Between Pieces

Stunned by winter's tympani
and how near as tapped mallets
the hail seems against glass,
there was plenty of time to hit

the buzzing oven alarm
on the trip down stairs,
picking up empty pop cans with
the pitched canvas kicks,

so I took a crossword guess,
made a phone call to mother
before attempting last week's dish sink
or water and a walk for the dog.

Easel lazes on spotted muslin
until the house chores ebb and let
sea foam swirl around my ankles,
yolk-yellow light my eyes.

Thank You, Maria Colvin

In a crater
in an apartment in Homs,
there is a satchel
of ripstop nylon
that will not melt
even at mortar temperatures,
covered now in pulverized stone -
a kit of necessity smuggled
to families become infernal

under a sin of shells arcing darkly
into hollow kitchens and gardens,
through air sick with your
last breath and the scorched flesh  
from scores of Syrians.

Save a journal,
what does a witness pack
that's not already abandoned
at the end of the world?
You've brought back all we can take:
a boy lies in his shattered street,
belly rising and falling until he dies.

nothing tastes like spaceman

We eat what aliens we might
sieve from our dark supposes.
They bring a tang of disbelief
to the back of the throat
when culled from those rickety
aluminum pie plate ships
flickering like fifties films
shot in the New Mexico skies,
peppered with far yellow stars.

Choosing Uselessness

The casement is all angles of maple:
sill, sash, top and bottom rails,
stile, stool and apron - solid wood.

Beside the window, branches
pound against the tide of the wind.
The moon cracks

the west crest of the canal,
plops down the poplar row
and rolls into the road.

Overhanging green swells closer
as heat and tree frogs screech
in the bell of the dark.

Stone in hand and wind-twisted,
I'm playing hopscotch
on the street chalk squares.

Blood Test Poem

Homework done and trash out --
my goal now is finish this meal without tears,
get to the kitchen and wrap the greens
and bones, little losses we won't toss.

There is no warning gong or whisper
when naivete turns like found cream.
I carry your faltered wilting in my throat,
unwilling to swallow or vomit.

Three days until a pay check,
still no overdue bills, but even
blankets in a car would be enough
were I to lose sleep hearing you breathe.

Goose Against a Blue Salmon-Skin Sky

Windows make me want to be elsewhere,
stop me mid air so I can plan to be cold,
scan what I've got in the closet to layer

and entertain potential worlds here in the house:
high maple holding a stone statue squirrel;
shuddering estuary slate-still before the falls.

So I am as much sitting at the black coffee table
as in the coupe seat driving through Chatham,
the wind blowing God's thoughts into my head,

memorizing the river that shuttles the hills
with strands of snow fall, clouds drawn down,

forgetting the lines of my hands branching
from the pattern of scales and feather vanes.

Kim Jong Il's Body

Kim Jong Il's body is corrupt and
following his spirit into corruption

Kim Jong Il's body is similar to
tens of thousands of other bodies
silent in the last days of autumn

Kim Jong Il's body can no longer
take nourishment as millions
of his neighbors
can no longer sustain their own lives

Kim Jong Il's body witlessly
stills to freezing like the Yalu
like the Chosin like the tractor
factory faces like the cabbage
in the can in the alley in the sooty air

Kim Jong Il's body cannot thank you
tries to bow but does not
wants to hold back each page of each book
but will not
wants to collect the last won from every
grandfather grandmother shoeless ghost

Kim Jong Il's body is smashed
in the bill of the oystercatcher

Mahler in His Middle Period: Symphonies 5, 6 & 7

The train schedule is indiscernible:
some nights two or three horns in long morendo,
some silent while cold stars twist into the hills.

Our linden wood bed keeps the dreams of Kalist
that neither the burned chapel at Worthersee
nor my overly-anointed nerves can dispel,

half-waking reverie where I race to the gateless
rail grade in the now-dark morning,
wondering if we will ever meet, the freight and I.

Here was the trade off: a summer house
for beautiful Alma; proper caps and aprons
for the children; all at the cost of voices

and the years of organizing tone:
one wants the folk songs of childhood
sung in one's own tongue,

the translated feelings that flee to me
out of the day's meal, a shoulder-shrugged blouse,
these scuffed boots now covered in graveside mud.

Someone must write the kindertotenlieder,
directing the audience to inflect
in the presence of the intoning angels;

bow to the principal and the final A minor;
to a portrait of fever under weakening poultice;
this calling bell by the sea bringing today's need.

Roused out of the winter quilt's weight with
family embraced to my marionette frame,
I try again to teach the divine how to love us.

Subactual

Light weakly tunnels this cavern alive
with whipped and grabbing trees,
snow-bright stone verging shifty road,
a whole night whiteout wheedling doom.

From culvert-piped mud-shape shoulder,
congregated by cackling overpass, up the gravel
to stave pavement fall-off and tell on treachery,

little orange cone people string along,
big orange barrel people stand aside,
white striped companion horses
steady in their orange net paddocks.

Only Seeing What is Near Clearly

There was no plan, there were pickets
leaning on the pool house;
and bordering the lawn, leaves
dense with the smell of working worms.
I put those things together,

didn't consider pending vines on my
pilgrimages to the compost heap,
satisfied to find the fence in snow,
and so stop throwing decayed food like
bilge into the open sea of the garden.

