When he hears orchestra he wraps his body around it entirely,
As if the crescendos and decrescendos spread out in a vast horizon

around which he can loose and find himself in cycles like the moon.
As if the vibrato could resonate at a frequency that would dislodge

him from this life, from this crippled city, from this traffic on I-81.
As if, like an oyster nursing a sand grain, he could snap shut on a swelling

of violins, or on the ghost of sound that follows the cellos out, the last breath,
as if he could compress it inside himself,  down into something he can keep.

He hands it to me like a ring that doesn’t fit on my finger, and I pretend
as if I understand but the meaning's unclear, and he says it’s okay, listen again,
                                                                ­                                                      listen again,
                                                          ­                                                            liste­n again,

I dreamed that I met your mother.
Not the women that you called by their first names
as a child; not the women your father carefully
introduced to you as you stared down at your knees.
Not the women who crouched to look you in the eye
and said, my aren't you a handsome little man just like
your daddy?
and you, still shy, always shy said nothing but looked into
their brown green gray eyes and saw someone else’s
mother, but not your own.

I met your mother. She who pressed you into being,
who molded you against herself, between her muscles.
The woman who fed you lifeblood
before spilling you out screaming for her.
The woman who looked into your eyes for the first
time in a hospital and saw her eyes and was scared
and packed a suitcase and left before
you grew into a half-version of herself.
I dreamed that I met your mother, and she gently reminded
me that I touch her womb every time I touch you.


She was wearing a long housedress, red with white peonies
and vines blooming and connecting like veins.
She was washing dishes and watching November birds
rise from the fields through her well-water eyes.
My son is a good man, she said and I agreed and the birds
took to the sky in lonely circles and disappeared.
In a dream I pressed my knee into the hollow behind your knee
and your mother smiled and said it was okay,
and all the not-mothers your father introduced to you
disappeared like November birds rising from the fields.

Derailed, and the bridge folds inwards, it came to bury the
moonlight, all sound cuts out. A hundred tons of dust
from beasts of metal tear the summer river dusk to
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary.

When the flickering dome of heaven collapsed to marry
itself to the earth, to the river bed, to the parking lot,
the bridge, a frail arabesque, snapped like a gunshot in the
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary.

What strange coincidence, come to pass, come to carry
away long childhood afternoons; her and her final hours.
Whose plans were these, man-made towers that break in
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary?

Derailed, the bridge folds inwards, it came to bury itself in the
silence of its own weight, as the coals meet the tributary.

I know of the creases in his shoes
but not the color of his eyes,
how utterly meaningless, romanticized
faults of man.

to be taken by the random
coming together of chromosome,
chance and missed chance,

In a dream he came to me;
he spoke to me in rhymed couplets

And my heart of sinew and muscle,
romanticized into something of feeling,
tuned for one moment to the sound of his
end rhyme

then sinks
to the bottom of my belly where it
pulls like a diver’s weight.
exerting itself against my body’s
own timid buoyancy

Open up the sky, come fall electricity
lift each blade of grass to yearn for heaven.
The churning leaves, pounding cataracts come fall,
beat us back into our ancestors, into the earth.

Lift each blade of grass to yearn for heaven
all reflected, caught in the water of our eyes.
Beat us back into our ancestors, into the earth
where words are rendered indigestible as stones

all reflected, caught in the water of our eyes.
Come, thirsty, choke on rhyme and water
where words are rendered indigestible as stones
In the grey and green wash, the last storm of summer.

Come, thirsty, choke on rhyme and water as
The sky breaks, sun behind its gauze of clouds, breaks
In the rose and gold wash, the last storm of summer
and this is that fairy land, the kingdom of heaven.

He and I are the same:
umbrellas on sunny days, nothing in the rain and
shivering, slightly, in the warmth of sunny rooms.

