It’s a project. Doorways. Walking backwards through.
Not like entering, not like leaving.
Ghosts know this: not all passages
lead somewhere. Who you are
and where you’re going are sometimes
unrelated. Where you’ve been might be
the only place you can know. The walls
become exhausted here from holding up
lights, so they go dark. Easier to hold up
mystery than fact, journey than destination.
This is a doorway and you are halfway here,
halfway there. Peekaboo, darling I’m home,
now I’m here, now I’m there. This is how
loss never ends. Doorways out of interiors.
Interiors glimpsed from doorways, from
exteriors. Wilderness everywhere. Tired
of assuming civilization’s in there, and
uncivilized is out there. You lean against
the doorjamb, sleep
standing up halfway between.
Walking backwards exhausted,
a guilty party behind you, or before you.
How to describe this world
that endlessly holds its past at arm’s length
and won’t enter its present for fear
of walls enthralled to ghosts forever,
leaving no distance between us
that suspends us in doorways
between what is allegedly safe and
what’s drowned in flop sweat? Don’t bother,
walk backwards, keep quiet, stay alive
if not free, if not either in or out.
The Guilty Project
The White Rug
They always want you
face down on the white rug.
Want you to be afraid
to stain it.
Want you to bleed
somewhere out of sight.
Some extraordinary
wounds you’ve got there,
they say. But how old
are they? They can’t still
be bleeding? You must be
mistaken. It must have been
something else, something
you did. Don’t stain
the white rug with it.
Crawl over there if you’re
going to do that. The rug
is fragile, and expensive.
We don’t want to have to
replace it, or dye it — although
we would know
it was a white rug to begin
and still is under the cover
of color. And if we tore it out
we’d just put another white one
down. Meanwhile,
you’re still bleeding and
face down on the rug as they
begin to clean up around you then
tie a rope around your neck
and start to drag you off
to other rooms where the rugs
aren’t white but the color
of older blood and also, maybe,
the ash of many bonfires,
black paint on a graveyard marker,
dirt from their disturbed
basement floor:
from where you’re lying,
nothing looks or smells clean.
What It Would Take
What it will take you
to be present now,
this deep in time
from your starting point,
is the willingness
to chase presence
along ruts in your road
until it stands still
for you. For you,
it will pull off
the trail
and watch until
you see it and then
it will gesture.
To see it and respond
you will have to
stop. Stop
and step away
from the too-worn trail
for a moment and walk
(don’t run) into
the clearing where it
stands and say,
hello or namaste
or whatever moves you;
it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter
if it answers you
in your own language
or with words you’ve
never heard or even if
you do not understand
them as not much
about this
is about understanding.
Understanding is
your boogeyman,
your feared beast,
your somehow
still-longed-for handcuff;
if you’d given that up
long ago
and relied on just
standing there with
what you’re currently
facing, what’s always
been ahead of you,
you would have known
all along the truth
of your presence and
how to hold it close,
what it would take.
The Men Of Industry
Consider the long work of the men of industry:
these steps
carved with
tools of stone,
bronze. iron,
steel;
the rails alongside
carved from wood
with tools of stone,
bronze, iron,
steel;
all the fires
used to forge
the tools,
all fueled
with wood peat
coal and oil of whale
shale and the blackened
deep raised from beneath
our feet.
They’ve been building for so long.
How much higher
does the monument
have to tower
over the stench
for them to be able
to stand on top,
breathe deep of the smoke
and carnage below,
and call it good?
