Long shadows glide blade-like
across the snow, sheering tufts of tan grass
in a cutting too slow for the eye,
too quick for the mind. Shadows vanish.
The blue deepens. A scatter of leaves
skitters like paper coins—a coinage no one
will possess. A solitary thrush feeds on the last
frozen chokecherries. No sound other than
the river hushing, muted by a line of cottonwoods.
No moon. No stars, though the first several
will soon appear above the peak of Walker’s barn.
In the time it takes me to wade the drifts,
lift, duck under and replace a loose fence rail,
slog my way in the dark to a looming form,
a thousand stars will have awakened, sending
just enough light to print on the snow
the spidery lacework of an apple tree.
FACEBOOK
Thanks, my peeps, for your concern. I’m still in shock.
Just now watered the tomatoes. BTW,
Paris was magnifique this spring. A walk
along the Seine can really make your day.
It made mine, en tout cas. And Musée d’Orsay!
Wow! You gotta see L’Origin du Monde.
That was then, this is now. Good to be back,
though it’s lonely here. Has anyone owned
a Smart Car? Shit. Disc is full on my Mac.
Ideas? Tech support has a worthless FAQ.
Doing my best to deal with emptiness.
At least there’s you. And there’s Funny or Die.
And my irises, my purple tongues of sadness.
They sing today. Without them, I’d want to cry.
NEIGHBORHOOD CROWS
In lazy flight this afternoon, they resemble
scraps of crepe blown aloft above the sunlit
crowns of firs. They’re my aloof neighbors.
All their guttural utterances are black, cynical,
feathered with irony. The point is, they mutter,
there’s no point. They clean up our messes.
In the corner of a field they hop to a scrap
of burger still in its silver wrapper.
Tolerant as Lao Tzu, plain as nickels, they gather
on wires in squads of nine. Earning a living,
they know, depends on luck, a canny eye
and magic, which explains their sorcerer’s robes,
glossy as lacquered shadows at twilight.
Like the universe, they do not judge.
They have no comment on the divorce rate
or the attendance of gangsters at church.
Instead, they’re the lamplighters of old, lighting stars
to signal day’s end as they pass over power lines.
Imponderable, ordinary, like night itself,
they spread their wings to shelter their young,
invite their friends to dinner in a ditch
or near an upturned garbage can. When threatened
by a hawk they call in reinforcements to harry
the intruder, distracting hunter away from the hunted.
At dawn they reappear, routine as soot
but wiser. For crows are learned monks
in vacant lots, beggars who take the vow
of poverty and then take over the city.
Crows have nothing to teach, nothing to sell.
They joke, cajole, bicker and tend
to their families. They are Zen masters
of the art of blending in, always making the best
of a bad situation, as poets do who know
it’s hopeless but go on anyway with their crow visions
and dark pronouncements, feigning nonchalance
when we fail to understand their off-the-cuff
commentaries, those suggestions they offer in order
to survive the coming apocalypse. If we paid attention,
we might even learn something—not merely
how to face the day when the comet strikes or the missiles
rise from their silos, but how to live in the now,
how to start anew, how to be better than we’ve been
and, despite the madness of our time,
how to get along with our neighbors, how to thrive.
WASHING OUR BACKS
We’d stand under the shower in that shabby rental
we made livable, somehow, despite the broken water heater.
Scalding needles or ice pellets—you never knew
what might rain down from the dangling fixture,
crusted with Depression-era rust. You preferred
a coarse cloth, usually blue. I liked threadbare,
soap-scum gray. We’d press together, breast-to-breast,
right arms clapped around the other’s back to scrub,
you requesting firm. Give it elbow grease, you’d say.
I favored long light strokes. We’d embrace as if to fuse
into one person, our eel-slick skin sex-enlivened,
aware of itself, touched as if for the first time, braced
for that moment we might cry out from a gush, ice or fire.
We’d slow-dance without moving much in the space allotted,
the tub floor slippery as butter. All we could hold onto
was each other. It’s a miracle we never fell. Once, you gripped
my wrists hard enough to leave welts. Next day, a student
came up before class. Brawling again, I see, she smiled.
And we brawl still, in the shower, more gently now.
We still wash each other into lathers of pleasure,
shoulder blades first—those incipient wings
that keep us grounded—then down the spine, back up,
hips to ribs to underarms, me giving it elbow grease
with your coarse cloth, you swabbing me
with my tattered filament. All the while our free hands
roam freely through the countryside of our bodies,
remembering favorite routes, those hills and dales
our hands love to find. And then, oh, then, we kiss.
