A Girl I Once Knew

There was a girl, lived just up this road
Pumphouse, named to hearken back a century,
Before so much iron made things spin,
And they used instead the wood and water of this forest
Which hides, now, the long path to her house
Or, more likely, where she used to live—  

For surely a new family lives there, and she’s moved on
And that is part of the mystery of changing rooms like we change days
The residue, though…that’s always the same
The filmy wash of love and longing, and so much pain
On hearts and windows

We never dated, never touched, but
Dear my, the lust of those brown eyes
“Chestnut," “mahogany," “coffee" and such
If they were written in rhyme
On some love-note inscribed
"Dark eyes piercing their own mysteries
and piercing mine" 
The tall longing to be known, a sunflower breaching sky
And strawberries, her skin
Grown warm in our Alabama sun

Her mother died and there was tragedy
She might as well be a maiden or her lady’s waiting maid
From some sod-trodden century now romanticized
The hardship of rock and mud forgotten

It’s all the same, after all—the same longing, whatever the time
And whoever owns the skin that contains within it
The taste of strawberry
Its scent wafting on the wind, still
Wading through so many years

Tide's Come High

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s come high
And the moon’s riding orange in the bright October sky
But the geese by the river sense that autumn is a-quiver
By the blue band of winter, sailing up the river

Sailing up the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your true love should be,
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
Cause the boy couldn’t buy a golden ring, girl
The boy couldn’t buy a golden ring

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s by your side
And the moon’s riding low in the blue October sky
Out across the bay, the waters rush and play
But they pile on the rocks without shame, girl
And they’ll pile down on you just the same

Sailing down the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your love let you be,
Past the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
Sailing for to buy a golden ring, girl
Sailing for to buy a golden ring

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s at your breast
And the moon’s gone to rest by the blackened raven’s nest
Cold as the morning is the ocean in his mooring
And it’s time for you to up and go

Sailing down the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your love you will see
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
He’s gone and he’s bought a golden ring, girl
He’s gone and he’s bought a golden ring

Lie down, Jenny, for the tide has touched your lips
And you’ll soon taste the darkness, beyond the ocean’s kiss
Unforgiving in its blackness is the ocean in its passion
But there’s morning far beyond these broken dreams, girl

He’s sailing down the bay straight to you, girl
That’s where your love your face will see
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
And he’ll cry and he’ll throw away the ring, girl
And he’ll moan and he’ll throw away the ring

A Circus Memory

I remembered, when my son came to my bed
Still stumbling up from his nap, just awake
That you took me to a circus

I don’t know why
I haven’t thought of it in years and was, in fact, surprised to find any memory of it,
Let alone something so pristine and clear, like a photograph dusted off, but
There it was, a file suddenly found

I was focused on the subtlety and smallness of his breaths, minutely filling the minutes,
When suddenly I saw the great green hall of the civic center,
The concrete once swept clean now filling with popcorn and peanuts and sunflower seeds
And in my hand a yellow fan they’d handed out, advertising a dealership, cross town,
As children bounded in and sat down in the delicious dark, waiting for the start

It had been raining—a good storm, too
So we were wet, which was part of the fun:
To step from storm into a place where the soul heaves away from sad shores,
For just a moment even, to remove itself,
To be restored in those tents
And in the centuries of trains traveling cross country, long before the show was contained in the big rigs which rumble now, with such melancholy, into town

I don’t know why I remember it, except perhaps that you loved me in it
In-between the crazy of our family and the broken glass of pain,
The ruthless love was there, rooting me
And I stand amazed—or sit or lie, as the case may be—at how deep and strong the love goes, covering (as they say) a multitude of misses,
Like ink which colors the whole pot of water

And my son, my son
His face without lines,
His life the very meaning of miracle
With such a heart to hold so much love:
Wordlessly he crawled up the sheets and lay down, smiling sleepily to find me here
And I tried not to move, still as a lion
As he slid beneath the big tent of my arms

