Tableau

A cheddar wheel of morning sun
Grates up against the window screen
To curl in whorls into the room
Where side by side we sleep displayed
On shiny continental pins  
Rorschach pairs of papery wings
Masking luminescent sifted rind
Silhouettes nestled deep in drifts.

Tableau

A cheddar wheel of morning sun
Grates up against the window screen
To curl in whorls into the room
Where side by side we sleep displayed
On shiny continental pins  
Rorschach pairs of papery wings
Masking luminescent sifted rind
Silhouettes nestled deep in drifts.

Tacking

Keel laid long ago, deck
where we stand at night
naming stars, worn salt
smooth and clocked
by the shadow of the mast
our ship trailing
veils of memory, smartly
parting swell, tacking
true from high up in the rigging
where I mend sails
with the thread of a tune
while you pitch
seams, humming
something old and familiar.

Lower, lower, a little more to the right, right,
so I work my way down ahead of the rain,
laboring under the gaze of a robin overseer
relaying your wanton desire in bossy birdsong.
She keeps an eye out for worms while I mind
the angle of the rake, ride grassy undulations,
tines biting into your arching back.

The Best Part of This Ride

is not the yellow lights
veering like starlings or
the smear of midway neon
neither is it the sweet
billow of deep fried
elephant ears or the lewd
bend of the corn dog
in the hand of the operator

centrifugal force
pinning us in a blue skylark
pulling you tight to me
your upturned cheek
is the best part
waving at strangers stuck
at the top of the Ferris wheel
every time we come around.

The Butler Model of Tourism

I come back year after year
cracked black valise, busted zipper
spring-shot lobby divans drained of color,

to press crisp bills into Monte’s hand
come up for air from the tortoise shell
of his thread bare uniform, ease myself

down on a sagging mattress
wait for the clatter of ancient bones
his creaking cart and shuffling feet

to recede into absolute silence down
the dimly lit hall, broken only by a spate
of conversation between the couple

I can just make out in the water
stained fresco above the bed
two of them lost in a heated row

as if I couldn’t hear their bald appraisals
shockingly frank in this flocked walled room
with musty corners and milky windows

disagreeing only on the degree of my
progression through the dismal stages of
“The Butler Model of Tourism”

him making a half-hearted case for
Rejuvenation, the woman straddling
the thin line between Stagnation and Decline.

The Last Bed

I should be grateful not to find myself disembodied,
hovering high above this stark cake of soap,
gazing down laboring to put names to faces,

the couple so familiar, side by side, palms down,
still as miller moths displayed on pins, our salesman,
Bill or Ted, rumpled like a morning after
motel king, reading my mind, musing
on this pair of worn porcelain dolls
painted in chipped shades of hesitation.  

Soft or firm versus memory foam or pillow top?  
Hypoallergenic, says Ted or Bill, the last thing
I hear before we drift off spooning on a queen
that is not too soft and not too hard, but just right
for ferrying us down this final stretch of river

past the last roof we’ll put on the house,
one last drive through the Tunnel of Trees,
the dog snoring soft imprecations to tender hips
on his old bed some rainy April night.

Two dormice cupped in a leaf
rills and eddies conveying us to the sea
on softly rolling shoulders.

The Last Bed We Buy

Should I be grateful not to find myself
disembodied hovering high above this stark
cake of soap, gazing down, laboring to put
names to faces, the couple so familiar,
side by side, palms down, still as miller

moths displayed on pins, our salesman,
Bill or Ted, rumpled like a morning after
motel king, reading my mind, musing on
this pair of worn porcelain dolls
painted in chipped shades of hesitation?  

Soft or firm versus memory foam or pillow top?  

Hypoallergenic pipes Ted or Bill, the last thing
I hear before we drift off spooning on a queen,
one not too soft and not too hard, but just right,
a satiny raft to ferry us the final stretch of river.

Waving like Queens we float on by the last new
roof over which we will preside, a nod of recognition
for the last new water heater, too.  Applaud politely  
our farewell drive through the Tunnel of Trees

one biting October afternoon in the not so distant future.
Cluck our tongues for the poor dog snoring soft
imprecations to hips gone tender some coming
rainy April night.  Blow twin Bronx cheers,

fat, wet, and sloppy, as we bid adieu to one last
shameless act of televised hubris.  Grace lies
ahead around the next oxbow, two dormice
cupped in a leaf, rills and eddies conveying us
to the sea on softly rolling shoulders.

Tig Coili

Gerry Mulholland sings
I come looking for a job
but I get no offers
just a come on from the ******
on Seventh Avenue
from a table top
on a borrowed guitar while
Johnnie Mullins adds in on
button accordion and harmony
rhyming ****** with Dewars
so soft so sweet whats left
to be done but smile
into this glass of Redbreast.

