I looked like my mother
when I was growing up,
curls framing the boisterous
mouth I’d gotten from her Tuscan base.

When I got older I took after my father —
surly and fed up with some
unexplained hole in my center.

It started when I was twelve, walking
an old trail on
an old reservation, the sign out front
proclaiming that “these four and one half acres
have never belonged to the white man, having been
granted to the Nipmuc Tribe by King George the Third…”

and although I wasn’t Nipmuc
and my dad’s reservation
was twenty-five hundred miles away,
the light became as sweet
as cornbread and my eyes grew fat,
clogging so much
they ran over,
and I did what little I could, climbing
a small hill to stand and face south,
singing a song my father had taught me
from an old vinyl record,
a Johnny Cash song
about drums, Indian drums
just on the fringe of hearable sound,
singing softly enough myself so I couldn’t be heard
ten feet from where I stood,
and I stopped crying.

I stopped calling myself “white” that day.
I told myself:
I will not be two at once.
I will choose the song I mean to be.

So for years I worked that way
and I thought I had it all together,

until I walked into the Pequot casino
for the first time
and saw the people spending money
in hordes,
the sound of cash bell and buzzer
playing a crazy dog dance,
saw the exhibits on loan from
the new cultural center and saw
people looking hard at them for once;
then saw the Goliath crystal
Indian
shooting a psychedelic arrow into the atrium
every hour on the hour,

and I knew:

there is a gap I will never learn
to live in, a place
between the anthem I learned
and the dirge I never heard.
The song on the hill,
the private song that made me swell with tears
and feel as though I belonged,
never taught me that being split
could mean
something other than choosing pride
in one side or the other,
could be
harder than simply choosing
to stand on a hill and sing
and decide I’d gotten it right for all time.

I sat down because my head
was cloven
and King George The Third,
disguised as a drunk on a park bench
in the indoor orchard
by the Wampum Rewards booth,
laughed at me and said:

Creating America was a bitch,
but creating you?
That was easy.

I’m thinking that if I scratch the back of my left index finger long enough a genie will pop out. He’ll be fat and awful with three wishes to offer but I’ll turn the first two down flat, holding out for the last one. He’ll shake his head and sigh and when he agrees to roll them all into a single ball of heart’s desire I’ll tell him I’m looking for a cure for the finger itch.

When the finger stops itching I’ll wonder what I’m supposed to do next and regret that I didn’t make the cure the second wish, leaving an answer to my current question for the third wish.

And a few minutes later I’ll think of how I should have asked for clairvoyance right up front and avoided all this.

I’ll be damned if I’m going to scratch that finger now…but ah, if the right one itches…

Do not speak to me
if you’re going to speak of
the way
my aura shines.

Do not say things about
the clan to which my ancestors belonged
or imagine the way my sun sign
could heat you up.

I wasn’t born yesterday,
or even ten thousand years ago
in Atlantis or its suburbs.
I know the score:

you want to and it’s unseemly
to say so, so you invent
a soulmate and make me
stand in for that Angel.

I am my own light, I can see you,
and if you need me to shine hotter
for you, just say so.
I’m no fickle candle. I’ll burn

without resorting to mystic fire.
I’ll just burn the way anyone does
when presented with the here and now
of shared attraction. No need

to gussy it up with some magic
you got from a paperback grimoire.
I’m ok being earth without heaven,
body without familiar.

Throw yourself against me solidly and I’ll
push right back until you push me
some more and we feel each other
without benefit of the Lord and Lady’s

heavy baggage. Want is its own
religion, lust its own spiritual practice.
The Wolf Clan, if it ever existed, won’t howl about
how we tangle each other up.

A hand is all you need, an empty hand. Let the crystal
and the athame fall. I don’t much care for the soul kiss
and the melding of our chi. Just give me your profanity,
and that’ll be Godhead enough.

good morning
everything’s
quite astonishing outside
and cliches on the radio
are stirring me
for the first time in
i can’t remember
how long

good morning
a grand morning
a stunner of a day ahead
walking around stunned
is on my calendar
which is on my desk
next to the unpaid bills
i’m still in bed
but i’m working on getting up

good morning
a grand day
a worth a grand day
worth a million bucks day
and something tells me
it’ll all be spent

i’m working on getting up
trying to get up
thinking of haze on the meadow
starshine and wood
there’s none of that here
those are some other guy’s
beautiful mornings

that million bucks says
a good morning’s always
followed by afternoon
followed by dusk
and then night
i’m working on getting up
before that happens

good morning
i guess it can’t be helped
it’ll be here and then be gone
my getting up gets it on its way
one leg at a time
my mother used to say
up and at ’em
my father used to say

good morning
i turn the radio off
spread myself across
the whole bed
pull the covers
way up over my closing eyes
get on with
the good morning
the best i hope
to ever have