The Bear

I remember still the thrill as the long snout took shape beneath my quaking fingers, which strained to lay things straight 

The wet nose was only partially captured in clumsy charcoal, but a suggestion of light through a bit of page left white—addition by absence—made me feel what Rembrandt must have: utter delight
The shivering wonder of shaping reality enough that some other could see it and know its name—
"Oh, nice bear," they might say,
And I would grin despite every impulse already burgeoning within me, to play things cool and quiet

Letting the world know nothing—
Isn’t this what we call growing up?

To the eyes, too, I added small flecks of white, as our instructor had showed us, and brought everything to light (if not quite to life)
Amazed at what one small glint can do

Standing back, I could not see the bruin’s odd shape—
That his visage was like play dough left to sag too long under its own weight,
A clay vase thrown with lumbering hands
A face that could hardly stand another child's scrutiny

But love, they say, is blind, and
I felt the absence of sight and of distance from anything—a part of everything, I was, suddenly—as if I had drawn a portal and absorbed myself into all time and space, through an act of true creation

Beneath the bear, I signed my name
But left absent the words I was too old to say
I only felt them, keenly, in every ounce of my burgeoning frame:
"I made this"

So I inked the practiced cursive with steady focus belied by nonchalance
A thin line of lip pursed with hidden pretense on my unrevealing face

I stood signing, standing between two worlds
Seeking new ways to draw the future forward
With clear and steady strokes

So You Must Stand Before the Painting

The same you've passed by ten thousand times
On your way to the bathroom or to shower
Or to cry on your knees in your bedroom at the senselessness of things
At the weeping hour
Or, removing your clothes, slowly, thrilling to the possibility of hands knowing you and the hope of being held

You must stand
Before the painting you had no money for and had no business buying and
Saved six months for, never eating out or going to the movies once
The same which you have now not looked at in six full years, except for seeing it as a lack of absence, out of the corner of one eye

You must stand before its pigments and its brushstrokes now and
Notice how they rise around you 
And you must let them fall about you, like a nakedness enfolding you

It will take a good minute before you begin to see
Though you knew it back then, so it will be almost like remembering:
It will dawn on you, slowly, like a winter breeze
Like a sapling from an unintended seed

You can make it down that path, like a mouse running to find warm comfort in the earth
But since you are so out of practice, you must stand before it, first, and learn humility
Then, only after,
Will you be asked to speak

By then, you will know better than to hang words on anything,
And though you’ll have the words for what you knew and know again
You will know more now,
And you will simply see and let things be
Without the need to say a thing

Regret

The words we did not say on that first chilled evening in October
I hold clenched in me still,
Like a gambler holding too tightly to a ticket, waiting for the race to end,
Afraid to lose
Afraid, too, to risk or win

Afraid that the fates would be unkind, I declined courage
And have now only the feebleness of a tighter grip to keep regret at bay
And all the things I wished to say—
All the things which were waiting in that space, like a fire waiting to find breath
(Like a sinner in search of grace
Like night waiting for the day)—
Sit within me, still:
Words to become worlds, stillborn and inert instead

The seasons, strangely, did not stop for me
My faltering did not bend time's knee,
Nor stop the stream from racing to the sea
All things kept flowing, and still make their way,
Just as years race on to the end of days

But the moment still buzzes in my mind
The tragedy of one dear thing left incomplete
Makes regret feel as death to me

To go back and risk it!
To return and release every thought, like fish, and to watch them swim away
To spread them like seeds, scattered on an April day

But I can't go back and send words out upon the wind
Just as we can't go back or home again

Perhaps, could I somehow return to pull at the seam
All would have pulled apart, leaving me, as I feared, naked
But perhaps, instead, we would have been covered in sudden miracle
Some great emptying somehow filling all the spaces between you and me
Some great yearning made complete
As a new world turned beneath our feet

If only some wise sage, other than time and regret and age,
Would help us make our way
And teach us
That we won’t regret swinging, even if we miss
But we will regret standing still
And though errant words can be spent foolishly
We will lament all the more
The day we would not seize and make secure
And that as we make our way
We will regret, above all,
The words we would not say

