my neighbor builds theremins in his basement.

he is convinced
that god planted the idea for the theremin
in its inventor’s head
to ensure that someday
we would all find it easier to believe in aliens.

he almost has me convinced as well.

tony, he says, i’m glad you’re here.
the world is a darker place
without good neighbors. that frost, he
got it all wrong. no fences, no boundaries,
forget all that long history of division.

i don’t believe in division either, i tell him.

we get along well, my neighbor and i.
he builds and plays and i listen. oh, and he flies too;
i see him flying over our houses sometimes
and i am surprised i can’t hear any music then,
he moves so gracefully. but i don’t think anybody hears any music.
in fact, i’m not sure anyone else sees him flying.

of course, i’m sure they don’t see me when i fly.

one day, i have a moment of clarity.
if there are aliens, i tell him,
we might never know them. they might
be among us now. and they might not know themselves
until a theremin started to whistle.

now you’re catching on, he says.

it’s my right
to hang on to everything about tonight
especially that dumbass hat you wore to dinner

after steak and weightless talk
we eventually got down to
the way we ought to recall each other

i did not expect that denim
would be so easy to tear
and the way you messed around with my back

made me grin like a fat frog
in a warm swamp — all wet and
croaking with the love

only a thin skin can believe in
and if you even try to pretend i’ll be forgetting this soon
cowgirl you’ve got another

ranch to buy
another farm to subdivide
another man to spoil

i spotted a bumper sticker on the way home
that said “save a horse
ride a cowboy”

for miles and miles I didn’t see
a horse or a cowboy anywhere
until i pulled off the road

and thought about the way your hair
whipped back when you flipped your head back
off of me

and i whistled the good the bad and the ugly theme
lit a cigarette
squinted into the night wind

the idea that you
will be the last one for me
shakes me.

it is not necessarily
a bad shaking. more like the shiver
they say you feel

when someone walks over your grave.
that’s not a bad thing. it just
is. it’s part of a supernatural

underground life i lead — while
the daily things are happening
as they always do,

the existence
i never understood
is ending.

i wonder sometimes if you know
that you’ve led me to feel
my own mortality in a glance from you,

your dear face a memento mori
reminding me not to waste time.
there is loveliness in knowing

i am doomed. I know from looking at you
that love is as much a resignation
as it is a struggle.

i’m walking toward you now,
over the ground that promises to swallow us.
no matter; forever is a dark and fertile place.

let us now kill
those who have made us

(let us at least begin)

occult urging of moon
and wind aside
there is much to recommend
a massacre

when we see ourselves
in their faces
we feel the allure
of broken mirrors
when we see our feet
in their footprints
we understand the ripping
of maps

we are smeared with the honey
of their world
the ants who trail us
are our conscience

surely we were born riotous
and have simply forgotten
the glad sweat on the brow that comes
from trashing the iron past
in favor
of the porcelain future

let us then begin
to kill that which has made us
as to stand alone
is the only way one can stand
at the end of the day

your last breath
is already inside you
tucked into
a pocket of a lung

it’s the one
that entered you
when you were drawn
from your mother

that cry you bawled out then?
that was someone else’s last breath
that had been given to you to hold
until you emerged

how it got
from them to you
although a puzzle
is not your concern

focus here instead:
how sweet the sound
of energy returning
when all was thought lost

who were you
you should ask the next newborn
are you my former angel
are you someone i should know

exhale that
and your questions will settle
where they belong — on the ears of
the past becoming the present

there is a kind of prayer
crazier than most
dusted with black sugar
studded with hard knocks
soaked for hours in confessional brine
a prayer that eats false piety clean through
and drinks like a sailor on one last bender

these prayers were first written in the plague years
rode on the saddle horns of cavalry in civil wars
were breathed by the dozens on reservations and in camps
became stronger thru pogroms and holocaust
and glowed poison white when offered to the traditional god —

because you don’t pray like this
to just any god

this prayer reaches a god of gold cadillacs
a god of ptomaine diners and roundheeled hookers
a god of dropped balls and last chances
this crazy prayer
drags a true god kicking and screaming
into view
a god who loves the desperate
and allows the sword to once in a while
be mightier than the pen
the word
or mercy

Gan (“Mountain Spirits”)

note: i’ve been trying to write a poem about the Gan for years. this probably isn’t it.

this picture was taken on the Mescalero Reservation at a midsummer celebration some years ago. i just found it in a file i’d forgotten about.

i can’t tell you all the stories
my father used to raise me.
i don’t know if any are true
but they were truly his, and are now mine.

he said once that he recalled
the Gan dancing late at night
and that he watched from beyond the fire ring
as they stepped among the people,

matching the stars
turn for turn. then, he said, the next
memory was of the whites taking him to
the residential school.

there he had his name stolen and a new one tacked on,
got a haircut, learned to sing of God
at the drop of a whip, and practiced
the conquest tongue until he forgot his own.

he forgot everything else there too
except the Gan.
when the preacher/teacher
called them “devil dancers” he swung on him

and took the backhand slap as a warrior’s due.
this is what he told me, and i have no reason
to doubt him, having picked myself up off the floor
more than once when he swung at me.

one day i swung back
and he never tried again.
i guess warriors are made, not born,
he said.

somewhere below Sierra Blanca
the Gan gather and begin to turn.
i can feel them from here
every time i look at my father, or at myself,

with our masks firmly in place, feet struggling to dance,
hands longing for the wands, thin voices inside us
singing the fast shrill song — two warriors too far from home
to do anything except fight among themselves.