Five: Airborne
And so a couple
Of years ago,
The old poets died
Young.
And now the young,
Scarlet on their wings, fly away
Over the marshes.
~James Wright, from “An Elegy for the Poet Morgan Blum,” from Above the River: The Complete Poems of James Wright
SWING
It’s that sensation of plunge and rise,
of growing heavy and light and heavy
and light, of forward-leaning and backward-leaning,
legs tucked, legs thrust out,
the one-second release from gravity,
toes pointed at clouds, neck craned,
head groundward back-tipped,
hair swept to and fro, brushing the dust,
the iron links cold and shrill,
silent at the arc ends, unburdened
for the periodic instances, then whining
with your weight for a full hour,
the tool shed falling as you rise,
rising as you fall, then from the head-low-
legs-high view, the derelict green house
inverted, half its windows broken—
a Titanic made of ice—that sensation,
the peaks and valleys of dizziness
flooding you, draining from you
with each pump and lunge until
that moment when, having pulled
and pulled to lift yourself beyond
yourself, straining, almost parallel
to the wincing crossbeam, you shift your grip
on the chains, readying for launch
at maximum forward upward speed,
whereupon you jettison into the dusk
of your ninth September, lofted into a brief
> parabola over a coil of green garden hose,
a wheelbarrow full of rainwater,
and an upturned rake, its teeth bared,
entirely ready to puncture your life—
and with arms flailing, once in every five
or six leaps, you land feet first into the cool
end of summer. The jolt when you hit
the ground, upright in victory or sprawled
on the beaten grass, inhaling its green musk,
feeling grit and sweat on your neck—
that sensation is why you adjust the rake
a little farther out, edged closer
to the furrow your impacts have dug,
to see precisely how far you can fly, to learn
by how much or how little you’re able
to clear that row of rust red teeth.
MEADOWLARK
He’s out there, somewhere, a quarter mile off,
hidden in the crown of that lightning-struck pine.
At this distance, maybe he’s not there, maybe his voice
is there, careening across Rocky Flats, indigoed
with camas and larkspur—wild with shooting star.
His phrases carry from his pine to here,
the ground patched with monk’s hood, cowled
like its name, among lichen-ladened scree.
She I love prowls the near-treeless meadow,
pausing to listen, binoculars aimed,
scanning for bluebirds in the wind-combed grass.
That’s when the long, twisted, complicated notes
come tumbling in a trick of acoustics to fill the expanse.
The pine hunches, blasted one night a hundred years ago,
arthritic now, a misshapen thing persevering
alone with the flowers, stones, wind, droppings
of deer and elk who have heard the same arias
sail out from deep within the green. I tell myself
it’s music. It is not music, not in the mind
of a meadowlark. Still, it’s a wondrous sound
nevertheless, a little delirious, the complex notes
alarming in their urgency: I’m alive, you fools!
All that matters are the sun-fringed clouds.
Wake up! All that matters are the sun-fringed clouds.
She I love scans the lightning-struck pine.
Who’s his audience? There it is: the mystery
of poetry. Other meadowlarks, of course. Of course
the stones, the flowers, droppings of deer and elk.
Maybe the lightning-struck pine he’s in, maybe
she I love, blue-parka-ed, her ears cupped to hear.
BAT IN DAYLIGHT
So balletic are his leaps and swoops,
his gray-brown 4-inch wings so agile
he seems an angel, a leaf
fallen from an aspen, slightly daft
as if attached to clear fishing line
tied to a girl’s finger. He traces
filigrees above the pump house,
near my heap of pine rounds
split for winter. Why he’s here
in early September I have no idea—
a nocturnal insomniac, I gather,
like me, out hunting, drawn perhaps
by the scent of pine pitch or, more likely,
flying ants I’ve seen rising from beneath
a stump. Easy prey. Such deft moves.
An ant’s wings flutter down like tiny
transparent oars, lighting on a round
my ax is buried in. Off he veers.
The mystery of his appearance remains,
like the mystery of night and day,
or bat aerobatics, or the human roundness
of the hill across the river,
river shimmer, river clatter, muted now in fall,
chitter of a kingfisher cruising
upstream and down. Or the mystery
of dusk, when bats usually waken,
peel off from spaces in the roof shakes,
then zigzag above the cottonwoods,
writing calligraphy in the deepening blue,
writing their lives all night—
but for the one who may emerge at dawn
while others return to their shake beds,
squeaking and scratching.