Like Fawns We Made Our Way

We sat by each other at The Shawshank Redemption, and
That was enough
No hands touched, no lips, no illicit bliss
But to sit
In that cavernous theater,
At the very beginning of our freedom (into which we'd fall),
Was everything and all

To be near each other
To breathe
To hold the spinning galaxies within ourselves
In the dark, pierced by longing
Made us young kings and queens
Riding nobly to first battle, and sure victory

Like fawns we made our way
Into the bright light outside the theater
It was too much light for eyes to hold
As we said goodbye
And fumbled into the endless world

On the highway home,
I looked out the window
And when my sister asked me how the movie was
I said, “Good”
Then watched the green trees blur by
In lines too wild for human eyes to see

What I Will Remember from My Travels

What I most remember of our trip to Paris was not the Mona Lisa or her sly smile
(Though I could see why she has beguiled five centuries of minds)
But rather, I will remember the warehouses, near the airport, along the Seine 

They strained in their daily labors, and the laborers outside them smoked dark and milds, to put their minds at ease, beneath a timid sky, as if the day cannot find its way or smile,
But sighs
As if it is stuck in tedium, so far from revelry, next to the great city 
An unseeing eye in a world of light 

And while I took from Rome, above all, the Coliseum, the city’s ancient throne 
I will also remember a small restaurant near the Tiber, unpeopled by tourists,
Where we had a mediocre meal, of pasta and cheap wine, and then walked beneath evergreens, which lined
the quiet streets, 
The simplicity of it all somehow perfecting our time, and satisfying our tired minds 

In Jerusalem, I will remember Rehovot, that neighborhood so far from the Western Wall
Where people went to dance class and ate in small cafes and laughed and cried 
As if the entire crossroads of history must give way to our daily dramas, and our crimes
Brooding in the street
Laughing at the spectacle of human desire, so full of fire
Neatly hidden and pushed down, endlessly longing, 
Like the streams of so many rivers, and of centuries
Like the cool, quiet hours in the desert
Before the morning breaks in heartless song 

Because no matter what greatness is happening
We forget the sum of things,
Which is mainly a women watering flowers, nursing hope for spring, at her own feet
And a child filling hours with wonder, sitting on her stomach, coloring
And a man smoking on the sidewalk, tending to such strong desire that, were it a storm, 
It would tear a ship apart
As could shake the heart of the earth
As could shake all earthly monuments
And the foundations of the world 

More real, somehow, all of it, and the art of surviving and striving forward, with heart,
Than the most sublime art 
Hung on walls for us to gawk and smile at and cool or souls as we stare at it
For we have it all within our hearts already 
We only recognize her smile and the height of the Coliseum and the mourning of the Western wall, and the daily walks in quiet neighborhoods 
Because we have them all 
Down deep inside us  

We have them all, crying out, like mother earth in birth
Down deep inside the dirt of us

Suburbs, 1994

It was a grown thing to be well-versed in dark nights, seeking streets flushed with neon lights
We didn’t know what such wandering meant, but we wanted it
As childhood fell away from us, like a slipping knife 

We couldn't quiet pierce the stillness of the suburbs without being bad
And though we had walked out those doors a thousand times,
We hoped each time to find a different knowing, to quench our growing sorrow;
We wanted to become wise, with open eyes,
As the stars spilled light like water from a colander,
And we were tired of being dry

The streetlamp on the corner was unconstrained by any cover, free to send its light skyward and onto one another,
Those beams may in fact still be going on, in endless space, unrestrained
They felt like us with our growing lusts 

But on the asphalt, the light only glared with suspicion, as if we could not trust any darkness,
As if wolves or dark creatures hid within the shadows of the woods behind your house  

We were still children, after all
And afraid
And still, like Ophelia, we longed some dark swamp to find,
Some bit of secrecy to embrace, enough to sate the sorrow of empty bellies and hands which shook with their longing and their demand
To be full
To silence the voices that said, "be good"
And to find some truer selves, rising like the moon 

