Sometimes I think the land,
the kind of soil,
the trees, the vining shrubs,
the water and what swims in it,
what crawls out of it,
these things fill veins
with a stronger wine
than mere genetics.
Feet of clay, they say.
Not much clay in these
Northern parts,
all sand and gravel
pushed and mangled down by
ancient ice,
time after time
until all memory is gone.
You’d think such persistence
would make smooth,
but all I know is raw
and open,
like yesterdays.
In those dim grassy
harp-infused summers, we
longed for gray days
in redemption of living well,
the irony cloaked in
naïve dissolution.
We rejected willy-nilly
all that was pre-primed, packaged,
brightly colored.
For us, the rough edge, the ill-fit,
the soiled and discarded,
dust-blown cowboys
blues men smelling of urine
pawn shops, dives,
anything
dismissed and mistreated,
we imagined our own.
How we trotted out our patchy
lives, how we dwindled in our
constructed agony,
tethered all along
to a safe and sorry fate
we could not quite discard!
Is it a kind of hubris
to deny good fortune?
Or is it mere antithesis,
the dark side of a moon
unworthy of its borrowed shine?
The visitation was grand
All about me, wailing,
Giving the glad hand to
Each long lost long ago.
Afterwards
I lay flat in the coffin, feet first,
You leading the parade,
Somber with relief at such endings.
You were angry when I squirmed,
All the same,
Unable to keep my straight-laced face
In spite of the
Droning
Tolling
Bell.
I shouldn’t have taken it all
So lightly.
I should have let the gray noon settle slowly
On my unbeating heart
Like distant longing.
But you have to admit
The element of absurdity:
Me, refusing to lie still,
You, beside yourself
With propriety.
How odd, when teacher becomes pupil.
How startling, when a depth of meaning
Lay on the surface all along.
Wisdom, it’s said, is indistinguishable
From farce in the fullness of youth
Or unmitigated age, bent on redemption.
Could it be we’ve seen all of it?
No use adding footage to pore over
In search of cheap salvation.
There, written on a careless breeze
Was the whole of it,
Gone until the next moment.
Serenity falls
Into the open morning
Stifling a yawn
Life ain’t what I thought it was
All those years ago
In the end, all the pain and joy
Alike
Fell in a grand heap
And life, stripped bare
More like a humping walrus
Than a lame gazelle
A poet once told me
He’d rather write about
Cabbages
exiles child 