happy father's day

Jerome K.
1933-1996

By your workbench in the basement, I found
your navy blue hooded sweatshirt with its holes
and white paint stains, and I don’t know how
you fit into it; the sleeves are so short my wrists
are exposed and cold. I remember a version of your face,
from pictures, and now your clothes with no body
wanting to keep going, to push along through
the remembered rooms, as if your ghost could uncoil
the tight aching in my chest, as if you could say
don’t dream of saving me, as if you could be saved any longer.

-- from Never

the archer

The sky was praying to itself in
the glimmering silk of that May night,
sky full of lions and cranes, archers

and doves, all burning the psalms
with no need of God, and I thought:
all this I love will outlive me,

and beside you on the river path I felt
the ache in your slight body as you watched
the stars flash and haze in the prairie

blackness, an ache relentless and jubilant
as if you had touched a new lover: how good that you put
the night on to wear, and I wanted

the stars to be feverish fistfuls of poems
to you, kisses on your flushed eyelids,
the honeyed blur of light flooding

from a screen door you’re approaching
that’s home to you. Nights like these
you know what life is for. You don’t

need to translate the exact point
that the archer’s aiming at, my love.
The arrow’s flight has already made me

silver, made me shimmer like the rain
that soaks you, inconsolable, the
storms you wish would calm so you

could see yourself reflected again
in the endlessness of the shining sky --
hoping to be, this time, the one

unharmed, serene figure in your life
that only wants more life, however
stranded you feel, however unmoored.

i hereby revoke my fuck it.

Sorry for the tantrum. I think it's over now. Thanks to J & P for being so steady and reminding me of what's really real.

fuck it.

I'm not a good poet. I'm shutting down the blog.

Thanks to all who read & commented. My gratitude & fondness
to you.

tiny hearts (rev 1)

You don't want this prayer to ignite.
Not of one who lies on a cardboard bed.
Not of one whose body has turned to hackberry bark.
Every night the red heart in the small glass bird flickers
and I wish to bury the bird on a morning
when its wings are not flapping in me. It is the last
week of warm April and I try not to dream of the incendiary
tulips that flame orange and red and infect my eyes.
My legs drag like thick roots, pulled without artistry,
and I keep giving myself to you as the incorrect yes –
an insect pressed into rainy air, a song for the why not of death.
How did I learn to come back from breathing
the river, that lonely submerged city, watching in
my silty clothes as carp jumped and broke the water's surface
with such unconcerned fluency? I have wanted to be those fish.

I have wanted to live unrehearsed, and not have the sun,
turned up high on the budding maples, make me despair
for its beauty every day. But I am an old fire. My ashes
will bless my own forehead when I die. My father is king
of the underground and I want to kiss the letter of surrender God
placed under his breastbone. Surely his heart defrosted long ago to
spring's rhythmic drip of water from the blind snow above. But
my father only stares at the walls of his coffin and so I wear a
rosemary bloom upon my chest that I cut away to resemble his heart.
I prattle with night prayers. I sleep to get rid of my body.
When this year began, I was sitting under a half-slice
of moon in quiet’s field, my angel for the asking
pinching herself shut in the sky. I needed only a lucky accident,
my numb fingers burrowing in the snow,
tying hearts in the dead clover, as if that would bring me love again.

"it's now after all" ( lyn hejinian )