All this we sensed, though there were no words for it
Longing is nothing but a pulsing in the brain until it finds some sound to frame its name
And whatever we sensed was interrupted, anyway, as two streets down, 
A car careened in unrestrained rebellion, bucking loose,
A teenager, no doubt, cutting tooth 

We did not even have the age yet to be ironic: 
The screaming of the tires did not seem pathetic,
It seemed wild
A big black dog tearing at its chain
A dog howling out its name

All while
The trees swung likes books of revelation,
The evening swooned
The leaves just budding on the branches
The night just awake beneath the waxing moon

One Wild Night

I guess it wasn’t too wild;
There were no drugs or amphetamines, nor even wine or beer, that I remember
Though we did break into someone’s house

"Don’t worry," my sister’s friend had said, "I’m his best friend, it’s no big deal"
He shimmied a lock and we stood on the hardwood of a dirty bedroom which held a keyboard and drums, 
Which was just about the greatest sign of wealth and freedom I could dream of
All this because I was too young to go out, like each of my siblings, 
And had cried about it

My sister, having great compassion or pity, said, “Come with us, tonight”
And, somehow, my parents agreed
So I rode in the middle of the backseat, saying nothing, eyes full of wonder,
As teenagers plied the town with hungry hearts
To howl the moon and give enough vent to keep their hearts from melting down
In the insatiable lust of life  

My God, they were babies, just cutting teeth 
But they were gods, as I watched them, their great minds set on edge 
Staring through the windshield as if staring off a ledge
Knowing destiny would meet them, just ahead
Then looking at me kindly, as if I reminded them of something—
Adam before he had tasted fruit
A reminder of some lost truth 

They were in the thrall that is the endless, long horizon
And the lust of longing 
And how could they know that life is a long road
A highway running from a great city into desert, to which it must go, always heading west 
With fewer off ramps and stops for rest, and only the occasional Last Stop Gas

Fewer possibilities, because we must choose
And every yes is a no 
Every choice a letting go 
So that, in the end,
You will sit not on endless roads, but only one, remembering all the untaken paths
And lamenting, perhaps, that you did not stake your claim more boldly 
Before growing old and sitting in the shade of sunset 

This was all unknown lore, with no purchase on that summer night
Not then, by God
Not then 
Unfettered as they were and full of life
And as we drove, I could feel the lust, the longing to touch and hold all things
Their hands still gripped to eternity like fingers on a steering wheel
The possibilities still setting them free
As the ageless sky turned endlessly 

Glamour

My wife's professor asked her class for "the opposite of beauty"
And what came to mind for most (and me, as well) was “ugliness" 
But “No," the sage said
"Ugliness still points to what it’s not— 
The absence of what we long for
Points still to something lovely, even by its absence"

The class rocked back, as she leaned in
"The opposite of beauty," she said (no doubt in that professorial tone
that knows a secret but plays it straight, proud but humble, crowned with grace)
"The opposite of beauty is glamour
Glamour points to itself, but beauty...
Beauty is a signpost to something else”

"That sounds clever," I said as we drove on, sitting in this little story,
And as my wife explained it to me, I remembered the figures which danced before me in Mexico, in a strange show 
All covered in swaths of lipstick, like warriors sick with paint,
Desperately clawing at one another, gripping flesh, the letting in of a wind that could not cool

And I felt again the sad song of how pathetic all that gripping was
Not young men and women standing in the river of desire, breaking the straight-jacket
With the courage to say, “Here I am” 
(Which is the most beautiful, being seen without fear 
Being here 
To truly touch and hold and feel)
But rather a thick crowd saying “Here I am not, 
But it will feel for a moment we are all in this together, and so…close enough”

The promise of good looks and money and flesh 
All enflamed to pass a torch across so many lips
Was glamorous and gaudy and awful, like a bad dream
A journey leading anywhere but home 
A touch so far from being touched
A truth so far away from true