His gentle face watches me walk through the door
and he paces the floor looking for a rhyme
that will hold me, neat like the sonnet he’s folding

                    my quiet dear, who walked in shadowed rooms
                    forever, noticed slightly dimming lights
                    and slighter changes in the weather, afternoons
                    with showers, clear and starry nights.

                    she smelled like air and puddles on the street
                    The rosy blush of clouds after a storm--
                    the pinkish blush of clouds after a storm--
                    the white and empty sky after a storm--

He admits defeat, and again we are the same,
afraid to speak each other’s names, waiting
for rhymes that would’t come, or never came.

But we could slink back into the mountainsides,
coastlines, deep tree recessions and rain-filled
nights, you and I.  Be brave and build a home,

a bed and a desk, fill up our books with poems
about the weather, the curves of our necks, lay
our words in the soil of the cold, careful northwest.

Last year, Indian summer
when the leaves were yellow, last year
when I was younger, more beautiful.
The river was still warm and
the earth was less ancient.

I thought I saw God in the water
but it was a trick of the light.

He stood on the railroad bridge
above the lonely Wallkill last year,
in the slow honey sunlight,
and the colors of his negative
are still hanging in the air.

Milk thistle, Queen Anne’s Lace, and other
nameless weeds have won the battle for the roadsides.
The flowering trees have had their shining afternoons,
and now they retire to green on green.

August stands at the deep end of the swimming pool,
where the water is still somewhat cool, gem blue.
Her shoulders are freckled and hunched and she glances
over the yard at the houses bleaching under the sun.

The young girl sits with her pale feet in the shallow end
like magnolia petals set adrift by the light breeze.
She is singing a hymn for the first day of June,
her small voice hums like bees through the air.

The chlorinated water is an ocean laid out between them.
A promise was made but not meant to be kept.
Something wordless, felt but not understood, smelling
like the sea but tasting like sweat, and she will sing of it

until her throat can sing no more.

Does blood smell like burnt rubber to you?
Now nothing but a stain on the highway.
The windshield cracked like a finely cut crystal,
it was glass that opened the animal’s sorry neck.

Is that why you flinch at the sight of tomatoes
in our September garden, rotting while
beetles make lacework of the leaves,
do they remind you of flesh bursting at the seams?

Do you remember being scared drunk and praying
that the deer was an angel or hallucination?
While steam rose from the broken bodies
of your vehicle and the animal like incense to God.

The red crescent sun
is pierced on a church steeple
and sinking slowly.

We called him Kansas because he reminded us of open spaces,
but we should have called him nothing at all.
He had a last name but we didn’t bother to learn it,
something all-American, midwestern and bland.
He had no hometown but a drifter’s restlessness in his limbs.


Kansas had a girl called Daisy-May, which wasn’t her given name.
It was said that she could charm the rattle out of the snake,
and we never knew if that was a a good or a bad thing.
Daisy-May reminded us of the Forth of July, all sparklers and rocket pops,
Cut-off shorts and bottles of whiskey.  She crackled like a firework display.


Our town overflowed with them, we were too small, too pure,
and they were too combustable. Daisy-May was as mean as they come,
and Kansas was ugly in the same way that Saturday nights are.
Knowing him was like being drunk past midnight, alone and walking
home past ***** neon and watching the stars pass you by.  


Every teenager in the county awoke at the moment of impact,
the night Kansas drove his car through that barn on route 20.  
We flocked like pilgrims to touch the twisted metal of the guardrail.
We followed the dead grass tire marks like the yellow brick road.
Daisy-May was lovely as ever laid out in white like the ****** herself.

On nights when it’s so dry that our skin turns to dust and blows
away, we think of Kansas and Daisy-May and how they caught fire.
Patron saints of our frustration, desperation, too ugly to be real.
Bottle rockets on the Forth of July. Shot from some lonely road
to explode lights in the sky, to blot out the stars for a moment, then die.

The roadside weeds that clutter my hometown,
tangled skinny stems and yellow flowers.
Sing oh reverence, glory come down
to us, they sing, in daylight’s fading hours.