I wanted no confusion in the future,
having hallucinated half of childhood.
Some runaway boy packing pajamas
landed on the neighbor's concrete stoop,
stopped between home and farther.

Now, older and not home,
I wonder where the morning glories grow
but can't look too far into it -
such gifts may find and wreathe me
grieving the short-lived trumpets of dreams.

Early Snow on Scarlet Ivy

I see Peekskill Hollow deepen
as I roll over Hamburg Mountain,
ignore the pressure against my inner ear,
tricked eyes resting on the lesser Catskills
until the plunge past Breakneck Lane
curves an undercut stone bridge,
a lunge like sun down the ridge,
or your long slalom schussing a flurry of t-cells.

We are from a family of cancers
gracing early snow on scarlet ivy,
our relentless growth the same
as locust and sumac stacking chlorophyll
against every storm.

When the weather warms,
I'll hack at the light green sprigs
with a rush of blood
I just don't feel tonight,
all the pull of gravity and tomorrow
dwindling into the flats
below Heaven Hill Farm.

Rats and Mallards

When the roadway was dug up
for new drainage
and lifted from the bog,
it was summer, rainless,
the rats came from the heat
to our side of the parking lot,
climbing through the
poxy shrubs, where the summer
lawn ran brown into the
brown flower beds, and
I lay in a stupor and
watched them, acrobatic
in their berry-picking, and wondered
where rats live before
all the heavy front loaders
roar, before the by standing trees
heave easily out of the gravel,
before the pond gets
that ugly dust face.

I left before I heard an answer,
sobered up, stopped smoking—
last I saw the devil
he was teaching
the unhappy mallards to sing.

Practice and Back

The board tricks start before kickoff:
worn thin trashband shirts won't flap,
deck shoes, no holes, and jeans I can
goddamn bend in.

Rolling to the ball field hill is an
easy ride, a breeze past the spaniels,
two quick curves and lean into traffic.

I've had too many spills
on the downhill, face plants
getting this trip down fast enough--
wiping in the sand, on the curbs,
just to get momentum past the fire house.

So I show up on stage bloody,
waiting to stand and stare,
eye to eye.
You pop out of a car ride, hop
over the stopped cars on Main Street,
flip your hair off your face, perfect.

I learn my lines,
catch my breath,
sit down with you
forever and slowly
walk home.

Mahler's Third Symphony

Cool days, the pool too cold for a dip,
I am surprised to think that the night
is like a grave, hollow, solidly damp.

I wake up and Mahler is talking to me.
It is quite gibberish, and I wonder
if he is sleep walking.

He is taking forever to get to the point…
trumpeting and straying into old songs.
I sit up when he asks me to sing.

Mahler wants to hear pain and joy,
wants a summer’s relief, flowers
and satyrs’ wine and bread.

I sing for him the sleeping faces
of the children, and the night lightens.
An angel sits with me, no longer Mahler.

The deep cobalt sound of morning,
misterioso and very slowly,
climbs out of my eyes, into my sight.

Mahler Two

There are fingers involved
in the whole process, picking
vellum, penning, pouring
a plop of ink.

So there are hands
to push the piano
into a proper corner.

Did Mahler grab the chair,
abruptly jarring the desk?
Was he jumping up to
fix tea, swill port, pace,
to put off the first movement?

He had to write the beginning --
at some point, say, “I wait
no longer.” He cannot tell now.

My guess is a mind unfocussed
could commence the Resurrection.
One day, in the settling and side-lit
dust, he stirred a quiet fingertip.

Mahler One

This boulder doesn’t have to be
bigger. There are other,
bigger boulders.

There is one Symphony One
by Mahler. There is a Symphony Two,
too, but one One.

There are only four parts to Titan.
No more are called for but four.

And as the rules go around here
There is no more Mahler.
He is dead, and that is perfect.

Seems foolish to want
more Mahler,
and this boulder bigger.

Multnomah Falls

My wedding was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.

There were hundreds of dragons in the gorge,
scores of sprites and oriads at the falls,
the way my friends venerate the stupa.

That morning, my wife taught me
that it is holy to eat birthday cake with someone;
holy to go to a homecoming game at the high school.

In perpetual creation, each step is a coming alive.

Events Which Befall Our Yard

I only knew the bat was there
by the dung on the ground.

The borer bees spill wood
dust over the trash cans.

There are branches to clear
before mowing, the sky

bluing where the storm
must have loitered,

shoulders hunched,
leaning into the red maples.

Shredded emerald leaves
float in the pool.

The yard’s shirt is untucked,
its pants rucked and laces untied.

Elementals

The old women have a ritual for this place:
They go to the well and yell into it
until a breeze blows up.

They will tell you that a woman
years ago
yelled up a gale, houses were
flattened
and men were carried off
in the winds.

When seeds flew
into the famined fields,
two women shouted into the well
and rain came.

The well is older than the town.
It gives no water.

Dislocated

I’ve dug myself a hole
in the right thigh,
and poured the concrete
to hold a mail box pole.

I’ve put port windows
over my kidneys,
and let the swallows in
under my chin.

Thumped like a bellows
and belching emptily…
the night asks,
“To whom? To whom?”

The chipmunks won’t come out
from under the lungs
and give up all the closet space
I’ve justly abandoned.