Arms poised to hold, and also aware, already
Of letting go
Because that’s how love goes—
The tender breath of it so subtle
Though it builds worlds and holds us, through the storm

Subtext

It’s hard, she said, in that way that you say "it’s hard" and almost look away or retreat inside
So that the seam of the bag doesn’t rip and spill its grain all over this nice table
The heart is like a sack, after all, the bottom of which we stuff with the stuff that would keep us from getting up and getting on, one step after another

“It’s hard,” she said, and as she looked away I thought of textbooks or the Bible,
in which we read “and they went to war”
Which means blood and death and rape and the mad frenzy of hate
But,
The black words look so clean and straight on the white page
Sanitized, stripped down to just the glories—Alexander on his podium, say—and the orgies after
The dysentery in the camp forgotten
The boils, the sores, the blisters swept away by the smell of warm ink on pressed paper

Such is the subtext of pain
"It was hard” means, I guess, she almost spun out into the abyss, like a cartoon riding a bike over a cliff
But somehow, just before looking down and falling
She somehow threw the sack of her own heart off the bike and landed here, at this table
Where the water tastes so much like lemon, and the windows keep the rain at bay

The Chinese Women Talking on the Benches

When my family and I pass the Chinese women
They who sit eternally on the benches by the gate of the nature center
I can’t understand a word, but I get the gist:
There’s laughter, there’s mirth, there’s merriment

And there’s the just hushed rush of gossip
Which tone must be universal, across cultures
Coupled as it is with raised eyebrows
As if we are truly scandalized and not satisfied

Age is relative, but they are old enough…sixty, sixty-five?
And what strikes me as we walk by—
My four-year-old throwing rocks and running like a squirrel when she sees the ducks—
Is how passionate, how enthralled they are
As their laughter rolls down to the valley of sighs

There are still things to talk about, then
We do not exhaust each languorous hall
We are visitors to a museum, who never see it all

Young Cashier at the Hardware Store

The cashier put down my bag of keys
With a false “yea,” and a flourish of her hand
That was sarcasm’s twin, but not unkind,
Before she told me, "four twenty-nine"

It was just a small trumpeting—an irony, a rhyme
An encomium to how mundane all this is
Both this transaction and, so it seems, her life

Which is strange, because she is so young
And it’s a shame to feel stuck when, as the cliché goes,
The whole world is at your feet

But I found it, also, almost brave, like spitting into wind
And I thanked her sincerely for her help
Grateful to be let in to an honest sigh,
Which is far better than a, “Thank you, sir, please come again" 

The Humbled Puritan

I always thought in protest,
As any Protestant should
That frills are frivolous
And guilt their just dessert
(And dessert a guilt)

But I see you there: The Wine Drinker
The same as He the wine did make
And still with perfume’s scent
Upon your robe’s bright filament

With no shadowed brow for pleasure gained
But a prayer of thanks and mercy
To the Father, 
Same Who made the rain to fall
And cleanse the land, with pleasure instead of pain

So here’s to you, my glass I lift
And as it kisses both my lips
I join creation’s song (I think)
And the secret of the saints--

Those who've learned to worship
Of this earth’s goodness
Where, like rain,
Pleasure need not leave a stain

Yellow

I am only writing this to remember that I was not looking for a sign
And only realized hours later, as I turned the lever and felt the rush of untested water which caught my breath, the surprise even worse than the cold blast on opening a shower door (such are the pains of all sudden absences)
That the yellow-breasted bird sat like a needle in the haystack of that brown, mottled wood
A coy reminder of something too quiet for words
A prophet whispering wordlessly, “yes, and keep moving forward”

Socks

My clean socks smell of fields brought into order
Dirt, tamed by cotton
And cotton claimed by the long hands of workers who sewed the stitches
As faithful as a conductor's watch
As faithful as the baton of Brahms

Oh, I know they were made by machines
But the touches of those long needles moving tirelessly, like the axis of earth,
Always follow the hands of man, which first break the ice that we pass through
All things made and crafted, for our quickly-passing-through

