This story isn’t even remotely true;
this is myth on a skateboard
rolling through. It has streamers
and smells like fresh bread but
it’s as fake as a tail wriggling
in a predator’s mouth as the skink
escapes to grow another distraction.
But that taste…you want more, of course
and you’ll get more as long as you
keep your ear to the ground, your nose
to the grindstone, your shoulder
to the flat tire you are trying to make
round. Meanwhile all around you go
the fast stories faking their paths
and drawing merry millions behind them
with tails in their mouths
while scaly little truths
get away into the underbrush
and continue growing into
dragons.
Here Be Dragons
Overheard Lament
It would have been better
to have been born now
rather than earlier.
There would already be rules
for growing into this.
This horror would be normal
and unhappy would be
default and somehow
there would be love and
silliness seeded among
thorns.
Daily news
would be a stream
of heartbreak
as it is today but kids
could shrug it off and
slowly accept gray as
a perfectly acceptable
color for lawns and
flowers. Someone
would make a game of
bullet casings and
police tape. Any songs
would be written
around the wail of
a siren,
and children would sleep
at least now and then
immersed in dreams of joy
fit for their times, dreams
that would seem
wounded and dim
to us today.
Lightning Over There
Lightning over there
already.
Here, we’re still just
waiting for it. Sitting outside
watching the sky over
the far hills blink red, listening to
the late rumble that follows.
It’s got a few miles to go yet
before it gets here,
if it does get here —
might only get a few drops,
might get a deluge
and a firestorm.
A few years ago
a big one took down
all the power here on the hill
and tore a branch off
the maple out back
that was the size of a tree
all by itself.
We stared at it
lying there the next day,
adjusting to how different
the backyard looked now
in changed, unfiltered light.
I try to remember
what it looked like before that
and fail.
So:
lightning over there,
and here there’s nothing
yet. We sit and shiver
from experience
of how much can be erased
in no time at all.
We say
maybe it won’t be that bad.
We don’t say
maybe it will be worse,
even though the sky
is as red
as a torn heart.
January Dreamers
The sleepers wake in January
and wring their white hands.
They turn to each other,
pale and damp, and say,
did you feel that? A sort
of wave in the air,
a plunge in the temperature?
Maybe we dreamed it.
Maybe it will go back
to how it was. Maybe, even,
it’s still the same and we know
it will go back. Yes, we’re sure
of it. Let’s stay up a little while
and wait for that and then
we can fall again to sleep
under the warm cover.
So they sit up and wait
until the air cracks even colder.
They shrug and go back
to sleep, dreaming
they will always have enough cover
to stay warm, dreaming
of spring’s return,
of fire on the hearth at home,
all the way to Beyond The Cold,
back to the Used To Be;
when they do not wake,
their dreams having been
trumped by the cold,
they are eventually pulled
from their beds and tossed
alive and unbelieving into
newly built pyres
of an ancient design.
Studies
What the just-born have learned:
how to breathe. How to
sleep and wake. How to be terrified
and then be loved. Hunger,
cold, how to cry for all apparent
and invisible reasons and
have no regrets for being alive.
What the just-deceased have learned:
how to fall asleep and stop
breathing. How to be loved,
terrified; how to surrender hunger
as they cool. How crying works;
how regrets do not.
Somewhere in between,
some days closer to one,
some days the other, you will find
the rest of us, grading on the curve
or praying for pass-fail. You will find us
hoping for an incomplete, a make-up,
extra credit. You will find us as we
rarely find ourselves:
working too damn hard.
Immortality
I fell off a mountain
while reaching for
the next mountain
I fell a long time
and when I landed on
the same mountain I had fallen from
I lifted my head from the ruins
of my body
and was free
to go leaping
peak to peak
through the range
When I saw one last mountain before me
I touched one toe upon it
for closure then
plunged into
the trenches of the ocean
and slid through those waters
from depth to shore
to depth again until
with this path
I’d stitched all the planet together
and when I’d done this
there were so many stars overhead
and so many worlds left
You lie to the children
saying
be afraid to die
stay forever safe
while I speed among the stars
and
you can’t even tell
that I have died
The Deer Woman
In the corner a remnant
of a vision pulled up
in half-sleep, pulled from
memories of an old man telling
a story near a communal fire.
In the corner,
a blistered sack of a human-like
thing with hooves and a black hood
covering its face. I fell asleep
thinking of the past and
an old man telling a campfire story
and now this looks like it was
pulled from that fire, but not fast enough.
It has deer-feet. It has a black hood
and I think now it is a woman
and I think in half-sleep that makes
perfect, drowsy sense. I don’t know
if I should speak to Her but when I try
the voice of an old man telling
a fireside story comes out of my mouth
using words I understand but do not
recognize. I am
aroused enough to know
She must know this.
This vision is now
floating toward me. I’m still
half-asleep and half old man
by the fire when
She comes close. I feel Her
grass-fed, smoke-blister breath.
The old man council fire story
upon my neck now.
The hooves dangling.
Her name on the tip
of someone else’s tongue
in a language I don’t recognize
but which I understand too late,
just before I fully wake; awake
forty years too late to tend
the fire.
