- and welcome to the Free Verse annual program. This is our 10th annual poetry reading. Checking
- our references, we found out that the 10th is the aluminum anniversary. Trying to read a little significance
- into that, we decided even if we're lightweight, we're tough. So this is our 10th annual program. We're
- glad that you all came and joined us on a beautiful early spring afternoon. We want to thank our
- The program sponsors this year, which are the Runciful Spoon and Matrix, a space for literary and visual
- arts. Thanks to the library for use of the auditorium and to CATS for filming the program, as well as
- playing the program throughout the year. Mark Minster has joined the group this year and is on stage
- with us for the first time. Our long-standing valued member, Tonya Matthew, is on sabbatical. We look
- forward to her coming back, being in the program in the future.
- Tony Brewer is our special guest poet joining us this year, and you've already enjoyed the Swingin'
- Beats, our musical group guest this year. That's Mitch Rice on guitar, Wade Van Orman on clarinet, Joe
- Hickman on bass. As for the program this year, Thomas and Roger took on much of the work of organizing.
- Carol designed the program and organized the food, as usual. Speaking of which, everybody's welcome
- to join us for the cookies and punch.
- back around the hall in room 1B after the program. We'll have the usual 10-minute intermission halfway
- through. We hope that you will help us keep the flow of the program going by holding applause and or
- other reaction until either the intermission or the end of the program. And our theme you will have
- noticed is News of the World. Incidentally, if you don't have a program over here with titles and poets
- listed, there are some by the door. News of the World.
- William Carlos Williams has penned these lines. It's difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die
- miserably every day for lack of what is found therein. So that's our theme for this year.
- Outriding horses on a morning of every mildness march could make, between its ides and equinox. No breath
- of frost staying, or first zephyrs luring up new buds. We found a long ridge of hardwood sovereigns
- hushed, empty-limbed, and pure of tangle, vine, or underbrush. How could we ride then but silent?
- kept in thin sun and the breathless stir until my wife said from behind me on the trail. I never remember
- these names, but your mother would if she were here. She'd know beech or oak or hickory from the shape,
- the texture of bark, and say something she first learned about each when she was a girl in Iowa. And
- how then but remembering her love of travel, her favorite poems, until the horses,
- winded, brought us to a glade of silent pines. Joe Pie is a native wildflower that is named after a
- Native American healer who used the plant as one of his medicines. Within the teeming fields of August,
- The myriad greens, yellows, purples, white lace, and browning grasses rise the dusty mauve clouds of
- Jopi. These perennial herbs seem ancient to me, like the lives of native peoples. Their spirits abandoned
- here, intermingled now with the same loud churning of insects they knew so well. Tall Jopi, the allurement
- of butterflies on vivid wings that flicker like flames on the blaze of summer.
- The mists that lie upon the fields on some cool mornings mute the colors of day and magnify the memories
- of our losses. Beyond that scrim, I imagine the people moving, quietly trailing ghosts circling the
- fields of abundance, reminding me with their faded eyes of the decaying of history, a story retold in
- the persistence of that old healer, Jopai.
- The Dalai Lama turns 70, and Bloomington is teeming with monks. They have come in from our cornfields,
- across oceans and mountains, the biggest of all, exile. Their scarlet robes signify a charity and compassion
- only their perfect minds can fully address. And then you arrive at their shoes, brown leather, black
- socks elevated to mid-calf by samsara. Even this shiny creaking newness chants
- in low tritones, I am ignorant of your feudal materialistic ways, merciless American imperial dead soul
- man-child. And yet they, too, pour over the birthday card section at Target, searching and selecting,
- sometimes frowning, furrowing their shaved golden heads, sometimes erupting with a belly laugh reserved
- for such profane aisles as this. But mostly they simply open a card, read the punch line,
- laughed at themselves, and spited themselves, consider this moment for a moment, and move on to another,
- perhaps more perfect, birthday blessing. Emma, I wrote a big poem about you, but it wasn't big enough.
- And the words gone over a second time fell flat and colorless and lay embarrassed on my table.
- I have thrown them away as you have too much respect for me to have something less than grand written
- about you. In the writing of that poem, I came to realize you were winning the contest, for I finished
- it thus. Am I find you a challenge? You have escaped me mostly this time, but I shall take you up again
- when you aren't looking. I'm coming back without warning. I'll grab you some night when you're cooking
- greens in the kitchen.
- or yelling at your son sitting on the bed with his shoes on. And I shall have you run you down the page
- with this keyboard, my eyes in hot pursuit, getting you on paper before you realize you've been had
- one more time by a white man. But now there's a difference. This is free. This time, Emma,
- no money down, no money to pay. Or said better yet, you've already paid.
- hiding in plain sight. It's not likely in 2006 that the muse is a long-tressed maiden trailing diaphanous
- veils, scattering flower petals, at best elusive, at worst prone to tease. What if she or he is the
- uniformed mail carrier and we are too offhand to note the stanzas tucked among each day's glossy clutter?
- Maybe the muse arrives electronically, disguised as spam. I know I have from time to time felt challenged
- to compose a Viagra Villanelle. Or could it be that listed in the lost and found columns, the sought
- after waits for us to claim what is lyrically ours? If visiting garage sales amid the chipped mugs with
- mother in gold and roses, the pilled acrylic sweaters,
- Within that carton of empty frames may be, but herein lies the magic we are not to know, just to become
- alert, tingling for gifts. The Widower. Only after her mirror betrays him, pearls in a cream camisole,
- His ivory chest hairs foresting through a lacy rose garden like snowy pines or closet-grown sprouts.
- Only after his thumbs have rummaged her satin nightclothes fraught open the clumsy garters for the last
- time this time, touching his old limbs with each slip's shoulder straps. Only after he has doused himself
- with every fragrance she used to use, jellied his hair with her mousse
- cue chalked up his eyelids like a pool player or real whore. Only after all of this will he acknowledge
- his harsh last words to her, mouthing them now to the mirror, now to the air. The old woman Jane found.