I cannot stomp them out, I cannot press them
in between the pages of my books.
Flower after flower, stem by stem
grow ugly. I can barely stand to look.

The preacher, he had called the place salvation
when telling us to where the high road led.
But the stars all seem to spell damnation,
and the moon, an eyeless, bloodless head.

Tonight the roadside weeds sing mercy, mercy
come for a homeward soul in need of thee.

Her prairie hair is grass gone to seed,
her voice vibrates on a fiddle string.
She taught you the meaning of homeward,
Americana Pollyanna, you tangle her name
in the cold northeastern stars.

She spills tall tales across the porch,
the air smells of thunder and cherry pie.
As a child she caught fireflies in jars
and has a scar in the shape of Alabama,
Pollyanna.

Tonight,
snow clouds roll through Chicago, the air is thin.
You stand in the window on a two hour layover
and look Homeward.

Pollyanna Mystica, a sky full of constellations
that you have already begun to forget:
watermelon seeds spit from the porch,
a spattering of insects on the windshield,
beautifully and infinitely random.


Freckles that trail down her knees and bare feet,
meandering paths you have followed before.
Pollyanna Diana, an fat moon smiles down on
the Kentucky dirt, rutted and red
where she will lay down her tired bones.

My nerves are dry reeds.
They cough his name in the lightest breeze,
they rub together.

Sparks or stars in the hot night,
we crackle like lightning along the riverbed.

The sun casts her jealous eyes down,
she turns the river to cracked clay,
and the wheat dries and dies in the fields.

She will starve us out. No haystacks
lining the paths home, the animals
have all moved on.

Our love is an empty barn,
with dust rising in shafts towards the light.

Trees like fox-fur brushes
red red red
and impossibly soft.
This mountain is sleeping,
Even the bears are swallowed up
Tucked into their rock wombs
Harmless as boulders

But winter is coming and
There is sand in my oyster-heart
Far from the salt spray, shut up tight
Like an old window stuck in its sill.

Man fell in love with the winter
The empty season, he understands.
Pale like blood drained from his face.

But my lungs taste the dust of leaves
Breathe the dim gold light.
I am folding beneath the earth
Red inside and beating with life,
Sleeping but not forever.

You remember that empty winter
Tasted like gin on my breath where it hung,
drops of moisture in the air.
J’ai coupé mes mains sur la glace

Mais mignon, tu es froid,
Et mes bras ne peut pas vous réchauffer.
Nous parlons les mots glacées,
Et ils éclatent dans la nuit brumeuse.

De whisky de vin de gin tonic
Comme les bouteilles, tu seras épuiser.
Alors, qu'est-ce que tu feras?

And those things we say, love
They froth and drip from our mouths
Down our chins and onto the wet snow.

I feel alive in bus stations.
While waiting on a wooden bench,
Chipping at the paint
In the quite anticipation of flight.
The exhaust smell mixes with bacon grease
From the deli next door,
As the buses heave on the pavement.

I choose my seat carefully
Watch the mountains turn blue with distance.
The bus expects nothing from me,
It won’t ask for an explanation.
I can lean my head against the window,
And watch the sun set orange through my eyelids.

Sitting among strangers in a tandem-flight.
We all have stations we’re trying to leave behind.
The  engine knows and will whisper to me,
In steady vibrations,
Rumbling through the vinyl seat.
I will not easily slip away,
On this bus or on any other.

Mohonk Tower is the spindle
Around which I am strung.

The water looks like the scaled back of a fish
Rippling with  its own quiet iridescence.
I place my hands flat on its surface,
Careful not to disturb the delicate tension,
And feel the lake as if it were one being.
A great mass that breathes in waves,
Catches  sunlight and throws it back just as quick.
The water reaches my lower lip
And my toes lose the bottom.

I am endless.

