I got nothing today —

just the cackle of a neighbor
and the steady breathing of the cat
while the heat kicks on and off.

The world goes on outside…
I take it in.
I spit it out for others to use
as they see fit,

but it’s got nothing for me.

After working time
comes supper time
and after that comes
chocolate time
and after that
comes sleepy time

and after that,
animal time, when
you are asleep
and not dreaming.
You’re an animal then,
in animal time,
the only time you’re not
slaving, eating, or caught up
in human re-visioning.

You don’t know this
when it’s happening,
but don’t worry
about it — you’re human,
and your ignorance of it
is to be expected.
You forget the animal in you
in order to free the human,
but the animal
does not die
and it comes out
when you have left
working and supper and chocolate
and time itself
aside.   You’re mammal then,
warm blooded and
present only for yourself then,
living without obligation.

No one knows
if the mammal dreams
in some way, its internal life
undetected by us, in those moments
when we are being human.
You can search for it if you wish,
but you’ll likely be disappointed.
Some things you aren’t likely
meant to know
though it doesn’t mean
you shouldn’t try.

Perhaps some day
you’ll take a mouthful of chocolate
and the beast will flash
into view,
animated by pleasure.
I wish you luck.
If you discover
its hiding place,
tell everyone.
We are dying to know.

The girl
poured slowly out onto the pool deck
from her room, turning to slide
the door shut behind her.
I can’t take look away.

At this point in the poem
my Audience takes me to task
for calling her a girl.  “That’s a woman
you are talking about, not a girl.”

The Audience is correct, of course.  “But calling her
a woman,” I protest, somewhat sheepishly,
“feels like a lie from the height of the tall pile
of fifty years I’ve got under me.  Every one that age

still appears a child to me, no matter
who or what they are, how they look; I can’t call
a girl a woman in the voice I’ve got to work with
at this point in my life.”

“Then you need to change your perspective,”
replies my Unforgettable Audience.  “Don’t call a woman
a girl if she’s a woman, asshole.  It cheapens her.  How old
was this ‘girl’ — eighteen, nineteen?”  Plenty old enough
for you to notice her as a woman, right?”  And the Audience

has me dead to rights. She was beautiful; tan skin, dark hair,
shy blue eyes, slightly chunky with a white bikini
that didn’t quite fit according to the rules and customs
that we’re supposed to believe…” “GET OUT OF THE POEM!”

snaps the Unrelenting Audience. “Just for one minute
can you stick to the point? We’re dealing with real life here,
with objectification.  You can’t even see her because
you’re obsessed with that body, and calling her a girl

helps to reduce her worth as a human, while your self serving
commentary about ‘society’s rules’ is a cover to make us think
you’re being deep when all you want is to get your rocks off
with some thinly disguised eroticization of the moment.”

“Well,” I offer, “she was the one wearing the bikini…”
“There you go again,” the Audience scolds, “blaming her
for your clumsiness.  I don’t know what to do with you.  You seem
so intelligent, so smart about so many things, and yet
you can’t stop for a moment to call this woman a woman,

to address all the possibilities she holds…”
And the Audience throws up its hands
and turns away.  I can’t say I disagree.
I’d walk away from me too, if I could.

Everything that was said was correct. I couldn’t help
seeing that woman as a girl.  It’s no excuse, but It happens
with girls and boys of a certain age.  Each
looks like a child, or close to a child, and I know

they aren’t, but the clock inside me is spinning so fast
that I find myself behind the times too often,
and it leads to my saying something that I regret
not thinking through.  Somewhere inside me is a well of poems

I dare not write because I know the All-Knowing Audience
will see through me.  That if I do not take enough care,
something will slip through obscuring the moment
I’m trying to capture, and all I am — all insecurities,

half-baked prejudices, remnants of a past life
I’ve tried to escape and make over, over and over —
will be revealed.  I am not that poet, that person.
I hold myself and my problems close.

The poem I am trying to write is better
than the one I can write.  I can say,
She poured out of the room onto the pool deck
and leave the qualifier aside. I can rexamine the way I see her,

refashion the word girl, talk of how she transfixes me with her shy style;
offer more detail, make her real instead of abstract,
make her uniquely herself, not a rendition of my image
of her self.  One word changed, an entire world transformed.

I sit by the well inside me and stare at her,
afloat on a poem.  On the other side of that well
is the Audience, watching for what I do, hoping
I do it as carefully as I can.

I look over now
into the face that haunts me, always
demanding my best.  I recognize that face:
a man I’d like to know.

Early evening, late in February,
I see a tiger in the shadows by the fence.

There are believed to be no tigers in Worcester
at the moment.  Our lone animal park
holds cougars and polar bears.  If anyone here
owns a surreptitious tiger, they’ve been keeping it
well-concealed. 

I watch the shadow tiger move past the cars
into the scrubby, snow-stained backyard. 
Perhaps it is a Siberian tiger.