Deserve (fragment)
You deserve —
what?
Offer of a meal.
A kind hand. A fever
poultice, a bandage.
A place. Silent assent
to how you get those things
if no one is getting hurt.
But if no one gets hurt,
can anyone get
what they deserve?
Continued
He had just proclaimed
that a part of his life
was over when
(as if in gleeful mockery
of his gloom and
faithlessness to
his own promises
and principles)
a final burst of
energy
passed through him
from the center of his gut
to his hands and
out came a path to
reopening that door and
with it a completion
he had never
expected to feel
Carlsbad
I do recall swallows
outside the cave mouth,
and I won’t dishonor them
by turning them into
metaphors.
To say that I have fears
that swoop in and out
of my own depths, taking
odd turns, diving in and
out — that’s true enough.
To surrender all other sense of how
those birds made me feel
to such a one-sided interpretation
is too human. I want something
beyond that from this memory.
Even the thought of them
taking one last plunge all at once
all together into the dark
before the first thin stream
of bats emerged is not itself dark.
To say these fears that flit within me
seem to presage something
more formidable rising into view
is not incorrect, but is incomplete.
I should say instead that I cannot imagine
that my life would be as full today
if I’d never seen swallows and bats
at Carlsbad Cavern. No need for more
than that. Mule deer were feeding
on the slopes around the cave entrance
the whole time
this was going on
and I’ve never tried
to make them part
of this mythology.
There they were,
just being present.
Just doing what they did
in the presence of what others
were just doing.
One could of course say
that this is just
what I’m doing. But
I’m tired of doing this
and there’s no obvious place
to rise from or plunge
or simply feed now
and Carlsbad’s too far
and it’s winter there anyway.
So I must keep doing this
until something happens.
it seems. Swallows, bats,
deer, wind, stones, fire,
storms, calm, snow, sleep,
until something happens.
Your Magic
In the middle of the night you awake
and in your mouth is the word
that will save everything currently in peril,
and you cannot pronounce it,
and soon enough you forget it, but not the knowledge
that you once knew it.
It poisons your magic for a long time.
A Memory Of Song
A man sitting in bed
on the second floor of his house
thinking about the stairs
as if they were a cliff to be
descended…
a man sitting on the floor
of his kitchen, frustrated with
plumbing, exhausted
after a day of wet dirt, crumbling
wood falling on his face — memory
of cave-ins, avalanches…
a man still sitting in his car
an hour after he was supposed
to be home, staring into the stalled
lines ahead of him burnished to red
by the sunset, simmering inside,
imagining sunsets over a prairie…
a man holding a gun as he crouches
behind a rock, trying to pretend
he isn’t too old for this posture, feeling
the weakness inside, glad his freezer
is full and this is for the show of
other men…
Somewhere behind all this a man
singing, dancing, weaving,
speaking in tongues.
He raises
one arm to the moon, pivots toward
Her, faces Her without losing his rhythm.
He returns to his original direction
without losing the thought of Her.
He loses nothing
in either the pivot or the return,
but as for the memory of song…
a man sitting up in bed,
astonished at what he
has dreamed until he
sweeps it away in worry
for the moment…
My Hand On Fire
Are you truly so surprised
to learn that my hand
bursts into flame
a few times daily,
and that I have learned
to shut out the pain
and move on?
You shouldn’t be.
This is old hat
to many
who are
torched so often,
so casually.
We learn it early and well
or we die
young, curled up
in our own ashes.
Do not mistake
apparent ease
in handling it
as a form of
acceptance.
We still
hurt, we still
now and then
scream with the hurt,
still have problems
with grip and
feeling — and for me
at any rate, woe
unto those who offer
to shake my hand
while still holding
a burnt match, for
I will accept.
Wishes
Not to assume anything
but if you are alone
at the moment you read this
with no one hovering at your side or back
and it’s a time of welcome solitude
stolen from your usual crowded
life, then I wish for you
to find here a set of wings
to raise you from the throng
into this happiness
whenever you want.
Still making no assumptions
but if you are alone when you read this
and it is a longer moment of alone
leaning into or full-on stuck inside
a life-poverty of loneliness, then
I wish for you to find here a set of wings
that may take you far and wide seeking
and finding others to enrich you.
I set now my last assumption aside
and say that if you are not alone
when you read this, if by choice or chance
or great good fate you are with those
who make you happy or at least
allow you to be fully yourself, then
I wish for you to find here a set of wings
long and strong enough to raise
all those you love to be with
to whatever height seems best
for all of you.
A Low Grade Fever
A low-grade fever
flaring: that is how
the chronic urge
to self-destruct becomes
acute, the same
for one person as it is for
a nation: sometimes
a dank heat goads one to
frantic energy, one begins
slashing at anchors; a desire
to let all go bubbles inside
like infection; one may
say it’s better to burn,
better to release and fall
to embers and let another
build again; no matter
how familiar it is
it seems so simplistic,
so terrible,
to feel in the daily news
a steam that resembles
the heat of
one’s own will to die.