- We didn't even know her name.
- A widow newly moved to the only rental on the block, one side of a peeling duplex, her porch light burning
- on a bright autumn day. Jane, a good neighbor, had gone to tell her so. That's when the sheriff came,
- no sirens, stopped with a squeal, blue light flashing, luring neighbors, kids on bikes, even Nikki Ray
- from down the street who cheers for the high school.
- Having called our paper boy back to deliver no doubt the hottest news of his 10 years, we asked what
- was going on. He was quick to tell how the rug was twisted under her legs, how the face was all scary,
- and how the cat might have done it, still eating from a spilt box of nine lives when the sheriff broke
- the glass, reached in, and opened the door. 88 and dead, the boy said.
- The old woman Jane found. Roost, in the morning I find you lulling in a field of flowers, sun's wild
- eye blossom, lemmoning your skin. But when I think of you, as rain recalls mist, as dewdrops bring to
- mind falling stars, I see you flapping through my dreams, a large dove-like bird,
- with a heart beating intemperately fast, a bird which has come to roost on the firm, stretched skin
- of my breast, the same skin which covers my ribcage, the same ribcage which nestles and anchors my heart.
- To Viola Lucero.
- Saying goodbye is saying I must accept the silences where your laughter is now, where now is found your
- smile, your expletives undeleted, your swift hands raised in mock shock to your raucous face, at some
- retort you'd loved and then surpassed, making us both get tears at our eyes' edges. But once in a while
- I spy you on the phone running your show or being the center of a willing circle, and I am calm and quiet.
- is I think of your story of the Texas bus station civil rights as ago, when the whites wouldn't let
- you pee, when the blacks wouldn't let you pee, and you sat on the bus in agony, too dark and too light.
- Not negroid, not carcassoid, but an almond-eyed, oval-faced, beautiful little girl who had committed
- the crime of being born an American. A fact all those immigrants, forced and non-forced, could not handle.
- And in the midst of our wonderful silliness, in the middle of a joke, a bitchy, gossipy tale about a
- dummy mutually thought, or when you are so competently carrying on, well-dressed, a good-looker, poised,
- and positive, I think about you sitting on that bus in the heat of Texas and remember with such shame
- our history of little brown violas waiting on buses to be carried uncomforted across their own taken
- land, or little black ones blown up in churches exploding the country.
- And I look at my own brown daughter and am relieved she will not suffer indignities of older generations
- and intend to tell her your story so she will know where some people's souls come from and why it is
- important to be able to laugh not just to keep from crying, but to laugh with relief that one need only
- laugh for the cringing joy of laughing at life no longer having to be taken so seriously.
- The Colonists. I have seen the Amish driving front inloaders down at the local wood yard, scooping up
- bucketfuls of log tops and gnarled, unsplittable rounds, dumping them into the cavernous bed of two
- new Fords. Papa stands atop the free Yupik wood pile, tall and proud beneath a black hat, as though
- God himself selected this age, this place, this one patient pilgrim for to impart his vast message.
- Papa is working and waiting for the word, waiting and working for it. Sitting in the front seat of one
- truck, neatly obscured by her bonnet, the daughter discovers us, slowly loading our truck by hand. My
- mate and I are wearing flannel shirts. I'm under a long shoreman's cap, she in muddy gloves, both of
- us wrapped in denim and with long decadent ponytails down our backs. The daughter whispers, Papa, she's
- wearing overalls.
- I have seen the Amish restore a sundered barn with only mallets and glue and whip the horse for failing
- to lift a beam. I have felt the roar of their heavy machinery resonating up from wood yard mud through
- scrap logs and work boots and gloves as the bucket slams into the pile then raises under heaven another
- load. Some Amish families allow convenience for the betterment of the community. Electricity, telephones,
- chainsaws, bush hogs,
- I have seen Amish bush hogs pulled by Amish tractors refueled by Amish pickups rolling across wide,
- quiet Amish fields. Oh, the furniture they must make to atone for the foregone scythe. The tremendous
- thread count of their quilts is a sermon. The smoothness of their sanctified butter and cheese, a prayer.
- I have seen the Amish shopping at Walmart where the little girls eye more than jeans and bras. One day
- that daughter will have the choice
- As a teenager let loose upon the world, she may stay among the English if she can't go home again. But
- she will come home, this one, and many after her to colonies at the end of dark gravel lanes
- after provocative ideas planted by temptation by this modern ashtray earth have been expressed away
- come Rumspringa, the wild time when the bonnet is lifted from her eyes and she will find no peace at
- all nor fully know it ever again.
- weak at a glance after a quote from an episode of Monk on TV. He may kill you just because it's Wednesday.
- Tuesdays he castrates if irritated and Mondays frequently dismembers. What about Thursdays and no mention
- of Fridays? Thursdays he calls his mother, then fasts.
- Fridays, he hones his knives, strips birch rods for weekends of self-flagellation and satanic intercourse.
- Why do you ask? I'm here to cut his hair. Lush or Dry, Indiana, 1998. Such a warm winter
- El Nino's doing. They said it would lessen spring, kill off unsuspecting buds, the early ones like lovers
- who can't help themselves, the wet opening suddenly shot with late frost. And yet the world is lush
- again, more so perhaps. At the end of the driveway, one tulip, cups so ablaze with red and yellow, a
- drink from it would risk rapture.
- And this morning, along the highway, flaming out of a rock wall, a bright loner of a red bud below the
- steep ground above, rich with sheep and trees and tall mottled grasses measured by a line of barbed
- wire, one man's rusty grip on the world as he sees it, no matter lush or dry. November sky.
- string of cloud days, oyster shell gray, wake to darkness, breakfast through half light, season of deer
- rot, of crimson seeping under autumn leaves, season of loss, of no certain tomorrow. Far across night's
- borders, geese honk. How can they fly with such end of day energy? Wings negotiate such late arrival.
