My father once owned
an Ithaca shotgun
he got from a kid at his job
who was going to Vietnam
and couldn’t take it with him
12 gauge with a monster kick
that knocked my six year old ass
right down the one time I shot it
Weird looking gun with a lever
that broke it open
at the barrel for loading
Good for birds and pests
and not much else
No idea when or where he sold it
or gave it away or turned it in
but now and then
I think about its oaken stock
and wonder about
how the kick would feel to me
now that I’m grown
Last night I dreamed I was living
in a condo somewhere not here
and a boy with bright eyes
knocked on my door
and asked for his gun back
I said didn’t have it
and told him the name
of the town where I grew up
and if was looking for his gun
he should knock on their doors
He nodded and turned away
to walk there in his combat boots
to go ask people he’d never seen
for a gun long ago lost
I saw him join
all the rest of the ghost boys
from all the rest of history
thronging the streets
asking strangers for their guns
because they knew that if only
they could fire them one more time
they’d remain standing up after the kick
this time they wouldn’t fall down
My shoulder aches for them
Aches for the gun my father got rid of
Aches for wanting to handle correctly
what I could not when I was young
Just another ghost boy
citizen of a dead nation
a whole nation of us
imagining a gun
that we could master this time
to feel masterful
and grown
Tag Archives: meditations
The Tale Of The Ithaca Shotgun
Nothing To Pour
I can see the shape
of what I must say,
what I long to say,
but not how to fill it in.
The container is perfectly
made, seamless and clear;
there’s nothing inside.
In my conception, once I fill it
anyone reading it will understand it
at once, regardless of
their literacy, their language.
The moment they lift it
from the page and take it in,
they’ll be so moved…
yet somehow for too long
I have had
nothing to pour.
Something Something
I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.”― David Ignatow
Outside something something
nature. Creature, plant,
rock, shadow on ground.
Inside something something
human emotion, insight. Illumination.
Metaphor as deep as depth.
Between something something
and something something a wall
unbreachable. Out there we call
“the world.” In here we call “soul” or
something. We call poems “keys.”
We try to make world into soul
with a key to a door we think we see
in the wall. Something, something;
something about the lock being broken
and something about trying to make things
work for us that are not our concern
while something laughs behind our backs.
That’s not door. That’s still wall.
That’s not a soul and maybe there’s no
world. This is a poem, or something, it seems;
a key that unlocks Nothing.
Eldercare
Your parents are going away,
diminished ghosts drifting off.
Whatever shall you do?
They are feeble, spiteful clouds
now, raining perpetually on everything.
You dry and fold their clothes
and fret to yourself about how
you will ever empty the house
while they thunder, cast bolts, start fires.
In other words, you keep living as you always have,
doing all the hard work you think is necessary
to hold them, like smoke, in your hands.
Nothing has changed. Look down at those palms,
those naked palms. All that’s there is a scent
you can’t follow to learn where they are going.
Call Out
Check yourself. There appears to be
a thin coating of slime
on your affirmation of purity,
a subtly gleeful aggression
in the way your principles allow you
such arrogance, perhaps indicative
of a willed inability to compare and contrast
your own righteousness on one subject
to your complicity on another.
If I were looking into a mirror
while doing and saying these same things
I hope I’d shut up and tear my face off.
If I found your face underneath mine
I do not know what I could do
except wall myself in with mirrors
so I would always remember
where I came from and never be able
to go back into the world.
If I later tore that face off to find beneath it
only the bones that history gave us both,
I would do the only thing left to do:
go back out there and let the people I’d hurt
judge me, then shun me or embrace me as they choose
while I bled and tried to grow something new.
Kinder, Gentler
Enraged at unknown others’
words and actions
read or heard about or seen
through a screen, I say
so often to myself,
“May Death take you…”
as a curse upon them.
I walk away muttering, change
the channel muttering,
drive past muttering; I throw
the middle finger, sometimes
I even shout out loud in the car.
Then I grow ashamed of myself:
who am I to lay this magic
like a bludgeon upon these people?
I try and try to change, to say:
may Death take you
as a taxi would, to your
desired destination.
May your ride
be white-knuckled and filled
with obscene commentary from
a wild-eyed driver,
but may you end up
where you need to be.
May Death take you
in a horse cart to
a field of long grasses
and small blue flowers
on long stems that scratch you
as you walk to the center of
the centering meadow,
where you shall lie in the sun,
itchy from the passage,
but where you wanted to be.
May Death take you
in Death’s time
as Death wills it,
being what you are.
May Death take me
when my work is done,
as soon as it is done;
may Death take you
before you can finish yours.
May Death take us both
as we would like to be taken
whether or not our work is done:
gently, with a pat on the back
or the head as we are guided past
the Veil and through the Gate,
and may I not see you there.
A Broken Shell
I knew a broken shell
with a name and a shape,
a solid being somehow
more or less invisible
to people on the street
where they lived.
Some said they had
terrible history,
some said they cracked
in the recent past,
some said nothing. Most
said nothing, just crossed
themselves or looked
away from the thing
rummaging through
the recycle bins once a week.
It was the eyes or the clothes
or the nonsense they spouted
that kept people looking away
and one day they did not
come around anymore, some said
they were the dead found behind
the convenience store but there was
disagreement about that but not about
how much my dog missed them,
how they loved to pat my dog
whenever they passed my own
precariously inhabited building,
long out of code, the unregistered cars
in the driveway, the weary yard
full of feeders and birds; whoever
that cracked shell was, I didn’t know,
but I trusted my dog
for missing them when they were gone.
Consent
To see yourself. To see another.
To reach out to touch when invited.
To be touched in return at your own invitation.
To strip another, then play.
To be stripped by another, then played with.
To strip mutually and play together.
To take on full nakedness and take on all else that way.
