2010
Depression is a seatbelt
pressure-strapped to chest
and stomach,
closing lungs,
restricting movement.
A hideous thing. It is
a blanket of frozen air
dully smacking face
and feeling.
Depression
is a prime number,
indivisible, alone.
Depression is a red light,
stalwart defender
of crossroads.
And as the
car careens across
the trafficked intersection,
depression is the vacuum
left when driver flies
through windshield.
Untitled, Oct. 11 2010
have you noticed
how the symbol
for “recycle”
looks like
a Star of David
?
there’s a poem in
there somewhere.
i just don’t know
where.
Guerillas
When they fight
wars, they fight
whosoever they find.
Vaya Con Dios
I squished a caterpillar
in the middle of the road
yesterday. It was slinking
along, tending to itself,
an inch away from the lines
in the middle of the road.
An inch away from freedom.
I saw it too late to stop.
Turns Out Victoria Can’t Really Keep A Secret
She is a girl -
peeling back moderation
in skinfolds, twists
and locks of gently
curling hair,
an overabundance of flesh
and so little fabric.
She is no woman.
She is no icon of revolution,
sexual
or otherwise.
A femme fatale
caught in the tightening recesses
of her own
feminine fatalism, flaunting flesh
with no regard for self.
This is not a freedom-rite.
She bares herself half-willingly
in order to be seen
in order to be bared
and born
- half willfully -
in the minds of others.
It is a postmodern un-clothing
of identity, a de-construction
of self and value
- finding worth not in
what is (but rather)
what is projected (and thus)
what is not.
She is a swirl of tainted prejudices.
She is a ghost. She is a slave.
She is a girl.
She is a victim.
Drunken Night-Owl
We were staring
at some art together,
this stranger and I.
He pointed to some birds
in the painted trees and said:
Man, owls
are like
really significant
in South American shamanism.
I said:
Oh.
and he walked away.
A Patriotic Poem Found in an Army Ad
If you want
Army
to round out
when you graduate,
an Army officer
soldiers
what you
check out:
opportunities.
An Anarchist Poem Found in an Army Ad
Start with
training.
Then
begin your career
leading America’s
limit to
achieve.
Trying to Write a Nature Poem; Waiting on the Muse
In truth, it smells a medley
out here:
pipesmoke, rainwet grass,
rabbit shit scattered pollywog
across the damp gravel driveway,
the carbon footprints of SUVs
driven past on 194
(gas fumes spilling into
the ether).
Bees hop from flower to flower,
cross-pollinating,
unintentional third parties
in an orgy
of stamen and pistil.
I wait for something
interesting
to happen…
some woodland creature
to come up to me,
stand on its spindly hindlegs,
and say “Hello there!
I am Nature. You have experienced me.
Congratulations!”
It doesn’t happen.
Guitar notes reach my ears
from upstairs (noisy
neighbors).
I am still waiting.
Existentialism as Evidence of Mercy
What wonderful fractionalities
pepper our moments!
How strange that such small
insignificances
should butterfly up along
the gradient of time.
Picture this:
My chiropractor aunt,
collecting some coconuts from under the auspices
of palm trees (this is in Puerto Rico),
cracking them open
THWACK
with a machete (their juicysweet guts flowing outward)
under the shelter of some plantain trees
in my grandmother’s garden,
and me
standing there wide-eyed
on the pavement lining the grass,
watching.
I wonder what I would be like
had I not seen that,
had I not been there
for that small moment of familial bonding –
and this when I was still quite young.
Or this fond memory:
me, sitting on an old ripped-out
armchair from ATW’s van,
listening to the creaking of the drumracks
(almost splintered by now)
and wondering which trees were cut
(and from where, exactly?)
in order to make those racks…
trying to listen to the history
of all the things in the room.
The relief comes in seeing
that we have such a
Merciful Mover,
else wouldn’t we have
tornadoed everything by now?