- Yellow disc will arrive again, so radiant,
- and ordinary. Sky will turn 911 blue and we will give thanks for one more perfect day, no matter how
- insect wing fragile. Incidental music. More to this drifting shore. We watch the flaring sun recede
- into quenching cold beyond the prostrate arms of the wide lake.
- Church bells ring the hour, eight peals for a day fully passed. At nine o'clock, carillon chimes glitter
- over the settling dunes, their notes disappearing into the water like cantable snow. Earth shadow blue
- grounds the eastern sky as we walk together in hand with the chorus of crickets beyond the orange moon
- rising. Besides the stillness inside me,
- What else hears the music? Moving. When it came time to leave Texas, we got a rental truck and parked
- at the curb in front of our house. Then we spent two days filling the truck in the cadence of the quiet
- neighborhood.
- Summer afternoon sun soon is gone from live oaks over city streets. When the house was empty, we stood
- in front and looked at what had been our home. The green prickly pear in our front yard is dappled pink
- with summer fruit. We drove away through the park along the river and up to the highway on pillars heading
- north. The sky was banded caramel and coffee and rose. In leaving, we finally could see the city's heart.
- First summer stars blink faint above a quick sunset in deep city streets. After just a few miles it
- suddenly was too dark and we were too tired from the work of moving. We slept hard through an opaque
- night beside the road and the next day drove east out of Texas and on across Arkansas. We lunch in big
- sun and dust where heavy trucks swing down by summer fields.
- Song for early in springtime. Under the glare of such stares as ours, what lovers could long survive.
- We cannot always lie with each other as yesterday we lay, in a bright fallow field, our noses close,
- steeped in the fragrance of cold dirt and young clover. Near seeds spat from unripe rose hips, side
- by side we lay, lost for hours in a daydreamy gaze, long after the ground,
- dulled our arms' nerves asleep. So close, the human eye cannot well adjust. The nearer I come to you,
- the less light gets in. Your face deserts me. Pupils swell with a sick gravity of black bruises until
- everything seems a cave. I need you just this much farther away if I'm to keep sight of your shape against
- the shapes of town and hill. Distance will win back what proximity loses.
- For if sad scrutiny has got it all wrong, scaring away what it's squints to describe, the galactic dilation
- of lovers' round eyes has it worse, glazing our vision with a glassy sheen. Yesterday, darling, was
- lovely but long. Today my neck is sore. Tomorrow we could try perhaps looking for the whole half of
- things that lies behind us, letting more than ourselves be seen.
- September leaving. Six o'clock and the cicadas continue their percussive music. While far away in San
- Francisco, my daughter begins her grown-up life. Today, I found three hair bands on the lawn,
- red and black, purple, and kelly green, more vivid than the grass itself, entwined on one several of
- her golden hairs. Evidence tells man proof that she once lived with us, made our hearts sing,
- as the cicadas do now, however mournfully. The Bowl of Possible Peas. It took me a long time to learn
- to call them peas. Today I slipped up, surprised after years of using the right word, saying, I'm going
- to have more beans. Do you want any? And my wife, either not hearing or finally resigned to my word, said no.
- peas to me are pods filled with round balls of bright green that we grow in our truck patch, not the
- black-eyed sort that I now eat every first day of January. For good luck, she said with determination
- and certainty as she stirred the pot of beans, now peas, on our first New Year's in 1971. We have to
- eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. My childhood was green, rows of corn, fields of soybeans.
- a garden of carrot tops, sweet potato vines, tomato plants, and pea pods getting ready for snapping.
- Her growing up was brown, the color of skin segregated to city playgrounds worn too thin. I ran free
- in a green world, dashing barefoot between rows of field corn, the sharp-edged leaves slicing in my
- shins, knowing nothing of black eyes by any name, or how one must never forget to seek the luck needed
- to get through yet another year.
- Cody, Wyoming, 4th of July, 1976. John Wayne weighs from open top tail fins, Americana on a roll, and
- everyone's a cowpoke. Me, leaning against the wall, looking mean like James Dean, slick down hair and
- wrapped in blue denim jeans and jacket, well-worn boots kicked out in front of me. The red skin stands
- stiff and dumb, feathers and paint too bright.
- plastic nose bones, impotent spears, maybe just little boys posing as enemies, filling a roll. I sang
- amber waves of grain till blue in the face and rode silent across plain states. Every tree concealed
- a bobcat or bear, every license plate a game. Dad smiled on that bicentennial, watching me in buckskin
- vest, watching geysers at Yellowstone, throwing snowballs at the mountain. Cannon, fires from within,
- shotgun float
- Rolling down Main Street, Cody, Wyoming. Boom, we laugh at how loud. I stand awkward next to players
- in the historic drama of USA, hand jammed in pocket, already looking too bored for all this, and dad
- shifts for best instamatic light. We are glaring at him, my red-skinned brothers and I, waiting for
- him to take it.
- Mute is as mute does. It said life span comprises birth, sex, and death. So I've been thinking about
- TV. We have control. On, mute, and off. Plus the range of varied channels. But then life offers those
- as well. Doctor, sportsman, cowboy, pimp. The mute option intrigues. Right now, for instance,
- A face is mouthing silent but carefully articulated words before a shelf of shelved shoes, and the little
- button's gift is freedom to fantasize. This is his collection of footwear, filched from numerous crime
- scenes before police arrived. He's not admitting that. Or, Let's Get Noir, garnered from relatives of
- homicide victims. Maybe he owns a lonely hearts club,
- And to match singles, he's inviting the desperate, the forlorn, to come pair if the shoe fits. Perhaps
- their designer rejects, he bargained for. A Diamante buckle was slightly off center. Sequins were missing
- on one instep. Or a job lot he bought at an estate sale. The deceased had a shoe fetish. They'd replaced
- men who'd spurned her.
- There was a phallus she held in every heel. If I grant the mouth voice, I know I'll be disenchanted.