“hey, asshole —
don’t your feet hurt
from standing on that edge
for so long?”

although she thinks
she could have stopped him,
she lets him fall.

some people think it’s romantic
to love a suicide.
she knows better:
it’s hard work to watch one die,
and harder work
to watch one live.

at the funeral,
she plays harmonica
by the graveside
and horrifies the mourners.

she is no messiah.
she cannot raise anyone.

later,
when the crowd has gone,
she becomes so starved
that she eats dirt from the grave
and wipes her mouth
with flowers.

a man who believes he is in love
wakes up on the yellow line of a country highway.

he crawls to the side of the road just in time to avoid
a huge truck rolling past. he thinks that he might have died
if he had not been so fortunate as to awaken at that moment.

then he thinks that the truck was not that close to the center line
and he might not have died after all.

he crawls back into the road.

he lies there all afternoon while the traffic blows past him
as if he wasn’t there.

he leaves the road at dusk and tells himself
that it was possible that he was never there at all,
ever, at any time.

he decides that
if one feels no pain,
one has not been in love. perhaps if one can lie
on the yellow line and never be struck,
the road one was on was too safe. perhaps
one should stay out there as long as it takes
to be crushed by love, just to understand
that it is not a safe place to be.

i’m watching the news and it is evident
that this is you, no matter how
you deny it:

blank, though storm faced, able to leap
a premise at a word from on high,
willing to eat paste in public
if it helps the cause, willing to lick ass
and let your lips show the leftovers
if that’s what it takes to win.

man, i don’t want to know
how you sleep, or about what dreams a guy like you
must have. i recognize the shit
of the eagle on your pocket
and i think you know as well as i
what you gave in order to gain your gain.
i don’t entirely blame you.
you just do what you’ve been told to do —
but then again, that’s how we got here, isn’t it?

but let’s get back to your face that looks like rain,
soft rain but rain nonetheless; let’s get back to the fact
that you’ll be drying yourself over this one for a while.
let’s assume you’re a man at heart — let’s assume that a man
would know how not to mistake tears
for a reason to avoid sending other folks
out to kill or be killed.
what would it take to get you to cry in public
over everything you knew that got us here?
what would it take to get you to agree
to cry injustice where none is admitted?

it will take more than a moon or two
before we give up waiting for an answer.

EDIT: I DO NOT REMEMBER WRITING THIS POEM.

there are a dozen empty bags in my room,
various sacks in khaki and black
i can’t describe that well because i can’t remember
when i bought them or even last touched them.

i know i bought each one
to put stuff in,
stuff i needed.

i keep filling new bags
with stuff from previous bags, but
i secretly love best the bags
that have been tossed aside
in favor of new ones.

the only way i can fall in love
is when i have moved on.
the only way i can love anything
is if i’ve put it in the past.

sister can’t rhyme
the way brother does
so mother makes him write
all her poems for school assignments.

one of them gets published
and sister gets attention
brother always wanted.
she decides to publish more:

all the poems he wrote
become sister’s poems.
brother dreads the day
he will be asked to write more.

of course she asks him to write more,
and he does not rebel because
it’s a way in and he prays
that the revealed deception may someday make him famous.

one day sister
writes a poem of her own. liberation
at hand, brother mails off some of his own
under his own name.

he is rejected
as derivative.
she is praised
for her maturing style.

but he does not drink
his way into cliche.
and she does not grow
irony inside.

instead sister keeps writing and
bursts into heat and light.
brother keeps writing, grows more original,
is hailed as a late bloomer.

together they marvel
at the way mother beams.
together they ponder healthy leaves
growing from roots tangled in mold.

the long way around, that’s what i live for;

the road that does not go directly home,
which passes things i would not see if i were in a hurry,
which leads into silver midnight woods and fields,
which moves through neighborhoods of silent homes
that here and there shine yellow even at two AM,
which reveal the deer and the skunk in transit,
which make me dream of journeys that will not end;

the long way around that is nonetheless terminal,

the road that eventually loses me,
which does in fact come to a stop at the front door,
which does in fact make me pause before i get out of the car,
which makes me wonder if i should have kept driving
even though i know there was no place left to see,
which makes me wonder if there was ever a different way at all,
which makes me close the door and sit for a while longer

before i go in to sleep,
before i start upon the road again.

wednesday morning

wake up
on a wednesday morning and put on
some rough shoes, because this is the day
you’re going. don’t wait for the weekend,
don’t wait for next week; pick up in the middle and go
because only an abrupt break is going to hurt enough
to make you feel how good it’s going to be
when you get where you’re going.

wake up.
don’t say goodbye. all your family, found or born,
wants you to be happy their way
right here, so you pay attention
to the way your boots look by the bedside in the morning,
because they are the best brothers you’ll ever have
and they will carry you where you need to go.

wake up,
turn away from the loves of your life,
give up their ghosts. give up your voice
that used to crack at midnight when you called out a name
you couldn’t remember the next day.
pick a new voice from the rack.
slip it on like a clog you can kick off at will. try on any pair
that suits you, and get to walking. get to running. get to flying.

wake up,
burst off from the earth,
and go orbit upon orbit around the sun.
then, turn on your heel and come back down.
founder or triumph, slink or strut.
no one’s going to believe you did it for love
and not fame or spite,
so you might as well do it anyway.
once you’re all in hell,
there will be time enough then
to hear them mumble about you.

try to use something
more gentle than
guns and fire
to describe the way
you feel after a shared
sleepless night —
it is not always a struggle
no matter how sore you are
in the morning

there are things to be said
for sunrise and cool bedroom air
things to be said for short sleep
and long waking

this talk of taking aim
and waiting for
the smell of smoke
may make a cocked and loaded
initial sense
but not for what happens when
the guns are laid aside
when the duel is done

there is a
peace between us
that was always there
waiting to be
observed