What stars fall on you? Is your horizon still? What rules do you break? Do creatures in myths live for you? Have you watched Orion sliding westward in the ten o’clock hour? Do you twist your hair as you watch TV? Do your dreams have orchestra scores with violas and contrabassoons resonating like human voices? Do your ghosts glance into the distance for you and name troubles that are barely spectral and flutter harmlessly? Are you haunted by the river, its hurry and eddy and snags, bald eagles unsummoned and pressed against the distance, and the sound of water flowing and fish plopping that you cannot catalog but only be continually surprised by? Do merciless memories visit you at night, mirages looming with awful, distorted faces made of slapping words, and do you sit like the shadow of a bird on a wall as the lamplight keeps the terror at bay? Do your cats pretend they’re in the circus, performing astounding feats of feline grace as they leap to catch super balls in their mouths? Does disarray or revelation come to you unexpectedly? Do you have toys from your childhood hidden in the back of your closet or the basement? Do you lose track of time when you explore the dictionary, page by giddy page? Is your life wondrous? Is your body a map, a color-riot of lines, freedom to see the world openhandedly, or does it inhibit rebellion? When grocery shopping do you write poetry for the squash and apples, the clamor of the floor wax machine, the 40 varieties of tea? Are your thoughts apparitions until you pull them down ravenously in solitude? Would you throw your alarm clocks to the wind if daylight could wake you by softly calling your name?

Will you tell me again? Will you tell me all your stories again? I was curled up in a rocking bed full of broken bottles, talking to what-never-did-exist. Sometimes all I do now is turn from side to side, not knowing my fate, or if I have one. My eyes are full of tears because I’ve just caught my breath, or do I mean I'm trying to set it free?

Thick: my flailing silent questions, spasmodic breath, longing.
Your laughter: high red bursts, mind's drop of honey, the life ...

a false-spring dream

1.
Nothing happened. Not when the sound of you walking down the hall so completely fucked me up for two days that I wanted to drink. I missed you and was very lonely. But since when did getting drunk alone ever make me less lonely? I stood behind you in line at the coffee shop and felt myself growing rawly transparent and disappearing when you walked off without a backward glance. This proves we can exist in the same world without being together. (no! all it proves is that life is a burned puzzle, a heart stutter.) Judy Garland sang "Get Happy" all day today (we're heading for the river / wash your sins away in the tide) and the warm air, the inquiry of spring, made me sadder than still feeling how soft the inside of your wrist, the blooms breaking now and no one to tell, remembering the last two Aprils, and how I want to unblacken my betrayal, give you back the love I stole, and how I want to carry you past the hells I made and into prayer. How I want you to write your secret languages in the palms of my hands, walk through me and back like I am the wind in your room, and then hold on.

And nothing will happen. Will you ever read this? I can't take anything back. Only carry myself for a little while and settle my nerves, depend on the river, and lead another life altogether.
(a burned puzzle, a heart stutter ...)

2.
Nothing happened so why not blot it out? I daydream things that are implausible and stupid. I am effacing myself, I have wanted to efface myself. Do you still hate me? I have coveted suicide and tenderness. What self-pity does after an adult life of it. I am nervous with gutter bravado. I fall in between I belong here and there is no place on this earth for me. And yet I am gathering strength even as I don't understand.

I love what I should not love, and cannot see the end of it.

letter from jones street

January 7, 2001
Dear Philipp,

Forgive me. I’m drunk again.
The whiskey is holding time still.
Even the guitar strings go on thrumming
without the hand.
Where to find you?
You told me you will be singing
in the one red room
in all of pale Germany.
Tonight I stand in my front yard,
wind lifting my scarf like birds’ wings,
and anxiously raise the nets of silence,
listening for your voice to slip through
and bend me down under the branches of the maples.

But I am lonely, Philipp, and cannot
bear all the beauty in this life.
My eyes have been pinched shut by a star,
and there is dark in me. The colors have closed.
You, Philipp, are a bird who can still rise up,
cross oceans, find me in these miles of fields.
Pull me even with the lines of your body.
Fasten me to you.
I, who will never be brave,
who will never be pieced together,
will wait with you for the morning storm
that will blow the burdens off our shoulders.

back home and recouping.

surgery went smoothly. the two stents that have been in my pancreatic duct since october were removed. i'm taking the knockout prescription pain drugs and am hazy and cozy on the couch, every few hours delicately lumbering to the kitchen for hot spearmint and lemongrass tea.

at mayo clinic ...

surgery tomorrow on my pancreas.

philipp, play "photonegative" on your guitar?
alice, would you sing?

deep in winter

You are so deep in winter, the bathroom faucet knob squawks when you turn it on in the morning. Something like your shape in the mirror, but you don’t want to look. Even your body lies to you, hunched shoulders and blackened eyes telling you stories you wouldn’t dare to believe. What you say to yourself as you brush your teeth threads through the mirror frame and gets tangled up in itself, the text snarled in the frame like knots of your hair you haven’t brushed out yet.