So that young feet growing old, like mine,
Can find purchase, warm and dry, in one eternal moment
In all the wonder, treading the scent of mud and rock and so much green,
And the longing just above the next rise
And the next one, not so very far behind

Ed

His name was Ed, but I can’t remember or I never knew his last name
He was just Ed,
A walking whirlwind, rail-thin, with tired eyes and cheeks that dropped like wet socks, his face
worn haggard like rock long exposed, his life worn by some sorrow too deep to name,
But he rode the pain like that cowboy rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, waving his hat in the air,
running one step ahead of the train, downhill, mouth open, hands off the handlebars

One night not long after I met him,
By chance we stood, before our shift, looking out over the Blue Ridge from the careening hotel porch
Me, bright-eyed and moving on come fall (it’s easy to enjoy adventure when you know it’s only temporary, after all)
He, a careerist, traveling the resort circuit to snow in Utah, to sun somewhere in summer
He quickly, and with the ease of a gambler, divulged his desire to hit the new waitress hard
As he pumped his fist rhythmically, dissolving my confusion

He was a poet of the vulgar, a magician making innuendo disappear beneath a never- ending handkerchief of description
It was so strange and silly, though he used words I can’t write here, that my body floated out above the hills,
Finding no words to rejoin him, awkward like a musician who can’t find the beat, I just nodded and pursed my lips as if to say, “Alright, then”

Late that summer, the sun already honeyed by an early autumn, I woke up to hear
“You goddamn piece of shit!” ringing near my ear and
Scrambling to the window like the man in the cap, tearing open the sash,
Awake from my nap I watched Bruce, the bearded and burly owner of that mountain retreat, man-haul not presents down a chimney, but Ed himself, out of his sheets and out the door, whimpering like a dog-cussed pup, unable to muster a “Stop it!”
Just “Okay!” and “Jesus” and “Okay” again

I never knew the transgression
Perhaps, drunk, he’d missed his shift
Perhaps he’d grabbed the new waitress’s rear, as he’d so often promised, in much more florid terms
Probably some deeper sin long brewing between the two of them
Though I don’t know how a proprietor could saloon-slug an employee beyond the fear of a lawsuit
Some things just pass before men in a place beyond, with its own laws and understanding

When it was all over, Ed sat in the dirt, listless,
In the long sadness of life, he had found a metaphor, a picture of the sadness always hiding behind his eyes
And I sat there, debating if I should go to him,
But before I moved, he disappeared into the woods, a shame-faced mouse skittering away, though the shadow of the owl had passed

I remember, equally, from that good summer, another surprise:
The subtle manipulation of niceness
How the hosts and servers would lay hospitality on the table, then dog-cuss the guests as soon as the swinging doors closed behind us,
Concealing hidden truths behind closed panels
Unaware that all the things we hide come home to roost
And life always has some Bruce knocking on the door, to throw us for our loop
Which was why I didn’t laugh at Ed, or shake my head,
And lay in bed, as if crossing myself
Wondering what lay ahead in this strange, sad world 

Origami

Love is like a child folding origami
Always for the first time

She discovers, slowly,
Crease by crease,
The paper 

The Rite of Spring

I remember the ritual
Like an explorer from the brush I stumbled into it
Or around it, approximating an angle of approach not too close to the circle that surrounded them
My eyes wide but feigning calm

They were locked in a ceremony I had never seen
We are all, at some point, adventurers discovering rites and tribes, and at first our own and our own self
But strangely I already understood it, and I could feel it coursing through me
We all felt it moving through us like current

David stood on the blacktop with Laura
Circled by a crowd so anxious and so full of energy, you could see their own longing bound up in expectation, their own necks on the line, sheep to be slaughtered who cannot look away

It was a warm day, warm enough for us to return outside, and the blood flowed like sap, just before the summer, when
We would fill our days with growing into all the expectations just stirring in our bodies