- It's a humdrum ad. Kurt's shoes for all your sporting needs. More remote from sex than fantasy. Wind.
- New Hampshire, 1978, September 9. A deep rush of swallowing as if the continent were taking great gulps,
- tidal waves of wind. Wind of erratic thrust and speed that scours the clouded sun, startles the delicate
- ferns waving their green selves like tattered distress flags. Wind that suddenly stops
- as if some huge myth of a bird had landed on Mount Monadnock to preen itself, still salt wet. September
- 10. This day is a mute stare of absolute stillness. Where yesterday the trees creaked with the weight
- of wind, today there is the close, pervading silence of loss. Even the ferns, always nodding and whispering,
- have ceased bending each other's green ears. The sun moves through dark rooms, mourning no one. Under
- White Pine Mountain. Back at the cabin, I cleaned up from the day's work and cooked supper on the wood stove.
- Then I went outside under the last shoaling of light behind mountain silhouettes, rimming the field
- of stars. Night breeze and breath of young pines where I sit opposite the cabindor's wedge of lamplight
- on the ground. An owl's urgent baritone pulls me to enter the whispering night. The only human sign
- in all that expanse was a light from the fire lookout on White Pine Mountain across the empty miles.
- As young children, my brother and sister and I had believed the sporadic blinking of the light was a
- signal to us from the people who lived May to September in that glass walled cabin high on stilts at
- the mountain peak. But that summer at 16, I realized the blinking was only one of the rangers passing
- on the close side of their gas lamp. Oblivious to the droplet, my camp represented
- in all the ocean of darkness their tower rode above.
- Late Sunday evening, reaching into the cupboard for chocolate, I brush a jar of mustard and suddenly
- remember my sister telling me what my father said the day he died. Photogenic, I am torn down the middle.
- There I stand with a faded old grin, my arm around nothing, air, the rip, the tear. I'm embracing her still.
- When the phone rang, it was the phone wanting to talk to someone. Here with my begging bowl, wondering
- what to write, I listen for a clink of pebble, a button perhaps, some small present dropped in its curve.
- Exploring, I find no pebble but a green glass eye with a minute pupil, as if blown in too bright a light,
- with no lid,
- No socket, it stares, naked in my palm. A voyeur, I look away. Jealousy. My eyes are troubled by your
- foot, nearly lost under a mist of white gown, your hand a dark lover, embracing your ankle. The girl
- with blue hair.
- The girl with blue hair and sequined eyes. The one with the dragonflies darting from her mouth. Each
- a wish she will grant you. Do not dismiss her. She may not come again. Myopia, an impromptu survey.
- Eight of eight poets wear glasses. Two of three musicians. First poem in a year.
- Next door, my neighbor exclaims with hammer and saw, while I sit idle as a sunlit firefly, pen and paper
- that any moment now, my hands will try like strange tools. Art. Surprisingly orange, the buggerfly weed
- is blooming. Clashing symbols, childlike glee among the staid grasses of July.
- An artist might be called clownish for painting such a scene. Too gaudy, incongruous to be real, but
- see how the swallowtails gather and feed. See how I likewise stare at Water Lily's starry night Guernica.
- She can make an afghan in four days, said so matter-of-factly yet so all-encompassingly proud.
- of another old woman, a feat she had expected us to admire and understand the portent of. But since
- we did not know how long it took to make an Afghan, the exact meaning of her words went by us, that
- we did understand in the general sense her source of felt pride in her companion who did a good thing
- thought good. She could make an Afghan in four days, said so calmly, so proudly, that we shared in her
- calm pride and enjoined her to stop trying to explain. We understood even if we did not.
- Every December I think of death, the way we leave the party one by one, sometimes shepherding our chairs
- against the wall, sometimes leaving hat or gloves, pink or plaid reminders, hat bow, percoli tied, leather
- glove forever imprinted by a slender hand. In the fridge, I found a four leaf clover propped in the
- glass of water.
- next to the milk and lettuce. How nice. She wishes me well. It remained for days, pert and green. Then
- she gave it away. It wasn't ever mine. Luck comes and goes like a breeze. A touch on the face, a fragile
- thought replaced by the mayo and beer. They tried to make things easy because they'd been trying to
- make things work so long they forgot how to make things beautiful.
- Track two for Bucharest. If I were to be a spy, I'd call myself Gomez, a delicious name sounding so
- spies to me, innocuous to those after my secrets. Cohorts would slip into my pew in the back of churches,
- place a thick envelope in an uncommon book of prayer. Gomez, they'd whisper, pretending to be reciting
- responses to the priest. As we knelt, crossed ourselves, stood and knelt again. Go to Bucharest, they'd say.
- Give this money to Smith. Smith, I'd almost smile. What a name for a spy. I am Gomez rushing to the
- train, patting my pocket of pounds, smiling in my nomenclature, nodding to Dowagers boarding ahead of
- me, all of us spies heading for a plain named man in Bucharest. Crux.
- I'd like to invite Jesus to take a drive downtown with me to view the Christmas lights. Not on a Friday
- evening, of course. I wouldn't ask him to travel on the Sabbath. But he might get a kick out of Bloomington
- festooned for his birthday. Or would humility get in the way and ruin it for him? How do I explain reindeers
- and sleighs on roofs, inflated Santas in gardens, the whole saint business so alien to Jews?
- Oh, those are the homes of heathens and those sacks of toys. He'd recall having said, suffer the little
- children to come unto me. Pretty rough then to discover he has serious competition from toys or us.
- I'd better forget it. This joyride is across a minefield.
- Luck. Driving home, 37 bypass, thinking he could do it blind, he wonders if it's always the same crows
- bickering, lifting in half flight above and around each other on the high limbs, waiting for that edible
- luck sometimes marked with a flare of blood that quickly pales as they float in and out of the rhythmic
- lull of stoplights.