I am immortal and so is the lake, the green-gold depth
Of which I barely break the surface.
In which time exists only as a gentle ebb.
We have been here forever and will still be here
When everything else has died.

A breeze picks up
I clear my eyes and turn away from land.
My heart is a metronome beating in my ear
As I stretch my arms to meet the small lake-waves,
Joining them in their illusion of greatness.

There's a jungle silence tonight.
The angry orange sun is low in the sky
Quivering in the gelatin air, sluggishly setting.
Cars rattle on the pavement like half-mad animals
And I hang limply to the steering wheel, drawing slow breaths,
Listening for a sound of thunder in the reverberating quiet.
There is nothing but the distant whine of sirens,
And the backwards static of the radio.

Only a red crescent of the sun remains,
Pierced on a church steeple and sinking slowly.

The wind chimes on the porch keep time like a metronome.
I’m sitting beside the imitation Tiffany lamp that my mother pretends is real
And wondering if the summer is a canyon I’ve fallen into.
The sky is a queer yellow, the color of a fading bruise,
And steam drifts up from the street. 
It looks like the world has been scorched and is slowly cooling.
The wind chimes are tuned to Amazing Grace,
Keeping time like a metronome to my summer heartbeat - a slow march.
The imitation Tiffany lamp lights up like a jewel,
my mother’s way of telling the world that we are home.

Isaac stomps out his cigarette ****,
He’s been living down in the suburban desert.
I heard he stopped going to church years ago
And I heard he’s scared to pray with both eyes shut.

A hot night - sixteen and itching with life,
Sixteen and running blind down the mountain
Sixteen with bound up wrists; ******* hands
And the story goes his old man dropped the knife.

And the story goes he put up a hell of a fight.
They’d make a killing on ticket sales alone.
Get that angel to sweat in the stadium lights.

And I heard that Isaac still has scars on his chest,
But we all pay some penance, we all cheat some test.

My mother and father, they brought me up clean
Spare change and a bible by the bedside
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

I watched the world through a hole in the screen
Smelled the rainstorm and the thunder outside
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

I hear my mother on my answering machine
She was a child when her own mother died
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

They told me that people are ugly and mean
And Jesus would love me if I swallowed my pride
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

My mother and father, they have a routine
And soft-spoken fears that they always denied
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

Childhood is a sickness without a vaccine
A fever dream, arms and eyes opened wide
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

Pale summer bodies
Hairless, like fish
***** for one another, lost in the blind sea.
They shed their virginities like dead skin,
They call out to me,
Winter is over!
Take off your wool coat.
But my mother told me not to and I’m afraid.
So I watch them come to shore
With childhood running down their legs,
And into the ground like melt-water

Summer is stale and lonely.
A fine dust caught in the air
And the corners of my mouth.
My eyelids are paper lanterns;
All I see is yellow.
And those chapped fields
That lay out under the high-noon sun,
They are stale and lonely too.
I want to peel off my skin;
It fits too tightly.
I want to raise my voice with the locusts,
Crying to our mother for rain
To dilute the earth.
But the sky is distant
An inverted ocean,
Refusing to fall.

Honey is the blood of the sweet and the rotten
With sugar-scabs on the back of their hands.

Their hands, stained to the wrists with pulp,
Waving to us from a roadside stand.
The people that live on this small mountain
Eat fallen fruit and peel off the flies.

His hands stick to the wheel as he drives,
Upriver, where the air is wet and heavy.
We swallow our words, thin like skim milk
And I smell the thunderstorm fresh on his clothes.

It covers the stench of his sweet rotting bones

Honey beads up in its combs
Honey combs his short summer hair
Honey runs thick in heat like this
Honey runs for miles on County Route Eight
Honey-bees cling to our window screens
Honey shut the screen-door when he smelled rain
Honeysuckles grew on the side of our road
Honey had a roadmap open on his knee
Honey-bees know when the summer is ending
Honey will wait out by the car for me