In tenth-century Arab Andalusia
under Abd-ar-Rahman the Third,
poetry took the place
of newspapers and poets
sang of everything
from the faces of God
to the price of mutton.
While the rest of Europe lay dark and stony
in thrall to iron Church singularity,
Cordoba rang with Jewish and Christian songs
as the muezzins roused others to prayer
with Arabic.  Spain as we know it today
was being born,
someone was listening to all of this
while looking at an oud
and thinking about inventing the guitar,
everywhere the gardens were light
and filled with splashing water,
palaces were cool
and open,
the streets were tingling with ideas…

and now,
it’s all we can do
to look at one another.

a guitar
socking into tune
each string matching its fretted neighbor’s tone when sounded together
the bell-throbbing of a not-quite-there pitch
disappearing into one clear note
shared between two

thrills me
like archery’s
pull and release
that sends an arrow
true

1.

You are my highway —
lines in the night, my destination
ahead, my home, safety, warmth.

2.

You are the highway —
the road that goes one, splits,
shifts from blacktop to gravel
and back again…

3.

You are highway.  There —
path on sand, skein on rock:
binding a promised land. 

4.

Highway: made by hand
and filthy machines.  Black in rain,
slick as danger, the only way to go
these days…drive: we’ve got
miles left to cover, and we can talk anytime.

1.
a hat in the middle of a quickly cleared dance floor
in a connecticut italian club

regie announces
“brenda’s purse got stolen
along with all the cash she needed to get home to arkansas
you know what to do”

and that hat is filled in five minutes
with more cash than brenda started with

2.
i don’t even remember your names
but there we were
in a dogs only downpour
strolling uncovered toward
an impromptu reading in the massachusetts woods
and not caring about the cold and wet
because everyone was together

3.
pat’s blurred vision
sucking down all the faces
for the last time
in a nyc high style lounge
because someone went and found him
in tompkins square park
huddled under newspapers
and said
“we’re all there
you need to be there”
and they got him past the bouncers
got him in for the last time

4.
ken talking incessantly
about sleater kinney and the wars against us all
for hours and hours on a bus
breaking the flow only when we sang
“uncle fucker” to reverend bill as loud as we could
over a cell phone
and none of us on that bus being embarrassed
to dance right down the steps
and into a baltimore club
to james brown
because we were going into share
words with friends

5.
high desert outside albuquerque
four of us fruitlessly watching
a clouded sky
for the perseid shower
and not feeling the need
to say a thing

6.
angela in a cheer costume
shaking pompoms and wheezing
“gimme a p-o-e-t-r-y”
at a crowd of people who never thought
of cheering for such a thing

7.
scowling at
“these kids these days”
with another guy named bill
in a seattle diner
while two crustpunks
drop poems of the road
on a microphone that hasn’t been silent
for a week
but both of us keeping our ears cocked
and noting every word
saying at the end
“that wasn’t bad”

8.
listening to you running lines
in an empty theater before a bout
putting an arm around you when you broke down
afraid that people had forgotten you were also a poet
assuring you that no one
had ever doubted that for a second

(when you first saw this poem
you loved it
and now, you are in it
what can I say except
we’re poets
and this is what poets do for each other)

9.
shadowing
the modern stars of all this twaddle
and all of us knowing there’s someone we don’t know
watching
out there
hearing this and saying
“i could do that better
if i ever get the nerve
if i ever get the chance”
and each of us praying that they do
and each of us looking for our role
in making it happen

10.
the mystery
of a blank screen
an open notebook
and wondering how it is
that all things are there before us
but we’re not capable
of bringing them forth
when we can see them right there
before us
plain as paradise

and trying anyway

11.
knowing i would never have known you
without this
and being more than grateful
that I have learned who I am
because of you

12.
holding your dear
shaking hands
unmercifully but with all the simple courage
i can give you
I say
you
you are this
you are one
alone
but not alone

When the bluebird on your shoulder
began to sing, I thought I was nuts.
"At last!" I thought.
"After all these years of pushing myself toward
that threshold!"

Ink has always spoken to me,
but never audibly.  But here you were,
your shoulder tweeting,
the feathers visibly ruffling, restless
as my own skin.

It’s only been a month since you died.

I expected some kind of visitation, of course. 
I remember how you fell from the tree at eight
and when I laughed,
you told me you’d haunt me if you died.  I stopped immediately,
running through the vacant lot back toward the house for help. 
It was just a broken arm then — Dad called it a busted wing —
and when at nineteen you got the tattoo on the same shoulder,
we laughed then about that too, but I had a twinge of pain of my own
remembering the promise you made me back then, and how
the arm had stuck out at a crazy angle, with a bump under the bruised skin.