So deep in winter
– cats sleep in broken-windowed garages
– you warm yourself running from bar to bar
– the wind is caught in the spaces in fences
– you drank seven cups of hot tea today, all different kinds

You believe in things like picking up the check and true love because they represent God to you. They make you feel better. You can live from day to day with some of your words missing, stuck in the mirror frame along with the river water ghost you leave there each time you study the way you look. Your drafty, windy head blows itself off your shoulders and you're left with the reverb vibrating the springs of your ribs. The winter is so long and at the end of it, we will pull your body from the ground again.

[ Philipp, one for you: I’ll tie some poems to my shoes so when I look down while walking, I’ll think of you and beauty and perfection and derangement. Ten years since I wrote that to you, and finally the poems on my shoes are my own. The text is being threaded through the frames and the story coming out is mine. I'm impatient to find out who I am but I'm just crawling along. Regrets piled high wherever I have been. ]

mom worse.

please send good thoughts her way.

belief

I was born and the nurses swaddled me in sterile gauze to soak up the rain. I was born and my mother’s heart went missing. I was born when the Americans claimed the moon. I was born with all the whiskey I would drink sparkling like glass chips in my bloodstream. In this chilly prairie eternity, there’s nowhere to go. Those who are broken press up against death and cry to God, and this slip into belief binds us to one another. It is a murmur of an opened reliquary; all that is left of us is rippling with the river through the city. Certain bells toll and they are never heard, hidden in graves, ringing in coffins, resounding in dirt. Wanting something pretty out of grief, the widow of a radio repairman builds wind chimes from vacuum tubes and roots of grass. She belongs to those who want to hide. She considers disappearing so that she will be declared dead. Let the stars pinch shut your eyes. Be happy that joy is rare, that your name counts for nothing, that your soul adheres to your bones. Be happy, because love conquers all. Our days are relic-filled, and we stare down the long relay of twilight to darkness. Love conquers all, but we break our own hearts every time.

my mother ...

... has broken her leg and is not well. All best wishes for her.

the television era (rev 3)

1.
Do you remember when you were five, back in the television era, when you stood in front of the TV screen and switched the picture off and on and off again, watching the reflection of your face magically appear and disappear in the glass with each turn of the knob, while the real story collapsed into a staticky white dot that quickly blinked out into blackness? Do you remember the curled brown backs of fallen leaves crumbling against the curb as the hurry of passing cars whooshed them off dashboards and back seats? Do you remember things slowly getting worse, each season wiped blank, predicate and cause-and-effect rustling like birds’ nests untwining in the maple trees that canopied our street? Barely old enough to tie our shoes, we tried to grab hold of worry swirling in mid-air, the mitten-muffled clap-clap as we chased dying things in the wind, each fragile part of speech I caught broke like cracked ice into a stutter, and you laughed because I was so serious and bedecked my red stocking cap with a sheaf of leaves stripped to their useless stems.

2.
Tonight, I can’t pull the truth through the spaces in between snowflakes. Everything that is not sky turns to sticks and is struck by a wind I can see but not feel. I open the windows and confess what I love but should not love. In such a dusk as this, I don't want to live unadorned. Standing in the yellow light by the back door landing, I tilt my head back, gather a mouthful of snow, and pray, let me swallow magic.

3.
And no, I cannot free the bird trapped underneath my skin even though its wings beat me into speech, these shattered lines, my mouth crackling with static as I burn away the kiss that turned into lover and then other. It is never so quiet as when you pass me by. I press the ellipses of my fingerprints on your shadow. You might pause, feel something, look back. And then turn away.