He’s the oddball, the contrarian,
the one who works the day shift,
who must do things his way, even if
it means he’s out alone, curious to see
(though half-blind) river glitter
or what trees look like, the daytime moon
or wonder if he should be afraid
of the large creature below,
grunting and sweating, affixed
to the earth, staring up at him.
THE UNFOCUSED EYES OF DRONES
They’re dream wrens in the clear lake of day,
like toys, a slightly larger replica
of those model planes men play with
at the park on weekends to escape the house.
One of them, Chuck, lives near me.
I see him summer afternoons, alone
on the baseball diamond’s pitcher’s mound.
He flies a delicate Sopwith Camel biplane,
then a screaming Spitfire that frightens a park dog.
He barrel-rolls his planes, gliding on some
unnamed emotion wired to his remote control.
You could say Chuck, the operator,
is well-rounded in his “Beer Beats Sex” tee shirt.
He’s got Santa’s beard and Trotsky’s glasses.
He wouldn’t harm a soul, though he lives
in a country that harms souls every day.
He may well know drones have been taught to think,
to beam down and detect human auras.
When its blue brain glows red, darts fly out,
quieter than starlight aimed at desert flowers.
The operator sits in a quiet room
playing the controls somewhere deep inside
the American Heartland—Ohio,
say, or Nebraska. He does not ask
who the girl in the red headscarf might be,
seen moving across his monitor
in what appears to be a courtyard filled
with trees, most likely lemon. She waters
a bed of eggplants with a plastic bottle
that could in his mind be a bomb
she plans to plant by the nearby roadside.
Crickets fill the air with their raspy chorus.
The operator can’t hear them, nor does he
know her scarf is red. He sees only
the flash of light on his screen, sees
an opened rose made of pieces of the girl’s house:
brick, rock, glass, iron, paper, threads
from her headscarf, seen on the screen
in various tones of gray and sepia,
a roiling miasma seeping outward
from the courtyard. When the last
chunk of mortar has fallen, the last
of the seared leaves flutters down,
the mist of lemons hovers in the air.
WHITMAN READING BY MOONLIGHT
Walt Whitman pads around on the lawn
in bathrobe and slippers. Moonlight
silvers the lilac tree by the dooryard,
the flowers long gone from lavender to rust.
He opens his notebook to read a recent draft,
the title appearing as—he can’t make it out—
“Growing Broken Berry,” it looks like.
Back in bed he sees himself forlorn,
alone on the stern, riding the Brooklyn Ferry,
his shirt collar turned up, his fingers
clutching the brim of his straw hat.
He opens his notebook and reads aloud
by moonlight a draft, its working title:
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In bed,
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br /> staring at the black screen of the ceiling,
he watches himself tear out one page
from the notebook, then another.
When he releases them, they rise like gulls
aloft on the back draft, awhirl in a billow
of coal smoke and steam. Pages flutter
ungainly, as if wounded, alighting
on the wake’s white fire where they swim,
swirl, flatten and disappear
into the black waters of the Hudson.
AIRBORNE
What comes back are two seconds
of weightlessness. That and a dirt road,
purple foxglove in a ditch,
the crunch of gravel under the red
tractor’s great black wheels.
There’s the grind and smoke
of a belabored engine downshifted
against the steep down-grade
toward a cave of cedars erasing
all but quilt scraps of sunlight.
There’s me propped on his lap,
full of the smell of him—Old Spice,
pipe tobacco breast-pocketed
in his overalls, pipe and pouch
pressed against my back, his fat hands
on the steering wheel, my small hands
tight on it, alive with vibration
this fall morning now startled
by the gunfire of backfire, startled
again by silence, again by lurch,
release, by sudden speed, his quiet “Hold on,”
our trailer of firewood careening,
whipped side to side, chunks lofted,
his foot stomped on the useless brake.
There are the two beautiful seconds
where I’m lifted free from the weight
of my childhood, of the fables I’d made,
lifted, flung from the jackknifed
tractor about to roll, struck in the back
by some hard thing, he leaping after me,
my face pushed in the muck of the ditch
where I flop entirely awake
to the tops of trees, bits of blue,
aware that there’s no end to it,
there’s an end to it. I’m not able
to breathe or cry or feel
thorns of blackberry in my cheek,
the sting of nettles in this,
The Law of the Unforeseen Page 6