When you finally died, you were twisting on a nylon rope
in Bourassa Park.
It wasn’t the first time you’d made that jump.
This time, you were found too late
by a drunken cop who was out for a late night stumble,
found by someone who should have known
how to call delicately to a family,
how to call a suddenly bereft flock
to the home grove.  Instead, we got a harsh phone call
from some crow in blue, asking us to meet him at a hospital —
blue lights everywhere, the scrubs of the staff
echoing the songbird on your shoulder, blue everywhere,
everywhere,
even on the peaks of your lips.

What are you singing, dirty bird? 
Aren’t you full of worms by now?

Dad hasn’t spoken much since that night. 
He sits at the window and watches the yard, I expect, thinking he’ll soon see you
coming home up the flagstones, tripping over the steps,
leaning your own sodden frame
against the wobbly metal railing.  He never got it,
never will, even though there were so many nights
like that in recent years.  You never had grace again
after the third inpatient stay; you spent your drunken days in the park
with songs inside you that banged hard on your ribs, stubbed themselves
against the way out
like so many sparrows on cruel glass…
I know that smackdown feeling.
I’ve always known it.

My brother, my bluebird, you are no ghost tonight,
not when your skin can still sing a wince into me.  
I understand now:
I’m losing nothing
if I lose my mind over you. 
We are two tattooed make-goods,
our father’s vultures.
We sat before filthy windows for too many hours as boys
imagining flight.  When first you fell, when first you dangled,
you were as close to that as we could get this side of the Big Window,
and now you’ve broken through before me.
I listen to your skin warbling the answers to everything
I’ve always wanted to know,
and though I’m as sane these days as I’ve ever been,
I’m scared tonight, brother,
of the echoes I can hear
in my own illuminated hide.

made me recall this poem.  Very old. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EPILOGUE

I’m claiming that title now
The one Glinda tried to give me
When I was too fresh off the farm to know
what it meant
I’m not making that mistake again

Once the novelty of being back on safe ground wore off
They started to think I was Auntie Em
I started to think I was Auntie Em

And that dog was cute but
He was too damn small
to run the way I wanted to run

So sure, honey
You can call me Dorothy
I’ll call you Tin Man if that’s what works for ya
Just freshen my drink and then
three clicks and
We’re outta here

Tonight
let’s bet on those rainbow horses
We’re gonna make this our town
Screw the balloon man
I’m not getting into anything here
I can’t get myself out of

Tonight
I’m the bad witch
and when a good-looking twister
like you comes along
I gotta take off
Like I’m riding some killer house
And while I may not know where I’m gonna land
or whether I’ll even end up on top

I’ve been through this before
and let me tell you

Oz
sure beats the hell
outta Kansas 

1. before I get old

my dad on the stairs:
"turn that
down!!!!"

he was right
it was loud
but he didn’t get that
it was Christmas loud

torn wrapping paper
shrieks of delight
lookit what’s in here

LOUD

2. but I’m one

it worked
when it wasn’t turned up, too

late at night
when I was supposed
to be sleeping

because lonely
is its own loud
and needs to be
drowned

3. I call that a bargain

I saw her close her eyes
when she faced the real me
and was glad I’d spent the money
on the album I’d chosen to play
that night

4.  cold sex and booze

had I known
how hard it was going to be
to turn into my father
I’d have listened more closely
to the lyrics
when I was young
before I became enamored
of passing pleasure
and before I learned
how hardened
my ears could become

5. endless wire

hand over hand
from the storm to the lifehouse
and all the way
the roaring in my head
the cables of bass
the swift knots of guitar
the stark breaking drums
the ripped angel voices
lifted me from black through blue
red
and now

gray

Capitalization
is a method for blending in.

A period is a bullet.
A comma is a safety.
An ellipsis is his consideration of an order from headquarters to stand down.
A dash is a microadjustment prior to targeting.
A semicolon is a shift in mode from single shot to full automatic.

A question mark is cocking the hammer, moving the slide back, then forward.

An exclamation point is a deafening report.

When none of the above are present,
he has let his guard down —
for the moment, anyway.

He will say
sip this thick flowing mead
and mean this:

We should talk of who we are.

He will say
ceviche
and mean this:

If you will just taste the lime
you will want the fish.
Whoever tastes the fish
will turn from the table
satisfied.

He will say
this locked door behind us
is all we have to bind us to each other
and mean this:

I am alone, and you are my last hope.

He will say
red breath, silk finger,
o you of the charred emerald eyes
and mean this:

I have no home on this earth,
except with you.

He will say
a flower grown in plastique
blooms in my blood
and mean this:

I am dying —
to be this close and not touch you!

He will say
tonight has a scent of open wounds
and mean this:

Only you can close me
tight against the bleeding.

He will say
imagine the trace evidence of novas
all around us
and mean this:

We will burn till there is no more sun.