- feeding on meat smoked in carbon monoxide, or, as he saw one do only yesterday, rise and veer off, a
- slow motion train of crows in loud pursuit of the white sack, the golden arch crumpled in its bill.
- murder at the big pond. There is something falling to the ground in the woods. The earth beneath it
- is a crime scene. The screaming witness of cicadas points to the frogs who croak, two killed. Then the
- cricket, first the cricket, then the fish, a flash of steel, a hook torn out with pliers, then the knife
- and the remains thrown into a ravine. It was good, they said.
- The fishing was good. Stand point. To ease the pain in my back, I lean on the hoe while the yellow and
- black spider works its web at the edge of the garden. How careful, how poised as it fashions the limpid
- net to tangle its tiny prey. I bend and continue to order the ground.
- A pilot's eyes sweep the forest and fields lush green to the horizon. He can just make out a form, leaning
- on a stick beside a tiny patch of rose. How simple and haunting the work of a gardener, so spare within
- the sea of summer.
- In the silence of its orbit, the blue-green sphere of Earth, its tan-smeared deserts, scattered puzzle
- of clouds, conceits of life unresolved, floats within the twilight of knowing everywhere beyond. For
- want of a better heaven, God invented a Bloomington spring.
- She dresses the flowering pear trees on Atwater until they wave in unison their ivory petticoats. Meanwhile,
- the pyromanical redwoods ignite pink and lavender branch fires up and down Maxwell. And those lilacs
- on Morningside pressed into bloom early offer the grape-shaped clusters of praise. Finally, the lone
- tulip in our front yard, apricot brushed with rose, rushes to open her topsy-turvy umbrella.
- to welcome the rain. Enphaloskepsis means the contemplation of one's belly button. I've shown you mine,
- this sinkhole in my belly, my little storehouse of cake, crumbs, and fuzz, my salt cellar, my berry basket,
- My, how slowly and well we watched your fingers trace from periphery to center. Now you show me your
- goblet, your puckered grail, thimble from which I'd sip water as well as wine. Lift just the hem of
- your shirt. Let one thumb barely pass across it. Let me use my smallest finger, my wrist, the top of
- my tongue. This is where you came from. This is the place.
- some responsible person drew a blade and made you lonely, you as yet too young to feel any different
- then as well as now. Vanished land. Gradually now I can see that ranch for its place in the world.
- At the far edge of land we make were made spirits that hold in pastures, barns, and corrals, reach to
- the edge of older spirits flowing in the woods as they flowed so long before we came. The horses look
- up at shadows where a coyote trots through April woods. Three deer wait and watch an edge of summer
- evening pasture losing light.
- It is not a sharp line there, but a margin of mixing on the land. The cattle grazing deep August have
- disappeared in pine shadowed woods. That was my father's world at the verge of what is wild. He was
- a keeper of what makes so much difference across that blurry line. Looking for a calf lost in spring
- snow, the neighbor finds a new bear cub.
- Snow. Snow. A pollster of fence rows, painter of red oak, limbs both upright and fallen. How do you
- taste? What makes you float? How can you hold so much tiny cold in your arms? Who made you rain's miracle,
- child's wonder, mouth upturned to receive like a baby bird's?
- I think you are stars transform, souls hurrying back to earth, light now, bodyless, so many crystals
- of quiet wonder to slide into nothingness. The given. What news, dark trout? What news of the world to come?
- Surely you've seen so surely you know the strange currents and deeps the rivers come from. You swim
- in water like time. You gleam in the hand like change. You prophesied to poets long centuries past,
- gave counsels and lore and the knife gift of speech to those swift enough of hand and eye to hold fast
- your shattered scale mirrors. Beseeching each to return you to your stream, your stream to you.
- Give to me now what you've been given to give, and I will tell others what you tell me to, of the dark
- mouths of rivers, and I will let you live. I like words for their sounds that slosh and spew out the
- mouth running along the tongue, jumping the fillings, leaping unreturnable into the world.
- I like them to make my jaws earn their keep, my saliva to spit about my tongue to conquer new sounds.
- Words like ubiquitous, egregious, and cognizant. Bring joy to the nooks of my cranium responsible for
- joy. Force my facial muscles into smiles, my eyes to twinkle. What pride is apparent to what I have
- had my child invented such words. What delight on my face as unaware speakers spread those multisyllabic
- germs about the globe.
- Over hearing a conversation, I'd say, that's my boy's word, or my girl came up with that one.
- And disbelievers would shy away from an overeager man spitting with excitement, all of us continuing
- to use the words trapped and attributed in Webster's. Only the child and I aware of the beautiful taste
- of their inventions.
- Take the day," the back of his designer tee said as he passed me at the Y, leaving me wondering if across
- the front was scrawled, it's all yours. Or perhaps I've had it in caps. Maybe it's still free, a sure
- grab in this consumer world. Or he wants to say, I'd rather it blew up in your face than mine.
- Maybe I've too little faith. Take the day off was the intent, but the armpit was too close. He just
- got it off a seconds rack to sweat in. He hunches forward as he runs, so frets and puzzles chase him
- six times round the track. The opening.
- What if every painting, 17 in all, suddenly fell from the wall and everyone stopped mid everything,
- bite, word, gesture, drink, and looked at the broken pile of art, really looked for the first time since
- arriving by foot, car, bus, bike, and then at that very moment of looking,
- let's say 1.60th of a second, as if flash and film had fixed it true as the last supper, the lights
- dimmed. And the owner said, thanks for coming, meaning everything that had transpired up to that moment
- was the exhibit. And everyone slowly left, some lingering in the doorway, others grabbing a handful
- of crackers and cheese, a dash of Chardonnay in the plastic cup for the walk or ride home,
- while a hardy few hurried around the corner for a late dinner at the beef and cabbage. Women on Currency.
- Sacajawea looks like an Eskimo. And how nice. Her papoose shares the spotlight. Mothering a child deserves
- gold medal the size of a quarter.
