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.

In denial
of the wet
shine of ice
on the steps.
Been thinking
it’s warmer than
it actually is. I slip
and fall before I can
prepare myself for the
hazardous surface underfoot.

When my head
cracks into the porch floor
I see stars, midday stars
that are only in my eyes.  Novas
of sick bust out in my throat.
I am suddenly a universe born
of my mistake and my arrogance. 

Does the internal possession
of a galaxy or two
of pain and derangement
make me a god?  No —

I’m just flat on my back
on the stairs, my bleeding head
resting on the floor of my porch.
And I rent, so I don’t even own these —
small and pitiable here,
broken up and maybe even
seriously hurt, yet I fantasize
about power and glory,
the constellation of injury
provoking delusions.

Inside, comets and violet
energy. Outside, blood congealing
in the sharpened air
of February.  Between them,
a foolish man.  I’d better get up
before I freeze this way.

You say

shame’s like a cracked tooth.
It keeps you wincing delicately
at odd times, but then
you move, you pass
through. You pull
the pain
and leave a hole.

Other feelings, other definitions
float by.  You seize the most
arresting ones for yourself:
happiness, you say, is a dark
choice made in
sunlight; grief an infant
left too long alone
on a quilt in a bare room;
anger a rare bird
of cracked leather
flying blind; love
a ridiculous suit. 

It’s delicious to some
that you are so swift
with this.

You are passing through
and throwing no shadow,
only a description of a shadow.
Solidity offends you. You mold
your boundaries as if they were
fresh from the clay bank,
never to be fired. 

Tomorrow, you’ll say
shame’s a donkey, grief’s
an egg on a ship’s deck, love’s
a new ribbon on an old flag.
And happiness? Happiness
is anger, is happiness. For you,

emotion itself is
simply a blanket you hem and re-hem
so it doesn’t unravel when you pull it
up over your head. 

Horror
is seeing
or being
a man with a pen
in his chest
where he should have
a racing heart.

House
is a radiotuner

brings in signals
from elsewhere
like the saxophonist
on the second floor
who moved in
with his snakeinsomniac solos

or the oftenplanemistaken rumble
of the furnace

occasional voices
of somethingcatdisturbing
in back and front halls

runningon
slurringwords
or in stac-
cato
bursts

near to meaning something
but not
quite

House
is no presets
no hanger antenna

brings in anyway
beams of connected tones
almostnotquite audible
maybe there’s a story here

or maybe it’s in me
and it’s
interpreting