I craned my neck above the circle
Fully emerged from the brush and hushed, in wonder, holding my own heart
As someone yelled, “Ask her!”
And the ancient chorus rose, waiting for the letting go

Some were dancing, literally unable to contain the tension
The boys and girls intermingled, rippling as one as if a god’s spirit poured over us in libation, in frenzy
As David held up his hand, an effort at nonchalance, a priest officiating his own sacrifice

“Will you go with me?” he said
And the vulnerable way he said it, a question on so many levels, the last far more profound than the first

Someone, I swear, leapt into the air at the release when she said “yes”
The beast confronted, for all of us,
So that we were safe to pass into that reality that holds all atoms together
The universe, held by that one question

Love is always a release, a fledgling question hanging above a blacktop and the cries and screams of so much longing, and so much hope 

Blasphemy to Minnesotans

There is no winter here, but if I am diligent
I can cobble together some semblance of it

It does get cold in the night
And if I wake up early, the mist will just reminisce of frost
Or, when we’re lucky, real crystals crunch on the blades

If I go out early with one layer, I need to pull my jacket tight
To keep the air out
And can more easily remember places where survival was at stake
Beside the lake
The night you grazed by me and I wondered
If the weight of your shoulder against my arm was intentional
In the land where all speaking was sent sideways
And we never looked too long in anyone’s eyes

I have realized
This is the sort of thing that winter holds for me
Memories that will not let go
The crisp dawn, the smell of smoke
The feeling that we are free-wheeling over water
While bare limbs bounce on winter wind
Beneath a bright full moon

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

Baseball

These men are common, like us
Felons and poets
In a game that makes them gods all afternoon

If you can find some glory that transforms you, seize it!
If you remain the same thereafter
What does it matter?
All any of us taste is a mere moment, anyway

So if it’s the game that restores you?
Let its poetry become part of you--
The perfection of 90 feet, from here to there
And let the beauty of a baseball curving at the far end of physics
Transform you
And the slow waiting in between slow your soul down in this, our sanctuary

Good God, I don’t have to play
Just give me warm evenings
Redeemed from the haze of summer’s sad heat

I’ll worship God all night
Starting at the long, slow slant of sunset
As they turn the lights on and we stand and sing like monks
In chant before, with once voice, saying our simple blessing:
“Play ball”

Christmas Morning at the Church I

Some years Christmas falls on Sunday
So I am at the church early, unlocking doors today
When all the world is cinnamon and slumber

It’s supposed to feel like work, but it doesn’t
There’s too much joy in the quiet of the building
The way it echoes when I’m alone, flipping lights
And too much interruption of the normal way of things
Not to feel somehow sublime, the mind climbing out of ruts

But I feel the work of unlocking doors, I do
Mostly because I couldn’t find my keys
And left the damn annoying things in some pocket

This thought then interrupts my reverie: that we still need keys
This, despite Christ’s coming
Keys, to protect our things
We who are waiting for the liberation of all things
Peace on earth, good news to men
And let it ring and ring and ring

But practical enough, wise as serpents still,
To know that we are waiting
And still bearing that weight that precaution claims on souls--
The weight of waiting
For gates without a portcullis
A town square without stocks
A Jerusalem without locks

If This Were a Movie

If this were a movie we would have looked, both of us, at each other, at the exact same moment
But as it was
I looked, and you were looking out the window

I was laughing because the man on the radio was so absurd
On film, we would have turned towards each other like dancers in rhyme
And time would have been split open like a piece of fruit for us to chew on

Instead, I looked back at the road, smiling something which quickly faded to a sigh
Thinking about how much of life is timing 

Poems about Poetry

I.

I used to think that poems about poetry were the lamest
Like writing a song about singing, but worse

Now I realize those poets weren’t writing about writing
They were talking about how life finds us
And how we learn to abide it--
The no-more-hiding
The being lost, then being found by what matters
And the way our soul stands stilled and stranded, surrounded by it
Afraid to look full at it

II.