Trinity

Three times
I’ve seen them
crossing the yard
but three weeks ago
led leashed by the dog
to the solemn Norway spruce
that celebrates mass
and blesses her gifts
her third offering that morning.

Enamel blue sky
after a three day snow
precise transverse incision
above the southern horizon
inscribed by a thieving sun
that pockets the night
in minute slivers
we’ll never miss.  

Motor drone
born full term
into silence
triplets
soothing themselves
a low hymn sung in one voice
graces the frame
at three o’clock
tacking west to skirt the zoo.

Slender as books
of stillborn poems
wing spans a third or better
the length of each slippery
yellow lozenge
nosing ahead
through alphabets
of airy verse hacked
to pieces in prop wash.

Details, details
devil detained at the boarding gate
pilots banking for their final run
feathering sticks
dipping wings
in watery sunlight
haloed crosses peeling off
one two three
the dog and me
retracing our steps
one short of a triumvirate.

Turning Sixty Easter Morning After
Tearing Down the Old Shed

Christ and I; we rose
early, slowly, gingerly,
but we rose.

Ukiyo-e

Thin curls coaxed from the grain
released from all claim by the dogged
rooting of the spoon gouge

bone white ribbon
easing itself to the fragrant floor
spiral cherry rivulet lost in the churn

at the feet of the carver, the first
thing I remember. A churlish man
as I recall, the burl of his squint

screening detail and smoke
from his cigarette, blue double
helix rising in mirror image

a lowering ceiling steeping
his head in stormy weather
gimlet eye weighing heavy seas

a tempest lipping
the canted rim of a petal thin
tea cup, striated wave

reaching for the heavens
top lopped clean by sheering wind
the fluter and the veiner alive and biting

in the hands of the carver who cuts me free
at last, rendered in stark relief at
the boiling crest of the surf break.

A Good Set of Bicycle Lights

Strap white to the handle bar
red to the seat post

of your worrisome bicycle
                         a fixed gear nightmare, these nighttime

streets lay in wait while I lay waiting to be pierced
by the call that never comes
with a bit of luck.

Old light from distant stars
at the edge of my
galaxy of fear

arrives as pinpricks of reminder
your new orbit free
                                of my nettlesome gravity.

Gettysburg Address

A diaspora of stones make their way back, posted
by penitents keen to relieve long years of suffering.  
Late at night under desk light they put pen to paper,
insert shims of confession to wedge bits of Pennsylvania

scree into envelopes, a wary eye on talismans cocooned
in twists of tissue or sealed up tight inside zip lock bags,
ancient Alleghany seabed pocketed one hot August
afternoon in the Peach Orchard, palmed on impulse along

Cemetery Ridge, another bearing the mica glint that drew
the eye of a desultory adolescent moping in the long
shadow of Little Round Top twenty-three summers gone
now, before the untimely death of a sister or a budding career

in HR derailed on the heels of divorce, DUI and depression.  
How else to explain the plane crash, forfeiture of assets,
the shadow on the x-ray, the second one hundred year flood?  
In after hour twilight, tour buses long gone, gaudy chains

out on Route 15 humming, all with waits of an hour or more,
a National Park Service Ranger, a man about my age and mien,
doffs his flat brimmed lemon squeezer to retreat behind a desk,
leaf through a sheaf of petitions for mercy addressed in desperation.  

Silence pressing in from Culps Hill and Devils Den, the Wheatfield
and Seminary Ridge, he presses smooth a pane of stationary, eyes
closed, fingers brushing words of intention, box of stones at his feet,
heaped, indistinguishable as an unbroken line of advancing infantry.

My Answer To A Request By Rosanne Cash To Sit In For A Performance At The Rubin Museum Of Art

I’m flattered of course
but I must confess
I don’t play guitar
or a wind instrument  
the nylon strings of the Silvertone
I practiced on
a cats cradle beneath
my fumbling fingers
the school trumpet
that always left me
kind of blue.  
Let me be up front about
my limited vocal range
pathetic inability to carry
a tune in a bucket amplified
by a fear of public speaking
a crippling shyness going back
to my peripatetic youth.  
But I can see you won’t take
no for an answer, not surprising
you, daughter of the Man In Black
me, a man possessed
of subtle dormant talent
waiting only for a spotlight
stool and tambourine.

Venus of Willendorf

You seemed so distant
Cool and aloof on slide
Perhaps I was projecting
In the warm dark womb
Of Lecture Hall B
A silent world but for fan racket
From the Kodak Modal 4600
Eager to please on stiff little legs
Nosing toward the screen
Where you teetered
On impossible feet
Fighting a losing battle
With gravity I found
Touching, *******
No one could ignore
A chassis built
As the bluesman said
For comfort not for speed.  
I hear Willendorf is nice
This time of year
Hint of fertility in the alpine air
Your crazy braids beckoning  
Braille to a blind man.