He will say
there is a fear no one can name
that is coded into the air
that is the rhythm of deep trench ocean
and mean this:

Only together
can we learn what it is
that I want most to say to you.

At a flea market. a a table
where a fat man was selling
bootleg tapes of the Hot 100
of the moment,
I purchased the malleus,
one of the bones of the inner ear,
that had once belonged to
Rene Descartes.

I took it home, varnished it,
drilled a hole in it,
hung it on a gold wire,
then stuck it in my own left ear,
where it shone
like a profane ruby
in the sun.

Whenever I’m driving,
it knocks against my head
in time with the radio:
"Lolli, Lolli, pop that body,"
and the like.

Sometimes it drowns out
my own ear’s efforts
to translate the world around me,
claiming that the music
doesn’t match the message
it’s always preached, and that
I’m missing the point:

"I think, therefore I am," it bangs
again and again, a prisoner hoping
to make contact with a fellow inmate.
"This isn’t thinking.  All this body stuff.
All this noise about what doesn’t think at all.

Sacre bleu, and zut alors!"  I just nod my head
and smile, bob along to the tunes.
Not everything needs forethought.  Not everything
bothers to carry meaning with it.  "Low Low Low Low
Low Low Low."  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I think, most of the time, and so I am,
most of the time.  Sometimes, though,
I haven’t got a thoughtful bone in my body
and I want to turn it off, that knocking
at my ear that tells me that four hundred years
of the demands of rational thought ought to be enough
for me.  Sometimes, body and beat matter more,
and I refuse to believe that because I’m not thinking,
I’ve ceased to exist.
 

A young man once told me
that to write poems
about poetry
is a foolish aim.

Hey, I said,
I can’t help it
if you won’t push
your limits.

The other day
I ripped a plywood plank in half
with a jigsaw.  I made a shelf
to hold books, and that was good;

but to deny that there was a pleasure
in the vibration from the tool, to deny that
there was suffering in the splinters that flew
from the cut, to deny that the books on the shelf are better

and more present for me because
I can tell you of the work I put into
keeping them safe, that would be
a lie.

You tell me to keep it to myself,
I say: if another person learns
to rip plywood in pursuit
of a better life, a life

that celebrates the chase
for meaning in every way,
I’m never going to stop
saying that it matters

how the pen hits the paper,
how the words receive their charges.
I’m never going to stop saying it.
You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to;

you don’t have to do anything at all
except tell your own stories of acting and
reacting.  There’s a reason I love the doing,
the craft: it reminds me

that work is the one thing
that separates me from
death, that keeps me aware
of how this flow

makes me human. It’s all
worth speaking of.
Everything is an act of poetry,
even the writing of a poem.

this morning
we were archerfish
and bluebird,
cat
and swallowtail, 
monument
and fountain,
abstract and concrete.
we were marble,
clay, steel, flame,
building up
and carving away. 
brancusi
and calder,
rounding off,
grounding, then
suspending
and floating.
making love is nothing
if not sculpture:

surface is paramount,
with a glimpse of
the potentials within
to lead us on.
our hands swerving
and smoothing, gliding
up over the ribs
with varying pressure,
applying thumbs
to tease out the nipples.
here is where we bend
back, here is where we
create the arched neck,
here is where we
mold the open mouth, 
there is so much time
needed for each lip,
so much care needed
to give the hips their crests, 
to choose
the ridge for each cheek.

but we are not stone and bronze.
we move —
plastic now, animated now,
stillness swiftly swept up in frenetic once again —
so we work again, picking up the tools,
seeking the next beings,  the next interiors;
this time cat and bluebird, swallowtail
and archerfish, nevelson
and rodin, or, better still, nameless before
the possibilities of a new elgin frieze.
there is animal in me:
you will find it.  there is
goddess in you:
I swear,
I will find it. 

that requires a lot of attention and time. 

We’ll see if it pays off, but for now, a trifle inspired by "This American Life."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fishin’ Without Dale

dale carnegie said:

"i am fond of strawberries and cream.
when i go fishing, i bait the hook
with a worm.  fish like worms.
it is immaterial that i prefer
strawberries and cream.
i give the fish what they want
if i want to catch fish."

which explains a lot
about why i’m who i am —
a clumsy-ass mystic
with few friends,
no influence to speak of,
and not much hope
of achieving either.
.
right now, for instance,
i’m sitting in a rowboat
with a canoe paddle
and a pocket fisherman.
there’s a strawberry
on the end of the line
and i just dumped a whole quart
of coffeemate, 
a pack of organic cigarettes,
and a copy of "the cloud of unknowing"
over the side.

sound crazy? maybe.
but god only knows
what marvelous,
sensualist being
i’m gonna pull in.