Which reminds me of something I heard recently:
That good thoughts--
Of love and mirth and family--
Are like Teflon butterflies bouncing off our brains
And that grungies are like Velcro, latching on like coffee stains
(Beautiful thoughts elusive, like hackneyed butterflies
Now, that makes sense to me)

So,
If you want to be a bowl for beauty
You have to pause and warm up your circuits a bit
You have to stand and stare at the beauty around you
Fifteen seconds, that’s the length of it
And the butterflies become a balm, to cover and smother your sighs

It’s not unlike how I stand in my driveway
Staring through the cold of my breath each morning
As my scooter whines its way to life, ready to ride

I stand there and let the motor oil up
And, in the waiting, through my deep breaths I see again
The leaves, bouncing in a dance line,
And the little line of clouds along the hill-rise
And I call to mind the verse about God riding the sky

III.

We are blessed
Or, rather, the blessing finds us
When what needs finding finds us
Comes to us as truth which will become its lesser self, as we handle it:
A poem,
A thought reduced to page and pen and line or rhyme
The great big void of perfect sky and sea which,
On the page,
Becomes a key-hole
Opening to the great hallway of beyond

VI.

So, of course there are poems about poetry
As sure as sight finds a blind man who, for a moment, sees

The Heroes in Black and White II

We read the stories and know reality
That these are often children taking the stage

It would be hard for any of us, with so much gold in the holds of our ships,
To expand outward towards horizons beyond our shore of self

Are they conceited? 
Sure
But with so many adoring, it would take a great soul to know there’s anything more--
It comes so close, after all
To being known
Such a strong narcotic to feel the drip of so much drug
Almost like a hug, just barely falling short of close enough

But then they create
Like a dragon, the genius is unleashed
And it’s poetry and symphony

Suddenly they are their best selves, drawn out without pretense,
A phoenix
Participating in something so much bigger
And burning bright as light and right

The music is not something they make
But something that makes them,
They just dance in it
It came before and will endure after

So for a glorious golden moment,
Like a child in a toy store, playing
They are truly free
In harmonies, they discover the line by which we all dangle
During our long fall

They are great, after all
These poets who burn a trail of freedom
Our collective better selves, whose songs we sing 

The Heroes in Black and White I

They, too, were surrounded by all the sad weight of afternoon sunlight
When you can't quite engage the gears of your heart or mind
Or be the person you want to be
And so instead you just keep running towards the night

We look back at how cool they were, their strong arms loping over the fence,
Staring slant-eyed at the camera, all cool
A cigarette dangling, restrained by soft hands, manicured

That’s what we want
To bear it all like Atlas, this weight of us
And play chicken with it, unblinking

But after the shoot they also went home and felt all the places they could not go
The person they could not be
And the charade of themselves in which they were now encased

All the life happening around them on highways they could not drive
Lined with houses and “normal people” living lives
Who adored and extolled them
And weren’t any different,
Grinding their infinite desire on finite stones
Trying to put some fine point on it

No wonder so many of them went crazy--
Drowned in a bottle or a pool
When you’re supposed to have it all and can’t make sense of it
You’re the greater fool

And when money only proves to gorge but never fill you
And regrets pile up day by day by day
As you discover how far the image is from something strong and real
That you could have a seat and rest upon--
It’s all fool’s gold

All any of us want is so simple, really
A hand to hold that holds us, not because of the sheen or shine of us
Or a diamond resting entwined on us
But the beautiful mess so near to us, which has real weight
And can truly hold and kiss and make love

They were heroes, yes, perhaps,
But not how we thought
They, the martyred ones, sacrificed
Like pyres burning, warning us to take a different path
Or at the least, to walk wisely, discerning glitter from gold  

Though we all line up, still
And drop a bill to watch their progeny on the screen
For a moment, to feel that thrill
The wise know all the while
That life’s weight is mostly held unheralded
And very rarely are they filmed or screened--
The unseen heroes of this world