And All the Stadiums Were the Same

Outside the fence you could still hear the crowd,
Their susurration interrupted only by whistles and the country boy voice of the announcer booming like a wounded bird from the stadium speakers,
As they plowed into each other, and the bystanders rejoiced at some choice display of gallantry on field of play

But you could fade the sounds away as you walked from the bleachers, the lights also pooling more quietly behind you, spilled like water clinging desperately to the ground, with miles of endless dark around
In the countryside, 
Where teenage dreams screamed like engines down country roads, some divinity to dare,
Where lust lived and died like summer thunderstorms, chased by the grip of winter wind

In the first grasp of autumn, the Southern grass turned yellow and hard with frost
Bodies gasping at the sudden cold
In West Blocton, Wedowee, Chelsea, and Pleasant Grove
The places changed, the scene remained the same:
The gravel parking lots, the hot chocolate, the chain-linked fence,
The high school penance, as we paraded, nearly apologizing for ourselves, to make our way through the world  

There’s the courage of warriors and of poets, and each faces its dragons
And we were battle-swept, each of us, and armored
Taking the long walk past all, so full of longing as to come undone

Every age has its promenades
Its way of creating time and space for ceremony, for masquerade
And sport, to prove our worth
And we were all there to find our birth 

For a moment I would wonder what would happen if I wandered away, 
Scaled the fields and just walked, into the night 
The sound of the game would fade like unwelcome day, the harsh white light crowding out the sky would suddenly grow dark 

But then my mom would say “Let’s go, come on,” and we’d get in the car and turn the heater on
The night both merciless and kind, and endless on every side
As a thousand eyes burned from the sky, full of curse or grace
The whole earth breathing
With a thousand arenas ahead of us
A thousand journeys yet to face

San Pedro, Mexico

We would walk to the bandstand at the plaza on Friday nights—
to behold the great cacophony of life, drenched in neon, as Mariachi music drifted across the parking lots and lawns, the speakers wailing the dirge of a desert town, to synchronize each human heart—
And after buying tacos and a coke, we’d sit on the curb as the wind stirred the dirt 
While novios walked hand in hand, in promenade, in Sunday best, above the fray

Those evenings seemed to speak:
Work hard all day and once a week, you can have your say, and a little drink
And lean in to love or lust, on tired grass 
If that’s your lot, then chin up:
A kiss beneath a tree with no business blooming in the desert redounds with miracle, and maybe you can
make it last
And hold it long within your grasp 

All the while, the great sun would burn down as if too sad to stay
But we hardly noticed the holy shades of orange nor the shape of the world’s temple nor its crown of thorns
And certainly not all the things we couldn’t name or say 
Ghostly within us, just kept at bay
Like how human longing is all the same
And we know its shape but not its name 

We felt, too, there is nothing new under the sun or moon 
Culture, too—once you get past the music and the food—is all a dirge
A sweeping of the soul so we can order our long lament
And our brave facing of the dark
With food, music, and miraculous hearts 

The First Day of Autumn

The first day is not the equinox, when the earth tilts past its glorious prime, but rather,
The first day we smell fire and leaves on the wind, intermixed with pine 
Then we know it’s here and sit back and smile
In the promise that, though we’ll die, there’s life again on the other side

And in my private thoughts what stirs, always, is the third grade,
(How closely scent connects the mind to memory, closer than a kiss)
As I see a field trip to the farmer’s market, when Janet Clark's batteries dropped from her camera and I was there to pick them up, all the pumpkins around us applauding for me, for grabbing the stroke of luck, 
Right place, right time, aspiring to be a gentleman and kind,
Though such things go out of style, they seem to be hard-wired as the desire
I already knew then—for the whisper of soft skin
And her bright brown eyes
My heart already so lonely with longing

And I remember, in ’85, standing next to the parade that filed all the high school heroes by us, their pious worshippers— 
We could not know their hearts stirred with any anxiety, how bright their smiles and their homecoming dresses, their hair pressed to impress us
And they did
And again,
The burning beauty of lonely longing was on the wind
Deep as any autumn orange
Smoldering the hole within every human heart, so desperate to be satisfied
We grow up, we remain lovesick children, writing the song of our hearts with dust and chalk 