- But don't dare show her leading Lewis and Clark. No one would ever believe it. I must take her in my
- pocket for Susan B. Anthony. I've lost enough of those in Coke machines that I stopped carrying them
- in the 80s. So egalitarian, they slide into slots made for George Washington so easily, so readily.
- You don't get change. The machine just asks for more.
- Clichés I have known. Mounted on a paperweight, the small jade editor bites the end of a marker and
- grumbles from her position on my desk. I'm sick of blooms full blown, buds unfurling, longing looks,
- and trees losing their leaves in the autumn of someone's days. Bored by princesses kissing frogs,
- nights in shining armor and the sanctity of peace. Waken my interest. Write about a hunk with psoriasis
- and a limp and keep it short. Find me a grandmother who pickles squirrels' brains and sold
- them to unsuspecting laboratories. Please me with dogs that behave like dogs and don't speak with their
- eyes. Write me a puma with a Mona Lisa smirk.
- You keep away from cliches when images, rather than leap off the page, swing your eyeballs from their
- sockets. Walls, a prose poem. Walls tell the truth no matter what. Like a scar, they are their own proof.
- No pictures on these walls.
- But insects crawl freely, a kind of moving picture. And there are stains, scratches, holes. These walls
- are white. In sunlight, they are the brightest walls I have ever seen. I, too, bear marks of imperfection,
- though I do not reflect the light like these walls. It is commonly known that the muse comes in many
- guises. Thus, I am grateful to these walls for their collective effort
- How they feel about this tribute I will never know. The best I can do is leave the walls no less than
- they are, resplendently flawed. Feeding horses. We have chosen our days among creatures of bone memory
- from eons of the herd, keeping strength and fear
- and trust in hard limb and large eye. With no famous place, no city, only such fortune has brought us
- to move with them through each arriving, each leaving of light from the earth. Nautilus, the world grows
- young around me.
- in its constant renewal and my own eager forgetfulness. This is how I am able to share the nightmares
- of my forefathers and still enjoy indoor plumbing. Advancement is illusory when the planet won't stop
- spinning, each step forward another fraction of earth turning backward beneath my feet. This no longer
- depresses me, though I think that, too, is part of the preparation, the welcoming of darkness.
- the bow that sways and the sun backlighting it, I could never hold them still and same anymore, even
- if I tried. Some days they are the only way I know my eyes still tell the truth, that the world is not
- completely unhinged, that no matter what, some things persist. Fault line. My mother isn't made of stone.
- She has no seething molten core. She is a human woman who bore four children, made us not alone, but
- with my father, who is himself just human, not some planet eroding to dust. This Earth would never regret
- losing some children more than others. You can't, as you can with mothers, use jokes to make the Earth
- forget it was angry. It doesn't get angry, and it doesn't get the jokes. It just abrades.
- and slips away. The tethered windmill. Blades locked, turrets swinging a few degrees one way,
- then the other, screech, screech, grading its insides. I'm reminded of a caged bear swinging its lowered
- head side to side, hour after hour.
- as the wind passes around and away over the lake. Not like a tree, a kite, or even a sail, set high
- on its tower, cemented in place, swiveling to confront its power, geared to spin and spin, working to
- lift water from a well, mill our bread, unused now, left to wrench against the shackles of age. The
- wind is in my face, ruffling my shirt,
- mind rocking, rocking, pulling against ideas, but the words do not come. I stare out and the wind passes
- around and away over that vast lake.
- Gossip. You wouldn't believe the lies about me, people spread behind closed doors. The lack of love,
- the sin and debauchery, you wouldn't believe those lies about me. So if you're all hot to hear more,
- you'll have to do it without me. I won't repeat the lies about me, people spread behind closed doors.
- Refuge. Speaking to the powerful, I hear hollow echoes.
- Looking for answers, I find mysteries. Pursuing faith, I walk. The sun rises, the day evolves, an old
- field overflows with summer's wild zeal wherein I search for spirits that never lie. Among the people,
- I find the angel of tears. In boulders these names, in these names moss and lichen,
- in this moss-cold dew. It was as if a cloth embroidered with a thousand starlings had been shaken out
- of a high window and the birds had winged free to crowd winter trees in unstitched confusion, the air
- a while chittering, flock swooping this way and there against a pale backdrop of frayed sky.
- six inches of fresh snow this morning, except where grackles flock, feeding in a circle of grass over
- the septic tank. Oh, Lord, give me a watch that counts only crow calls, measures each day in wren song,
- its second-hand pausing only as long as the young doe hesitates before the black band of road, its steady
- heartbeat fueled by cricket
- Cricket rasp, toad trowels, it's tomorrow one looms longing on wind. We live far enough from the hustle
- of town, out where pastures feather into the hardwood forest coming back. Fields abandoned for a hundred
- years are heavy stands now of maple and beech, hickory and oak, except where we keep a long strip in
- grass so the horses can run, throwing their heads like banners in the sun.
- Have you never felt the mad beauty of the weeds? O Heraclitus, Nebuchadnezzar, oh me, crazed and face
- down in clover. Espial, if you come to that place on the shore on a clear day at a certain hour and
- stand in one specific spot when the light's angle is just right, you will see waves swelling into a rock cove
- thrust back in white sprays, disappearing in slips of rainbows. As black as my umbrella, his blackness
- spattered with mud. The pony sports thin whiskers just below the jaw, appearing wise beyond his years,
- his tail switching flies as we eye each other, sharing summer rain.
- like a bat with fine ribbed wings in obscene disarray upon the blacktop, a crushed umbrella, spines
- splayed by tires, the rain, that bad joke driving down. The chickadees have arrived this morning, all
- eager and flighty as usual. No prayers to share, no gossip skeins to weave between branch sighs.
- What sharpings, whose announcements, I'll never know. Still I recognize news from their thrumming hearts
- to mine. In the serrated shadows of Ailanthus, a listless rattlesnake.
