POEMS  

The Rock Cycle
         for Lynn 

Modern day patron saint of lost causes like a lesson a long way from the darkness

that hinged one day to another      when all the pots and pans echoed his absence

like sediment washing through the rock cycle inside me    everything eroding with the swish

of water into fragments  dissolution   you were watching              my hands full of sand

broken hourglass that sat on the rocks and filled the pockets of my near drowning

And somehow you kept me from washing away with the tides so much later I emerged

began to wash the dust from my white window sills again   

I was folded and stretched by all these fault lines those strike slip boundaries

are the danger in two people moving next to one another  and we were smashed and crushed

but in the end neither of us came out on top we just jutted vulnerable into the pale sky

as we sat with dead hearts 

coffee  cold pizza alone that Thanksgiving

I never thought that I would be subducted through this fire                but now I believe in undoing

and transformation because sleeping tearfully on your couch that winter somehow saved me

so this is a thank you for planting seeds

in the spring when I thought salt was sown into my fields—

That spring we watched the sky from your yard go neon over the soaring fields

the wind had blown the topsoil to our windowsills where we wiped it away later         

but that day the furrows were just planted even though the bedrock was painfully near the surface

and when I looked into your face I saw my own reflection—

everything hard and soft at once

and endings that aren’t happy

but aren’t really endings at all

We stood there watching this great ring inside us

as the sun set neon over the plains:  the deer were just at the edge of the field and there was the faint sound of a tired engine turning over in an old man’s back yard

a bride’s bird bones were singing to the chime of church bells      

a sore back resting against the kitchen counter tea kettle boiling     

 there was a hacking cough a faith in redemption  a cup of tea    paper wrinkled hand— 

See, even now we are vibrant and young and old and ruined at once

frayed along the edges,  we are broken and new  tired and wise  

moving through the landscape, always breathless,

breathless.

Bracelet 
         for the Silversmith 

 Silver cuff 
bracelet, heavy. 

 He cast it into a mold
of gray rock. 

 Laughing as he made
the liquid silver
into tiny skulls
to adorn it. 

 His fingers bent
sideways 
with age.

 *

 As a boy in the 1930s,
he killed a rooster
who was sparring his sister. 

 It had terrorized
her for months. 

 And he killed it. 

 And then wept.

 And put it down
the outhouse

so no one would know. 

 A good rooster 
was no small thing
to a poor family.

 But no one 
ever found out
what happened-- 

 He carried that alone.

*

 Chill in the room
as he told that story

 and then
he struck the silver,
and laughed

and laughed,

 tears streaming down 

his face. 

 *

It’s heavy on my wrist-- 
skulls and roosters,
my dear, departed friend. 

 Tears streaming down 
my face,
and right at that moment 
I remember him
making the whole room roll
with laughter

 as he pounded it all
into something
I could carry. 

A Prayer

Down was falling like snow

across the sodium glow
of a city
streetlight
after the day
unraveled
in my hands.

Hungry,
thinking of manna,
of sweet water:

Oh Holy Web
holding me
between God
and the sidewalk

Open me up,
just open me up.

Fall

The sunset converts green leaves to glitter
against cornfields, their stalks taller
than I can remember,
laughing, harvest time strong with the smell
of dirt and unwashed bodies
on these roads that cut
beanfields and barns, roads parallel laid
in grid miles
that stretch as the roads
change their names at county lines.

The earth flows
so ripe it nearly explodes
and I am a top that spins dizzy
knowing it will fall down soon

So I say thanks be to the hooks
hung too heavy
and thanks be to cold winter
days spent pounding your head
in the dark. 

For today the earth burns
and it hasn't always
and it won't always, so thanks be
to all that makes this moment,
this month, this cycle, ignite
itself so brightly that its beauty
nearly blinds me.

Through Forests

I took him down the train tracks
which stretch through the forests
that make up the united states
of every heart, balancing
on nothing but rust,
the smooth tilt of rail.

He would later move into our house
while the river was overflowing
as rain poured over winter ice.

That was between his stays at the psych ward
where he became a hollowing
vibration of before.

My mind has visited the houses of his youth.
Dirt basement. Peeling paint, dirty gold carpet.

But the trouble with living
together is that need for solitude burrows
down and drives its own stake
of sadness.

So he moved back
To some other life:
a basement darkness
of brush burn and thorns.

Since he’s gone back, there have been nights
when my eyes drive
to a place on a dirt road far from anything
and walk toward the woods,
sentiment of this solitary body

and still always the arc of an arrow
between us.

I keep dreaming of him standing
against the empty pane of a window.
A psych ward soft body.
He tells me
it’s time to leave.

Careful Measure (Or, On Schizophrenia)

The weight of water in this summer
of pale ends, tans faded past the heart smack
of your illness that came like a door, slamming
through your body.

The earth’s curve speaks ever of ellipsis
in this corridor of difficult memory
where I stumble through the hardwire realization
that your brain’s misfire trumped everything
and started this free fall.

This life to debris,
the terrible weight of gallons.

Where do we go from here—question mark, bold
and sorry, echoing on in a trail toward sleep
where I see you at the far end
of my dreams.