To wear the playclothes, to take on all the toys.
To be yourself. To be another. To be each other.
To play with another at being selves or others.
To arch and stretch and turn and moan together or alone.
To do nothing like anything already spoken of.
To find another way to see the Fire and chase it.
To come to the edge of the Fire and run with it as it gallops along.
To run alone or with others parallel to the edge of the Fire.
To leap across into the char behind the Fire’s edge.
To leap back again. To do the great back and forth across the Fire.
To be flame resistant. To be Fireproof. To be unscathed.
To be singed. To be the Fire. To be burned.
To find yourself or another in the burn.
To never cease burning. To live on Fire.
Agony And Equilibrium
The secret to not feeling pain
is to swim in a world of hurt
so thick and profound
you cannot tell the difference between
agony and getting by.
I’m sorry if this
suggests that personal heartbreak
is my job to such a point
that I appear to have tattooed it
on my eyes, shading everything.
Believe me, I wish that were true
for it would suggest that I believed
in redemption, that I believed that
erasure was possible with
work that allows for art’s divine intervention.
I might believe that, if
the right god had ever appeared to offer
a hand. If the art had ever taken me closer
to that throne — bah. There’s no
one throne, no matter what the books say.
I’ve read them all, even written a few.
The secret to not feeling agony
is to make a place to put its overflow.
Art can do that. It can’t erase it completely,
but out there, somewhere: equilibrium.
Shot
In his head, loud
had always meant final
and had been the sound
of closing. It briefly surprised him
to find that his staggering in silence
after the loud was closer to the mark.
The bullets screwed through him
noiselessly on their trajectories.
The sweep of pain throughout his body
did not make a sound
and smothered
all the rest.
Death did it all
with a long white finger to his lips.
Four In the Morning
Up and at it,
four in the morning.
I’m not an insomniac.
I just went to sleep early
and got up early, yet somehow
I am dismayed;
can’t imagine why
I’m being subjected
to such disturbances at
this hour;
don’t get why birds dig singing
in “darkest before the dawn”
time, don’t get the junkie upstairs
rearranging furniture since 2 AM;
do not relish the too-loud scraping
of my bracelet against the shell
of my keyboard — the bracelet
I never take off as it speaks of
what you might need to know
if by chance you find me dying.
I suppose that’s also what I’m typing
at four in the morning: tales
of who I am and what you should know
in case you come upon me alive
or dying or even
long dead;
one of those things is that
I am the kind of man who will get up
at four in the morning, get out of bed
and step away from sleep to ruminate
on the natural order: birds singing
before dawn; an addict unable
to consider others; a small noise,
metal on metal; a slight clatter
I’ve heard so often I only notice it
when I need to fold it into my art
and change it from random annoyance
to a metaphor for life and death
at four in the morning, late April,
spring beginning to spring just before dawn.
Tides
Shocked by the daily news
being revealed as a lie and then being
walked back?
This country is a manipulation by nature.
Why did you ever think
anything that makes that work
would diminish, can diminish?
Expecting truth to come out
is a misunderstanding of what it is.
This country
is liquid by nature.
It tries to drown the truth
every time it opens its trap.
The truth disappears
in the flood. It stands there
under the surface, immobile.
You think it’s dead because
of that? Truth never dies.
It just stands still, hidden
from view, disguised by this country’s
hard, dishonest work.
But it doesn’t die. It holds
its breath. It stands there
in the muck, remembering
the existence of tides.
Ghosted
If you’re going to go, just go,
sneer the seemingly-healthy. They tell you
that announcing your departure from anywhere
before you go is all about seeking attention
and drama. Just ghost the party, the friends,
the community. No need to announce the exit,
sneer the seemingly-healthy. The ones
who feel entitled
to owe no one else a damn thing.
I think of the ones I knew
who just left, ghosting from parties,
news feeds, friend lists;
I count the ones
who then slew themselves
before we knew they were gone.
I think of the ones
who made some gesture
before departure, something
dramatic, clumsy; some outcry;
I count the ones
who are still here
because someone responded.
Don’t hang up, I used to plead.
I’d hang on as long as I could hear them
still there, still breathing.
No one uses a phone that way anymore.
Now I send a begging text, an instant message,
a public post —
You still here?
Why don’t you respond?
The Fool’s Dance
You thought you were safe
from what you had asked for,
you fool, even as you pulled it
toward you.
As the moonlight
fell across you in the garden,
naked from the waist up, carving
the runes into the slab of oak,
saying to yourself that safety
depended on your sure strokes and
not seeing at all that this is how
it was meant to be
it approached, concealing itself
within your certainty, your common
spirituality, your academic slant
upon such things.
You followed all the rules
and said everything right
as you worked
and so it came upon you, chuckling
in spite of itself, hearing from afar
the slight mistake you’d made:
thinking you were in control
of what you’d be summoning.
You look up.
There it is, not looking quite
as you’d expected but eager to begin
the ancient fool’s dance:
the side step, the menacing curtsey,
the too-close bow.
The leap.
Readiness
With no regret for how I have been refined
by the decline of who I long thought I was
into this realization of what I truly am.
With no regard for what others may think of me
in my next stage — whether they pity me or break free
of me, whether they care for or studiously avoid me.
With no clear choice as to how I must plod through
the remainder of this current stage as it becomes
a bog sucking at my steps, begging me to stop, rest, and rot.
With no revelation in the transformation as it unfurls me
into some flag for others to marvel at or fear, the borders
of my territory becoming clear though little within is obvious.
With no usable personal history to back me up as I puzzle through
to whatever is next, and no proven sense of what might be next
as those who might know and pass this way cannot speak my tongue.
With everything I have said being true,
I once again come to the window in the morning
and, as always, raise the blinds to see the sun.
Dark Matter 