- stealing from birds. Their quick alarms jangle the sun's rays. I am among them, balding, gentle, though
- a predator of sorts. I eat their songs with a forked tongue and leave them flopping and dazed, still
- whole of feather and bone. At night as they stir, solemn in their sleep, I sing their songs like a mockingbird.
- as they dream uncontrollably of berries that ring. Our killing styles are so very different. When the
- cats have cornered a mouse behind the bathroom door and I discovered in the morning the body limp and
- wet and scratched up from hours of playtime,
- I grab the twitching not yet corpse by the tail and fling it out into the snow. Later, there are tiny
- footprints away from the crater he created, to the fire pit, to the birch tree, and back under the deck,
- probably back to his warm little den, the wife waiting with a thimble full of brandy in his pipe and
- slippers. Boy, have I got a story for you, he squeaks. I hear him now between the walls regaling and
- embellishing, still very much alive.
- You, on the other hand, upon discovering the vermin, grab a shoe and whack it over the head. Whack!
- Whack! Is it still alive? Whack! Then toss it outside. I appreciate your thorough efforts, but I hope
- you never find me that small or annoying. Parabolic. When Romans wanted to kill a bear,
- They put a pot of honey on the ground under a tree and hung a log lengthwise over the honey pot. For
- love of honey, the bear would shove the lumber which swung away and back, thumping the eyes and hungry
- mouth before the bear could take a taste. To get closer to the pot, the bear struck ever harder and
- the log kept striking ever harder back. And yet bears don't give up and yet neither do logs as the honey
- sweetens in its perfect pot.
- So my heart is the honey, and yet my heart is the bear, and yet my heart is the log gradually swaying
- still. The perfect poem has a full moon float over it and two stars, one cascading. A stray mutt runs
- through it, it's barking his spots into oblivion, past the prairie,
- repubescent mice sing. In the perfect poem, a rosy at cloud cartwheels over a fence. It offers the sounds
- of a lone stallion, neighing for his errant, donkey lover. In the perfect poem, a Havana cigar flames
- into life, but the stogie remains hidden under dense smoke. While we readers must creep through, praying
- will recognize the poem's beginning before its singes are vulnerable yet eager fingers.
- Frog came in through the open doorway. Humming to himself, he tossed his boater onto the hat rack, hung
- up his navy jacket, and stepped a little self-importantly into the drawing room. Imagine his surprise
- on opening the liquor cabinet to find his secretary, who tendered to tipple, had definitely overdone
- it this time. Supine amid the decanters,
- Four paws awry, rat snored. Tonight at church I polished candlesticks and vases for Advent, glopping
- pink goo all over the brass and rubbing for all I was worth. The harder I rubbed, the more I blackened
- the rag, the more I thought I had to rub.
- so much rank filthiness I didn't want to be seen. Till the priest said it wasn't dirt, it was just a
- chemical reaction. I could scrub and scrub, and eventually I'd scour it to nothing. Tipple, an apparatus
- for emptying freight cars by tipping them, Webster's New World Dictionary. Seek no door to this poem,
- no window,
- For argument's sake, call it a teepee on the moon. Listen as spacewalks hurdle paths into nothingness.
- Bury this poem in the garden with a ripped fin of a garfish and a silken giraffe's ear. Notice the girl
- with alabaster skin balance herself over the thrumming tracks, her silver cross a magnet for dragonflies.
- Warn her that her umbrellas too small a reservoir.
- for rain. April night. Slender candles of new growth on pine boughs out my window hold the urgent shine
- of spring's half moon, like the dogwood flowers lilting there two weeks ago. Camellias in Seattle the
- night our sun was born.
- hollyhocks of a childhood evening with its breeze to tug high yearning after clouds that rode the brilliant
- air. Cat. More lice and mercury rising. She streams up to the hatch, molds into symmetry, golden eyes staring.
- Her stillness as absolute as Bast's breath held. When back arched, she later end stretches every muscle.
- It is yet languorous, unhurried, an action so complete as to be obeisance to some perfect rule.
- searching for a gene, images of immortality. I expected something small, a will of the wisp,
- a weak voice, but she was the looming clouds, the waves, dunes, birds, the lake itself glistening to
- the horizon. I imagined the merganser sitting alone on a rock was more than just a bird, rather a familiar
- face, the way it cocked its head to look my way.
- If I spoke to the bird, would she answer? I could not risk it. I wanted to believe that if I were still
- enough in this, our refuge, she would be there to see and hear me, our murmured conversation just beyond
- the sound of voices. The air seemed eddied with images like looking through old glass. Was this merely
- the art of memories?
- When massive old trees die, they slowly lose their limbs and bark, but stand for years an imperative
- part of the living forest. Old battle sites, long abandoned homesteads, the places where love was learned,
- the places loved, remain when the people are gone. Even those who were not there sometimes feel distant
- incidents fading in that never quite appear.
- The language of the dead may be different. In a quiet dune meadow, I thought I heard people talking
- far away through the utter silence. I am sure it was not the wind. Death may be real, but not absolute.
- If bodies merge with minds, what are the limits? Where are the boundaries? Alone on a high dune, I felt
- my mind slip away.
- I could see all the generations, each individual being out there together, each staring out with longing
- under the cold stars.
- Please keep your mind turned from madness and your face turned upward toward the sky where the pale
- light of divinity drags a sparking chain across a blacktop night. Do not succumb to infinity and the
- pressure of the untold depths of time crushing to a pulp even sadness and snuffing out all comers, all
- sources, all light.
- I do not pretend to know the reasons why all sorrow and all hatred finally turn to gladness or why the
- weak ultimately flex their might or why, good and bad, all things come in trinities. So cherish with
- blunt instruments all indignities. Champion the weak and try to love the hapless who cower inwardly
- beneath the light and in their disappointment fade and dissipate.