Twenty Flight Rock
Woke up
singing Eddie Cochran’s
“Twenty Flight Rock”
No idea why
At once I thought
of seeing Ry Cooder
play it — solo acoustic — long ago
at the Newport Folk Festival
I’m not much given
to nostalgia which feels
to me to much like
lusting for ghosts
who can only feel
what they have always felt
Why do that when
there are new things
to be felt
Why repeat yourself
endlessly with the same
old same old movements
going back again
and again through one
life two lives three
lives four
Although
I’m starting to drag
and soon enough might be
ready to sag
I’m not yet ready to
say things were
so much better
before when
I could look at Ry Cooder
playing a song from his own old days
in his own splendid fashion
and say I could be him someday
So fuck the ghosts
who crowd around me
demanding obeisance
to their past
when I am still learning
to play not like
Ry or Eddie
but like myself
No matter how far
I have to climb I swear
I will only go to bed
when I get to the top
Big Stone
This is the story
of the argument everyone had
with Big Stone
Big Stone says to us all
I can displace your weight
in water from here
without immersing myself
It’s a neat trick
an impossible trick for you
but I’m projecting tonnage
you don’t have
How do you think are you
supposed to compete
We said
something
unoriginal
about Bruce Lee
water and
big stones
Big Stone laughed
so hard at us
mocking the idea of
being cut to pebbles
by water
Laughed so hard and stonily
that it split along
its own faults
so we rushed
into that void
left in the center
of Big Stone
We recognized little there
but felt at home or at least as if
we were on the way home
although the rock terrified us
as it continued to crumble
Things moved faster
that we’d ever believed possible
Big Stone’s threat
to displace
our weight in water
failed to consider that we
might ourselves be water
even if we had somehow forgotten that
through all the eons of staring
at Big Stone
Snow Tomorrow
Snow tomorrow,
not first snow but
first plowable depth.
At some point tomorrow
you’ll be seated,
chin in hand,
trying to guess
how bad the roads are
while regretting
unpurchased hot cocoa
that would have made
for complete comfort
and safety in the living room
from which you watch
a world slowly changing.
As things disappear into
humps under snow
you will shake your head
at unprepared cars
slipping down hills
and around corners,
and you will feel again
the ancient fear:
what of everything I most love
will not reemerge
when this snow is gone,
when the winter is gone?
Chopsticks
If I say “Chopsticks” is
my favorite piano piece
will you think I am being
facetious or simply
and incredibly stupid about
how much great piano music
is out there that I must have heard
at some point and yet here I am
championing something
almost anyone with fingers
and a memory of hearing it
can play with little thought
once they are shown where
to begin? If I tell you
that the reason I claim
such a thing is for
that precise reason —
how accessible it is and
how it connects so easily and
how much delight one may see
in the eyes of a new player
of any age — how the sound of it
might make even a seasoned pianist
ever so slightly nostalgic
for their earliest days upon
the ivories — would you think
I am being facetious then
even as your own fingers
begin to twitch and beg you
to let them try?
Sugar Bowl
measuring my weeks
sifting through days
as if they were
lumps in a sugar bowl
examining the texture
of each rock
of particulate sweetness
hoping for a spoonful
to cure what ails me
selflessness
is so sour
not that I would know that
except in theory
as I am so offensive
and rank with my
own decades of
misguided self care
nothing tastes sweet
Guitarist’s Prayer
Poem from late 1990s. Lightly revised.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“ it was not the first time / I left a guitar behind / and it would not be the last”
— patti smith, “munich”
while
dreaming of things beyond / my own ruin
i pray for a
ruined guitar
i pray my
hands will some day pry open / the lid on the case where hope is hidden
and brush
aside the fierce ills that torture me / as they fly by
and if
/ as i suspect / i find that hope is a guitar that’s been trapped for too long
one that’s
been scorched and broken
neck just
cracked enough / strings just frayed enough
that one
good chord / will rip the instrument finally / apart
i pray that
my hands will recall their past
i pray the
strap will hold / when i lift that guitar into place upon me
i pray
there’s a decent cable / in the case
i pray the
Amplifier of Heaven / is plugged in and warmed up near by
i pray i
will remember / the name of the right chord
i pray i
will remember how / to set my hands in place / on the strings / so that chord can pour through them
i pray i
take a long quiet moment / before i strike / for the spaces are as important as the music
i pray i
have the patience / to not worry too much / about the perfection of the tuning
i pray the
Pedals of all the Saints / are arrayed before me
i pray for
enough time to stomp every possible voice / into that chord before it fades
for the
right chord is itself a prayer
and tonight
i pray that
i pray it / just right
i pray that
then / i will have enough grace / to know when i am done
to know when
to set that wreckage down
and
walk
away
Telecaster
The Telecaster
is in my hands
unplugged at
11 PM so as
not to disturb
anyone but me.