I am strengthened in my climb by these memories,
Pictures in my mind which are ever mine and my greatest treasures
Gold which goes with me, consigned to some place beneath the daily pace of life, but always rising to remind me that, My God
The world is fair and bright
And that it is no small miracle to harbor such worlds inside us

So now, fire-on-the-wind, my old friend, ask me your question, once again: 
Can I enter in? 
Into the lonely, 
To make of it some poetry in verse or in how I spend my longing and my time 
And can I bless now the young hearts and minds being kissed of fire for their first time?

Perhaps at a table tonight, with wine, I will tell you, my love, of those places behind and hear of yours
Though none now shine for me with stars as bright as the light echoing in your eyes
As we incline the conversation back through time, tilting it like the earth’s axis
We, too, become turned until, at that perfect angle, all becomes still
And the firelight shines revealing the world that spins inside us

Our good glad work now is handing on some world, like wheat, to the children at our feet
To feed the lonely of their precious hearts
And eyes that are meant to burn like funeral pyres, the phoenix to give flight 
And minds that will carry memories, I hope, 
Always kissed by smoke and fire

A Reflection on my Trainwreck

I spoke to a room full of people, and I suppose I’m writing this to address the anatomy
of my glorious meltdown  

First, in rising mania I moved before the mic, saying things like, “Right?  I mean, right, guys?” Palms raised pleadingly for comprehension, I looked around the room for some nodding eye or mind to anchor the panic of not knowing what I was saying

Second, I soared out of my body, asking myself what on God’s green earth I was talking about, and wondering, not unlike a lamb being sheared, when it would all be over 

Third, three times, I opened my mouth, like a leap off a clip, literally without words to say, and not a pool to land in
I only found a place by making up a thought, no matter how incongruent, how grand the non-sequitur
And the wreckage was profound

Fourth, by the end, I just admitted, “I know this wasn’t very clear,” by which I meant, “I know this was a total trainwreck, and I’m really sorry,” and people got my meaning because they came up to me afterwards to “thank me” 

So they said, but, 
I’ve been around the track enough to tell the difference between gratitude and compassion from sweet souls—the kind of people who take home strays or leave milk out for tomcats
And saw how in need I was of a warm place to spend the night 

I told my wife, two days later, that it had stirred up my soul, like vinegar in a vat, settling into the bowl of my stomach, where I hold the best of my anxiety
It chewed up the sediment that holds down the river bottom—the waters of ego I scramble like an engineer to hold back, 
I, always an unwitting builder of a sandbag dam within me, holding back
Pebbles of performance
Earth layers of ego
Fissures of fear 

But three days of sitting in the dark is enough time
For my soul to enter that v-shaped resurrection I’ve come to know will hold me
You hit your low and then you know
That God never sees the pretense anyway, or sees past it, right as rain
And if all pain opens the soul, it’s better to learn to laugh and let it go
Sometimes, like the models in those old Westerns, the train just needs to go off the bridge
So you can learn it’s perfectly okay
And that the best lessons are the ones that shake you whole, so you can learn to let them go 

On Clichés Becoming True

On my math teacher’s desk in junior high there was a postcard standing sentry to remind us that “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” the first in a long kick-line of clichés we learned to dismiss along with all the veracity of romance novels
Either so clearly false (unenchanted wands waved to produce one last bit of sleep for us, the awakening ones)
Or truths so true they became trees to the proverbial forest of our heart’s unseeing wilderness

“Aim for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”
(maybe)
“Sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you”
(until you start therapy, twenty years from now, and find they are all still inside you)
“God will never give you more than you can handle”
(no wonder so many people hate God)

Even with the true ones, you don’t know the truth until it’s true for you
And familiarity breeds contempt, so we overlook the closest truths to hand
Until we stumble into them and remember we read them on a poster back in high school