- like a sigh. Rebel without a cause. Obstinate as stale fruitcake, she would not join the rest of America
- in sports shoes, stride out in step with what she termed the herd instinct. No, she was on track at
- the Y in slip-ons, mules,
- They did have arch support, she told the M.D. when knee pain drove her to the clinic. On doctor's orders
- she conformed, laced up in white rubber sole uglies, breezed a mile, outpaced herself in comfort she'd
- not known, as if her feet were laced in foam. She has a logo now, humble for health. Figures that fitness
- hinges on her keeping to a diet of the same.
- in pie. Pins. It used to be that when a seamstress made a wedding dress, she saved the silk pins for
- her husband to pick a lucky horse to play at the track. After the wedding, single women rummaged after
- every hidden pin they could find in the gown of the bride. Corsage pins.
- safety pins in the hem, so that when a year had passed, they could be the ones to wed. It used to be,
- too, that an undertaker placed a small bowl on the chest of the departed for each mourner to fill with
- a pin painted black. Then they stuck them in the cemetery gate posts. I think this was done so that
- the veils of the dead would catch and tear, catch and tear every time they came back.
- Good fences make good neighbors, Frost said. And I borrowed his remembered line as I pulled the weeds
- from under the fence, separating our yard from our neighbor's yard. Those weeds that began on our side
- and ended on their side, and they being too polite to say anything or not brave enough to reach through
- and take care of the problem themselves, had put up with the stalk shooting up the side of their fence.
- For surely they speak of it as theirs when standing in their yard, as we speak of it as ours when standing in ours.
- Getting rid of the weeds was not a chore merely to see them gone. It was as well to preserve the fence
- that was being choked in places by them and preserving it to demonstrate in plain view of all concerned
- frost lines. Be they New England stone or Washington DC metal, good fences make good neighbors. Coyote bitch.
- Flappy-titted she came, sneaking around our place, taking a chicken every day to feed her den of pups.
- We had come as refugees from suburbs smothering the land for the old balance of keeping birds so they
- could help keep us. But she had the immigrants' urgency too, opportunist, destroyer of well-laid plans,
- keeper of wits for the next generations vying on the continent.
- pheasant. As if he'd swallowed his pride at the last second, bright cock strutting across the road in
- autumn evening, he rose suddenly seen in the neutral dusk and met the grill with a spray of feathers
- as I braked and swerved, thinking to stop, my skin chilling as I pumped the pedal like a getaway. Later,
- I found a small dent, twist of plumage,
- there hadn't been time for blood, and tried to forget what it was that sent me driving a country road
- only to return a foolish man home again, unlike that broken iridescence lying at the edge of the field.
- Tree, this is a prose poem.
- That old sugar maple must be 100 years old. The morning sun catches it stretching out for the day, golden
- and eager, limbs spread out like welcoming arms next to the country road. On my way to work, I stop
- sometimes to see early spring, softly green, slowly entering among its branches. In the fall, it glows
- like a lantern against the gray sky. Winter contrasts its sinuous form in waves of white.
- More houses going up around here now. That old field marked with flags and stakes will be built up soon.
- I see it shifting in other ways. More people on the roads moving a little faster. At work sometimes
- I daydream of that wide statue of a tree. Think of leaving a little early and stopping in its cool shade.
- I could lean back against the rough bark and rest for a while. Stare up into that eternal green mystery.
- I have to leave earlier to get to work on time, past the trees standing there like the sentinel of another
- world, strong, secure, calm, an island in the tide of traffic. But I don't slow down anymore. Cars are
- pressing behind. Then one morning on my way in, I came up the road and saw immediately something was
- wrong. The old tree was gone.
- Pushed down by a dozer and dragged off, it lay in a broken heap in the field, limbs torn and stripped.
- A new road begins where the tree used to stand. Just a raw dirt wound now. Soon it will be paved sleek
- and smooth, a faster way in and out of the burgeoning town. I still leave early for work to avoid the
- hairy traffic on the new road.
- sometimes glancing up where the tree used to be as I accelerate into the city as fast as I can go. My
- father fixed the farm with twine that pulled and rotted black and died its annual death. And so to bring
- renewal, the two of us would walk holding new string together around the farm.
- as I bit my lip then let go against the fury of it all and cried aloud that fences fixed with twine
- did not last and looked homemade at that. But my father smiled and continued to macrame his life into
- the rusty breaking fences of the 80-acre farm. I was never more ashamed than when he fixed those fences
- with baler twine. I wanted bright red metal fences around the fields to tell everyone that the barn
- that needed painting
- the house that needed painting, were but eccentricities and not a measure of our true worth. But in
- farm country, everyone knows that everyone knows, and there would have been no use in trying to disguise
- our too well-known state. So we continued to tie the twine and pull together the rusty metal pieces
- of fences put up a generation or two before, when men went out to the fields with posts of new wood
- and rolls of town bought metal fencing
- and hoped that that year the crop would come through that would release them from the land they so hated
- and so loved. Lacking visions of later men tied to the farm, lives of twine rotting black in the sun,
- the neighbors clucked tongues over as they drove by and spotted the white and black fences being made
- by a smiling father and a raging son standing by a ball of twine somewhere far too short of plenty.
- On the cusp of praise, we enter the world armed with silence, bare of song. Given the prize of speech,
- do we plead for the animals or bother to notice their loveliness? Through mound-shaped tunnels, we led
- archaeologists to study inscriptions on coins. The earliest scrolled maps pointed north. Long ago, scribes
- carved medallions, believing the only counterpoint to happiness
- to be self-worth. Why can't we speak for the animals of the way of immersing themselves within the world's
- breathing? Compare the bravado to the way a wave greets land, the way clouds graze the moon's teats,
- and sky opens to receive each falling care, slivers of meteorite, strings of prayer.
- Here it is, folks, News of the World. Thank you very much for coming this year. We want to thank again
- our sponsors, Ronciple Spoon and Matrix, our guest, Tony Brewer, and our musical guest, Swingin' Beats.
- Don't forget to mute the food around the corner in the room 1B. Thanks again.