Even in this
incomplete state
it does its best
to cry and
offer prayer
as I try
to make
my sick hands
move one iota
more like they did
six months
a year two years
ago. The doctor
calls this “diabetic
neuropathy” and
people beyond
the doctor like to say
it’s my fault
or at least my fault
and my parents’
fault but what I know is
I was bad at this before
it happened and am
no better now that
my fingertips feel
nothing. Meanwhile
the Telecaster is still
doing that transparent thing
where its voice becomes
my voice and my voice
becomes an insult
as well as a prayer
and together we do
what a thousand thousand
teenagers with guitars
have been doing
forever: trying to
keep their pain silent
when the house is asleep
and all they want to do is
scream. Here I am though,
old and numb, trying to pretend
that old and numb doesn’t lead
to the same
kind of pain, this
clicky-quiet
Telecaster pain,
this stumble-finger agony,
the discomfort
of knowing
that regardless of whose fault
all of this is,
I am failing this guitar,
and it is not
the other way around.
Hearing Problem
Revised, from 2018.
It has taken me
nearly sixty two years
four thousand glasses of whisky
uncounted pounds of herb
pills upon pills
a taste for killer’s thrills
dozens of bodies held close
whose souls I kept at arm’s length
and countable but daunting numbers
of lost hours spent
chasing words into caverns
and trash heaps
to realize I might have a hearing problem
I might have misheard
my mother
when she said
don’t have kids
they will ruin your life
What she might have said was
don’t have kids
you will ruin
their lives
but thank God I followed her advice
for surely
surely
surely
either way
she was right
Going Through The Motions
hidden at my core
is a small, dim light
what you see is just my shell
going through the motions
everything that looks sincere
as well as
everything that looks
faked or false
everything that seems solid or fluid
everything that seems remotely static
that shows I’m settled for life
into the nest of my identity
every cuddly blink
all the sighs and furtive glances
at thighs and backsides
all the human moves through the fair
all that action and lust
it’s all just
a package of motions
I’m going through
every rage at insult real or imagined
every dangled bait to draw attack
every sneer and morseled-out hateful offering
to war-doctors and high priests of the blinding
just going through the motions
so the world won’t notice
the dead lamp within
still stale and cold
everything I do out here
is motion — is lies
masturbatory once
now tedious hideous and old
dim light within like
a salt lamp rimed with dust
I tried to shine brightly once
but failed and started this pantomime
now and then thinking
my motions have become me
and I them
I’ve begun to forget my light
it remains within
and continues to dim
but now and then it flares
I cannot predict or explain when
but when it does happen
I stop moving for a short time
and try to remember which I am
the shadows of my motions or the light
One Last Snowfall
Revised from February, 2011. Originally titled “Inertia.”
One last snowfall.
An afterthought,
though the calendar
still insists otherwise.
I refuse to clear the walk
knowing the temperature
will rise tomorrow.
Is this hope? I’m calling it hope
though it has been so long,
I’m uncertain. It may instead
be surrender, white flag
waved in the white face
of more on top of so much.
Story of my life, lately;
unwillingness to negotiate
with relentless, impersonal events.
The tendency of a body at rest
is to remain at rest unless acted upon
by an outside force. I’m not at all
rested, though. The snow outside
has held me here but I’m still
shaking in place. If this is
hope, I trust it less than despair.
Hope suggests you get up
and clear the walk
before it will enter. Despair
tells you to sit still and wait
for nothing to enter
except whatever comes when Hope
refuses to even glance at the house
when it passes on its rounds. Despair
is trustworthy. Hope, on the other hand?
I can’t even get up to look out the window
to see hope pass by. Can’t even be bothered
to wave. The walk is never going to melt off
today, and tomorrow might be warmer,
but it will also be too late.
How It’s Done
slow misstepping
arrhythmic
plodding to
the near-end
saying
it all
by saying nothing
directly
this is
how it’s done
and it is
Dark Matter 