As when I cleaned my yard this afternoon and saw all the unscrupulous pieces of dirt,
Returned after last week’s good brooming
And the leaves fallen once again, the vines re-claiming aimless space,  
And I knew, as of a sudden seeing,
There will be no place in my life, no space in my yard, where it’s done
My backyard has become the metaphor I’ve denied, the cliché I’ve hid away, the fact revealed:
There is only journey

Yes, I feel it now in my bones, moving up my stomach with sobering sight, this revelation,
That I will not arrive
There is no destination except deeper down and real, where God is—
The arrival of letting go

And somehow, without wondering what else I could be doing or where else I could be besides here,
I put my hands on the rough-catching handle of the rake
The bristled top-hat of the broom (with its flakes of paint falling in a great irony, to be swept away)
And move the dirt that’s always returning, holding the rake with steady breaths, at peace, while another sort of irony snakes back upon itself
Finding me mindful for a moment, that  

The journey is an always-becoming-destination
A train station merging always with the tracks
A process so very close to place 

The Self is Like a Paper Cup

They had in my dad’s office one of those glass jugs of water and,
Beneath it,
The coned paper cups which were good enough
For a drink or two, maybe three
Before we crumpled them into the can
Wiping our lips with our long sleeves and sighing

All this I remember because they would tear so easily
Like our own souls
Into which God is always pouring water

Return to London

The day was crisp when I came here, a young man,
To London
To Bill and Blake and the Bulldog
The whole world on the threshold of my hostel
A new flannel shirt to keep me from the cold
The leave-less trees of London stirring in Atlantic wind
And on my face, the indomitable grin of youth
Bouncing like a blown-up punching clown
As my footfalls echoed down Baker street
Despite my awkwardness
My inability to negotiate the tube

I went three stops too far on the wrong line
Before realizing I was headed far afield of Covent Garden
I swept into people’s way on the street
I asked for a pint of Bombardier, rhyming it with Perrier,
(The barkeep placed it down and said,
“That’s Bombardier, mate…like dropping bombs, eh?”)

Now, I walk more secure, either more mastered
Or more mature at masking
Aware of how to hail a cab and flow through crowds
But something is lost in the exchange
The world more behind me now
The thrill over each hill a bit dampened

Good God the crisp air by the Thames as I paid my ticket
Scrambling to figure out how much each coin was worth
Then striding down to the Beefeaters and the great glorious Tower
Real as brick

At Oxford, I said something that offended my tour guide,
But here I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut,
The faces of the past welling up like Trafalgar on the tide
As the cold wind swept tears into my eyes
(Or from them, who can tell?)
And the great city opened all the past
And all my future flowed before my anxious feet
Like the Thames rolling to the sea

A Constant

Sometimes it seems the constant in my lank life,
Flickering forward through memory,
Bringing me back to myself,
Pinching me
Is the sound of a jet on the afternoon
Its whine limping forward in undulating pitch
Its lips
Just barely touching,
Sounding an Fff or Zzz in the key of C

Then suddenly the day is still
And I hear, breaking through my work
The dust falling on the grass outside
The children playing trains down the street
Their voices choo-chooing across the yards
And somewhere a street away, bricks being unloaded in a steady
Scrape and clink, the weight of worlds being re-made
And the laughter of the workers over (I imagine) some lewd joke
That breaks through the sweat with smiles

While above me, the drone begins to fall away
The last ember glow and smoke of firework
As lives buzz through the skies
And a man with his eyes closed, sighs
Feels the plane shimmer all around him
The sounds of the earth so far below

11:04

When we stepped from the train
And smelled that green
Felt that heat on our skin
Saw the distance shimmer and wave
In springtime heat
All covered in the morning’s sheen

All the possible, all the hopes
Were held there, in that pause
Standing on the platform
As we breathed in greens and blues  
With pleated breaths,
Folded neatly within our chests
Measured, each, to give us time
To see the steps ahead

I said, “Let’s go”
And fumbled with the awkward weight
Of trunked up things

You can’t risk standing still
Too long in that sacred place
Where hopes and morning meet