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.