This story may not be true:

a famous poet
once committed
psychological torture
upon a graduate student
in order to observe her behavior
and derive content
for a book of poems.

He was not alone in his effort:
he enlisted other graduate students
to assist him and observe and report
on their comrade.

This part is true:

as an undergrad I once sat in a dorm room
hearing this story from the woman who had been abused
or claimed to have been abused,
and I believed it.

This part is also true:

I told this story
to many people over the years
as if it were certainly true.

At first, I named names.

Then the book in question was published
to no acclaim
and general bewilderment: where
had the famous poet’s talent gone?

I kept telling the story.

The famous poet
later redeemed himself
with better books.

And I began to choose my listeners
and hedge the details,
and soon I stopped telling the story altogether.

This is also true:

I have read the work of the famous poet
in this story, and wondered,
and thought about it, and looked for clues,
and I have written a lot since then
and wondered, and looked for clues,
and thought about truth and redemption
through poems,
and nothing disguises the fact
that I am no famous poet,
but I believe in the power of fame.
I am no famous poet,
I am ashamed of what poets will do
in the pursuit of a poem,

and I wrote this.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

the preparation of substance
for consumption
is a primary concern. 
how to chop, mix, soak,
treat, flay, disembowel a thing
so it may be taken in. 
how to burn off its hide. 
how to boil it. 
how to extract essence. 
how to squeeze.
how to strain the squeezings.

how flow is controlled
is also a primary concern.
how information is strained.
how water is moved.
how the gates are kept, and
who keeps them.

whosoever knows these formulas,
knows the heart of living.

the oratory
is not a concern.
the literary
is not a concern.

that the literary
and the oratory may leap gates
is a concern.

it is of paramount concern
that the gates not be hurdled.

tiresome, that they are always
in flight. 
we would need to squeeze the air itself
to keep them quiet.

what if they tell everyone what they know:
that the gates are free standing,
placed randomly, and there are no walls?

this is a primary concern.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Your wings are not a problem.

The doors you must walk through
that shred your leading edge
are a problem.
The granite steps you must climb
that soil and tear your feathers
are a problem,

and you must love those problems
in order to solve them.
To simply fly over them
and spit upon them
is no act of love.  What will
your children do
if you do not take the time
to caress them into
a pleasing and comfortable
place to be? 

You will say: bah! Enough!
I will raise my children
far from the doors and stairs
that have bruised me.

But there will be new stairs
and new doors.  A right angle
is the builder’s best friend
and a sharp edge makes
for easy packaging of
right and wrong, approval
and denial.  Trip on a step,
bruise your wing on a frame, and
you are learning that they are there
to make pain obvious and avoidable
only by compressing and stunting
your passage.  Someone
vested in that will build again
wherever you choose to live;

perhaps you will become that architect yourself someday.

So love them, those shin-busting,
wing-breaking corners, too-little
headroom, too-steep stairways
that lead to the Heights for which you are longing.
Love them sternly, love them strongly,
do not submit to them without pushing through
and wearing them down with their unexpected joy
at the pleasure of your touch.

Before you fly,
flow through the gates
and make them smooth and soft
as if your flight was water coursing
over the ruins, as if the deformation
you suffer
is a token of respect
for the ones who will follow
more easily across the barriers
you’ve pushed so hard against
as you moved toward a land
full of promise fulfilled.

Never
in the story
I know best
and dread but believe in —
my own —
have I come back
from this far
along this trail
that’s run
through deep woods
full of storms and
filled with the running
leather lunged wolves
who harry me along
as if I were
their solitary prey,
but
I found myself lying on the floor tonight
and disbelieving, for once,
the most likely outcome
of that scenario;
instead
I heard the ocean
and saw the long horizon
and felt a hand reach for mine
and say
come, get up,
there are people here
who want to see you,
and the night was still
and though there was a moon
there was no howling to be heard,
only arms outstretched to me and
murmured, soft greetings.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Leave the shoe
where you found it,
on the sidewalk
in front of the house.

That broken sole, that torn toe,
may mean nothing to the owner;
maybe he’s fine with that shoe, maybe
it’s the only left shoe he owns.
Maybe he lost it running away
and now he’s safe and will return.

It’s not your place to decide
what is disgusting and useless.
The street
where the broken shoe
awaits its fate
is not your place to judge.

Today I want so badly to die

but October’s coming, sometime
soon, not tomorrow, not
the following day, but sometime
after August starts to bleed off summer
and the days begin to pale through September,
October will come. 

I hope I make it to October, to that month
when I’m glad to be cool, glad to be
needing a jacket, wondering how
I made it though the heat, happy to be watching
the trees turn and strip themselves
to nothing but bark and bone.

Ah, October, month of memory balanced upon
expectation, with its glimmers
of future want and last gasp days
of comfortable light and clarity — why does October
have to be so far away?  There’s too much fog
in the mornings now, and too much sweat

from late morning all the way to night.
What I wouldn’t give for October tomorrow.
I know it will come, not soon, not tomorrow,
not the following day;  but sitting here and burning up,
I can’t wait for October
when the earth will be naked,

when I may be alive.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

If you send me one more request
to become your fan,
knock on my door one more time
with God in your fist,
exhort me one more time
to accept Jesus as my personal savior,
whip a finger at me again
to tell me I owe you my attention and my fate;

if you touch me again
as if you’d earned that intimacy,
ask me over and over
for a number, a key, a sign;
beg me one more time
to take you back,
coat me with unrepentant irritations
so I need a shower ten times a day;

if you look me in the eye again
and steal my glance,
raise my hope again
and steal my thunder,
pat my back again
and steal my spine,
stick your hand out again
and slice my grip —

watch me turn, then,
into water;
watch me sluice
down this channel between us
and wash you back;
hear me whisper like silk on steel
to try and melt the block in your head;
see me take your hands in mine
still covered with my own blood
and gently, as if everything depended on such a thing
being gentle, turn you back onto yourself
and make you feel how ashamed you are
of your fanatic insecurity
that makes you seek me out
to join you in your lonely cell.

Walking by a pond,
I shiver briefly
near a mound of rocks
and rusted cans.

Because I prefer the visible world,
the blare of neon and loud comfort,
I ignore the possibility
that has just occurred to me,
that the mound covers
a maiden’s grave
and that she is calling to me
to open the pile and see her face,
open to the world, her jaw gaping,
teeth gray with soil, her hands gloved
in the rot of years —

how many years
has she lain here?  No telling, because
I will not stop to discover
if any of what I’m thinking
is true, and not a fantasy born
of my unfamiliarity
with the unseen.

I do not want to know if she’s in there,
or if the ground I cover
on my hurried way home
contains more like her — Nipmuc graves,
broken colonial skulls, the wrecks
of more recent people who remain nameless
though they shake me
as I pass. 
Every pond may be a grave site,
every heap of stones
a home for a plane
I will not acknowledge.
I do not want to know
where women
who never got a chance
to speak of rape
were raped.  I do not know
where children were killed. 
I do not know
how the poor suffered
on these same streets
back before affluence
covered their poverty.

In the suburbs, I never have to think
about why, in the middle of all this
light and sound, I sometimes shiver
as if the light
was full of ghosts.