Today, I’ve got nothing.  No food
or water for the being
starving in my skin.  I can’t
dig a message out of me.

“Sense memory,” they say.  I can’t.
Got none, got no pathway to that.
“Recollection in tranquillity,” they say.
Not here, not today. So

I’m going outside to eat a wet oak leaf.
Toss myself on the asphalt
and skin my knee, like some kid
getting right with the program, or with God

the way I used to see God; some Hairy
Schoolteacher, some Dusty Wrestler
looking for smackdowns.  Scary Man God!
It used to feel right to have Someone to fight

when it came time to be the One Creating.
Now I have nothing to battle
except my dulling blood and stiffening hands
that want me to think it’s time to hang it up.

So it’s back to the playground and all that.
Back to losing at everything.  Back to being
picked last.  Back to taking a wild swing
at the biggest bully and falling back destroyed.

You know…I know a dying poet who still tells stories better
than anyone I’ve ever known.  I know he’d laugh at me
thinking I’m done.  I know I’d walk away ashamed
if he could hear me whine.  So, you know…

I have to remember how good it feels to fight,
lose, bleed, get up, tell someone about it.
Maybe I’ll call my buddy up and we’ll laugh at me
for a while.  Maybe, for once, I’ll even cry.

(for J. M.)

The last time,
I was taken by a flood;
the time before that,
I was taken in my sleep. I want,
this time, to go and not be taken.

Garlands of joy should be
hung around me as I sit here tonight;
fireworks, music, and dancing should begin,
and very soon.  Why wait?  Let me be

as the fish who shimmer
under moon or sun,
even when they are in the net. 

I am reading the last poems
of William Stafford.  They fill
with light upon opening.
Their simplicity
spills and fills me
with light.

Elsewhere
poets are nouning verbs
and verbing nouns, never met
adjectives they didn’t absorb, know mostly
how not to be themselves
when they write.  They praise themselves
endlessly for their cleverness.  They all sound
the same.  I can find these poems anywhere.
I trip over them in the dark.

I am reading
the last poems of then-dying, now-dead William Stafford
and the darkness is missing from them,
from around them.  All that’s there is light and
William Stafford, whom I never knew,
who fills me with a light
I am not too used to finding
these days in a poem.

Guns smell too much like family and home
and the danger we know versus
the danger we don’t know.

Knives taste a little like
ionized air and the good ones
leave their taste in your mouth.

I can never recall how many
loops there are in an official
hangman’s noose, and that

has kept me alive as I
will not violate tradition
for speed in execution.

Pills are too unpredictable
for a man of my size.
How many is too many is therefore enough?

What I adore instead: the cigarette
alcohol drugs laziness fat fast food method.
Happy is the man who goes forward

in that pleasure. There is of course
stroke and slow decline as a possible
result, but I trust my impulsive body

to get the job done swiftly
when the time comes.  And I won’t
even know it’s coming.  I can pretend

it was inadvertent.  I can forego
stealing a gun from the folks.
I can just go with no immediate agency,

exactly as I have lived.

realizing
you’re alone
and hateful

knowing
you’re past
expiration

seeking 
clothing that will not just fit
but reveal and cover at once

the reverse
of sparkling
and shiny

terrible divide
stanched flow
and rager caged within

returning to 
peace in the only place
it abides

having to leave peace behind
because of burrs
under the saddle

sad uncertain winging
of the unexpressed
over the green sea

plunging for it
as deep diving birds
plunge

forgetting 
you’re a man
and no bird

shock at the depth of the ocean
and how clearly you can see
what you sank there long ago

the man who drowns
in the distance between where he is
and where he should be

the damned at play
in the pool of no mercy
still too far from what’s sought

the man who drowns
thinking he ought to be elsewhere
but knowing he put himself here

the man who
the man who drowns 
the man who drowns himself

the man who drowns himself
to read his epitaph
hoping someone got it right

the man who reads his epitaph
and lies to himself saying
I don’t know that man

The cut on my arm reminds me
that after the phoenix has flown
some will gather around the hearth 
to stir the ashes
with dirty sticks.

What do they expect
will come of that?  And what
did I expect from the blood
I drew from myself
when I heard he was gone?

Did I think that if I drew enough,
the phoenix would rise again
from where my blood had pooled?
I’m old enough to know better.
Sometimes, though,

I get young again
and fall in love
with childhood magic: believing
that if I give enough, hurt enough,
the phoenix will return.

Since I am old enough
to know the worst, though,
I do bind the wound
and begin to listen
to the wind —

for when the bird flew,
he sang, and the song
remains with me,
and in it
is the fire that released it.

A myth 
is a myth
not because it’s a lie,
but because
it is a truth

that cannot ever die for long.
It rises again and again.
It flies blazing up from the ash.
It is never in the ash.
It is in the clean, bloodless sky.

— for David Blair