(But my dreams fall like shot doves,
one by one
under this pale night of haunts,
long-tone of lonely
that drives toward the ramshackle
concoction of home
that’s buried under your brain’s explosion.)

And I am wishing this
would trace its fingers over my body and be gone, a ghost
distilled through air, eclipsing this summer
deep tread of my grief gone

—

wishing that God would open his mouth like a rainbow
and infuse your skull with light,
transport us back, via some divine elevator,
to the top floor of stars, where we stood in the sky
laughing,
laughing.

Water Vapor

Miniature ping pong balls are falling
disguised as snow today.

Like the whole sky
is just a lottery where battered white balls
are sucked down—

The water has been around though. It ties us
to Jesus and Muhammad, you know.
Those old wooly mammoth men.

We’re breathing their water vapor in—

This story is stuck to the inside of my teeth.

It doesn’t want to come out, like lynx
that grow full of timid terror
and refuse to peek their eyes out
even as they move
through the bone extension
of hunger.

*

When Saddam Hussein was pulled out of some hole
into the light,  terror-eyed and matted,

I felt sorry for him.

Wild-haired hiding of a man

who loved hygiene. 

*

I still see him two decades later.  The snow is just water you know.

It stays cold on my teeth
as I memorize
the distance between here and there
and here.  

Living
       for Gilman

Anymore I find him sitting in front
of the glow of the endless
History Channel specials,

Napping. Looking more like his father
who hangs stern, framed on the wall.

Deaths piling up
thick as makeup
have been dusting a fine silt
of sadness
accumulating since he lived
without electricity
on an old ranch.

He rarely smiles anymore,
an all-business kind of man,
but sometimes,
sometimes, I can get him to dance
with me in the middle of the living room
when the right jazz tune
comes on the radio
.
His house slippers gliding
across the carpet
next to red painted toenails,

feet swinging wide arches of laughter
into the late afternoon.

A Blessing

Two-year old
child who climbs onto my lap
with your monkey limbs this Christmas,
a silver bow stuck
to your small blonde head,

Little girl on my lap
who touches my belly
with palms the size of thin mints
and asks, “Baby?”
because your mother who looks like me,
thin and pale and dark,
is cradling
the hope of something new.

Little girl who climbs my body
like a mountain:
Let there be sunshine that moves
through your fingers. May you memorize
the wrinkles of old faces and their songs

and be filled with wonder

even as you watch the creaky
movement of skeleton trees
that give everything they have
to grow again
with the coming of spring.

Anniversary

A future forged in ignorant instants
on this rowboat.

Steam bent long planks once,
the knuckles that made this boat
swollen from stings that swarm
across years

It warns of the rough-hewn
benediction:
this stone skips
how many times?

Love Poem

4 in the morning alone
eating a cold eggroll.

Because the groceries moved to New York
with you.

But what of the early morning quiet
in small towns?

Leaves that blow
across empty cornfields.

Lone dog illuminated
by the sodium glow
of porch lights.

I am a town
with six stoplights.

You are a traffic jam,
a designer handbag.

My heart is a farmer on a tractor
who is holding up traffic

4 am eggroll--
the tangle of highways
that stretch out
like a morning yawn
between us. 

For the Bishop 

Years after your death and I still see the swish
of your robe, well-marked steps over the sidewalk,
almost ethereal among the trees barely beginning
to tip towards the buds of Easter.

Always we’d cross paths in the sunshine
of four-o’clock light tipping towards fade.

And you, like an open door in the distance:
a nod, slight smile, remnant
of our passing this place.

Always, the teller behind the text,

the unspeakable flow of hours lost to jet lag
but when you were here, you opened your hands
in the light of the afternoon walk

Serene, despite this suffering,
and you looked at me,
always said into silence—
Listen.

Car wreck, blood of your body meshed through
the once measured movement of your robe. It is Lent.

Time of waiting. Who put the ash
on your head? Who moved your cap,
cradled with crosses, each carrying a story?

Who heard the last tale, the disciples and Jesus spinning
through the subtext?

Before you died, the college demolished your house, paved the place into a parking lot
and like a Buddhist monk, building the wheel of time
and then destroying it, you cast it like sand to the waters,
and kept walking.

Your hands always papery,
bearing prophecy when you spoke—
perhaps it was just the perception
that follows a lifetime of long patterns,
beginning to end back to beginning.

And truth be told, before they told me you died
I was sucked through a downswing,
this bed, my dwelling for days.
I hadn’t told a story, or washed a glass,
but I dreamed you— white robe glimmer, gossamer.

And in the morning you are gone:
No more swish of robes parallel the sidewalk,
meeting by the river in silence.

Still, I walk under the simultaneous sway of the trees
bearing through roots and branches
sending buds upward in air,
drawn through this wheel,

this cyclical spoke,

hope.

Thanks

Almost Christmas
he pulls
a single orange
warm from his pocket.

The peel falls
in soft pieces
and we sit 
in the cold kitchen,
separating segments 
that suck the gray 
light.

Widower

Days the sound of metallic plinks-
like guitar strings.

The sound of a single spoon
on a cereal bowl. 

Small Truth

Students gone in their happy bustle
and I sit with a green apple.

It is slightly bitter;
I’m thinking of you.