If a tiger once tastes human flesh, it is said
that it will remain a maneater forever.  This one
clearly sees me, but makes no move in my direction.
It may have eaten.  It may not know how sweet I am.

Or perhaps that’s just a legend.  Perhaps the dream tiger,
real or unreal, has tried a man and found it wanting,
is seeking goat or sheep or some game creature instead.

The tiger (and I am certain now that it is unreal
but cannot take my eyes from it) has stopped by the oak tree.
It looks up at something.  Perhaps at unfamiliar bark
and a scent it’s not had to identify before.  Perhaps
it is listening for voices it may recognize.

I call it, using a name I haven’t spoken in years.
It turns and tenses, fangs and stripes bared
but transparent. What I see through its body
seems menacing in a way it was not before
as if there was an overlay of pain before me
that I am seeing only now.

Mystery cat, tiger in the mind.
I long for you to be more real than I can conjure.
Come and tear me up, leave my true blood on the ground.
I am tired of my fear of ghosts,
wish to fight something solid,
to die for something real.

The feather
on the sidewalk
could have come
from any bird.

I want it to be
from a robin.

It’s time, I think,
for spring:

they’ve been gone a long while now
(although it’s a lie
that they all fly south; I’ve seen them in packs
among the bittersweet vines
in Harwichport
in deep December),
and they rarely appear
this early in the city,

I’d like to think that
one made an exception for me
and me alone,

knowing I need the mud-time
badly right now.

I want to have my feet sink into
what was once frozen
and come out sucking and black
with heavy dirt,
because that way I could feel
like a farmer
tuned into the signs
and signals of newness,

and that bird would be telling me
things only I needed to know
as I knocked off the sludge
and smiled.

A boy was an infant for a while,
then a boy.

A boy did not think he should be here.

A boy imagined a difference,
and it did not happen. 

A boy was menaced by his mirror
with a face that was familiar, so he changed it. 
But the face within that new face remained present.
The two had common eyes
and softened the same way
when they became melancholy.

A boy grew to disbelieve his mirror.
What he saw in there instead
was a movie. That actor
looked young all the time.

A boy learned to comb the actor’s hair
and to play his banjo.
He saw the actor’s wife
in the background, another actor.

A boy would sometimes pause the movie and ask
if what was before him there
was the difference he had imagined
and wished for when he was young.

Really, I couldn’t tell you, responded the actor.
I’m a stranger here myself. 

Welcome, words
that I love more than
sense, more than butter on a radish
or two bagels full of cream cheese and silky lox.

I eat you in the moments
I’ve lifted from the day.
You go down quick as fireflies.
(Were you real?  Oh, there you are, inside.)

I’m hungry all the time,
panting, mouth running with water
for rinsing them down. You are health
morselized:  get enough of you, even just a few

of the most substantial ones, and
I’m sated for a while.  You can’t call me
a glutton or a satyr for wanting you so much:
there’s no deadly sin

related to the desire for words.
They’re better than barbecue and beer,
escargots and white bread balls full of
cheese, pudding on a stick

and ginger crystallized in a plastic tub.
Each syllable a bite of time and essence,
I gobble freely, sit back silent only when
you connect within and fill me up

until I find a way to bake, fry,
roast what’s in me and feed others
with you.  A feast within, a feast without,
welcoming, welcomed, breakfast lunch and dinner

and snacks in between, I grow fat
upon you, my sustenance, my provision
in the famine years, my generosity when I am flush.
Words, crumbs of words even, words.

Worshipful
of the elsewhere,
fully subservient
to the pervading otherness
of being here
and not
where I say I want to be,
I seek my safety
in being absent from
the life I imagine I want.

If I had what I desire,
I’d have to live up to
my own expectations.
Instead
I play rogue, renegade,
proud
in my sloth, blaming fate
for my inability
to achieve.

“Be Here Now,”
the sage admonishes me.
“Here, Now,” I reply,
“is not where I am best suited
to Be.”   “Be Here Now,”
he says again.  This time I refuse to
answer, my eyes fixed
on the horizon, not seeing that my feet
already have long, gnarled roots
that reach down for miles into
this dry, much-reviled soil.

Oh, you American dogs —
barking, loving, tongue dangling
boys, sweet mongrel girls
at our feet:

you don’t care who we vote for,
our politics, our positions
on abortion
or limited government;

you do care if we don’t come home
from a war, or if we don’t feed you
well and let you become gaunt,
even homeless when the money falls short;

yet even then you will leap at us
when we call and love us without reservation
on this stolen, damaged land we call
our own.  We call you “our own” too,

but truly, you are your own tribe
and your rites are observed wherever
you find yourself: the chasing of tails,
the lying down anywhere,

the inappropriate things that are eaten,
the public sex, the loudness, the happy
earthy stink of you being yourselves without
any thought…oh, it’s no real wonder you love us,
you American dogs; no wonder at all.