Vespers

What were you chanting  
from down the dry well
of our German coffee maker?  

A brusque Gute Nacht masking
the finesse required to defeat
the hinged plastic lid?

Begging bus fare
for the Silk Road
transparent,

even without mornings
bracing first cup.
A caution, then?  

Don’t leave bags unattended?
Know the warning signs of stroke?
Sleep like a baby, use two-step

authentication?
Your cloistered solitude,
fringed bulb of abdomen

whispered tonsure,
solitary choirmaster dwarfed
by cathedral walls

soaring graduated
into heavenly gloom
where I hovered on high,

my nightly routine
to summon The Flood,
deigning to lower

a spoon of salvation
while you wove a gossamer
chorale,  

working
the eight tiny shuttles
of your batons.

Vieques

Snakes were here by the grace of God, but
knowing Him, He set them down while He fiddled
with an Egyptian plague, forgetting where He’d left them.

The Navy brought mongooses to eat the snakes
so they could relax and shell the sunrise coast in peace
but mongoose got to eat, as any chicken farmer will tell you.  

Spain sent Church and State astride the horse, but conquistador and cleric
dismounted to take in a sunset from ***** Arenas while the sea breeze
whispered soft and sweet to a restless stallion and his starry eyed mare.  

Ticks in the grass, indifferent to bombs, bitter on mongoose tongue
bloated equestrians each every one, blithe captives of nothing
but the cold blue Atlantic and the turquoise bath of the Caribbean Sea.  

Bored by the endless cycle of creation and destruction, inspired perhaps
to beauty or by niggling guilt, God unveiled the egret, elegant in its simplicity
with a taste for tick and a knack for lazy symbiosis.  

The Malecón sways with rhythms we won’t bring back in our carry-on’s, a drink
down the road from the old United Fruit Company dock, short stroll to sugar house
ruins, unhurried drivers nodding to afro-son, waiting for horses to make their way.

Lines Laid Down By Others

Days of measles spent cloaked in twilight
Veil of curtains and dime store sunglasses  
Between me and a sun gone dark with evil intent
Hell bent on robbing my sight while I was busy
Looking inward tallying wage against sin
Bedeviled by an itch that needed scratching
Hands sheathed in white tube sock condoms  
To ward off nails rendered poison as the fer-de-lance
Snakes that glared back from steamy jungle overlays
In the World Book Encyclopedia, cotton prophylactics
Incompatible with the proper grip of a crayon  
But the germ of a lifelong refusal to stay
Inside lines laid down by others.

Virginia Lee Burton

It’s all in there, a blueprint
for living, my sacred text

perfect replacement for a world
of tired hotel Gideon’s, this tale

of a plucky fellow with an Irish
surname, unencumbered, set free

to roam at will, picking up work here
and there, more hedgehog than fox, a man

who did one thing and did it well.  He
wrestled with private doubts in the dark,

stretched out on top of Mary Anne,
the nights warm and clear, sky smeared

with stars, a man who knew how to
back up a claim, take a risk, court failure

and humiliation at the bottom of a deep,
perfectly excised hole, all four corners

neat and square.  My idea of a perfect ending,
a second chance, a mulligan, quietly tending

the boiler with a pipe and a good book,
waiting for you and your homemade pie.

We Implore

How in Your name do you do it?  
Night and day, day and night,
a whiteout of words,

scribble of mother tongue
uttered beneath the breath,
those rending howls

packing power enough to jolt
the odd celestial cat nap,
find You holed up under alias

disguised at the wispy tip
of some far flung finger of cloud,
or sitting at the light

in a pearlescent Lincoln MKZ
with tinted windows, leaning
slightly to midline tracking

the approach of a woman brandishing
a hand lettered sign like the relic of a martyr,
praying for the light to change.

We Implore

How in Your name do you do it  
night and day, day and night,
weather the whiteout of words,

mad scribble of mother tongue,
those heart rending howls
packing power enough to jolt

stolen celestial cat naps
hunt You down holed up
under alias disguised

at the wispy tip of some
far flung finger of cloud or,
as I like to picture it, waiting

at a light draped low in a pearlescent
Lincoln MKZ with tinted windows,
following the progress of some pilgrim

brandishing a hand lettered sign
like the relic of a martyr, silently
praying for the green.

We Implore

How in Your name do You do it  
night and day, day and night,
weather the whiteout of words,

scribble of mother tongue
uttered under the breath,
those heart rending howls

packing power enough to jolt
the odd celestial cat nap,
hunt You down holed up

under alias, disguised
at the wispy tip of some
far flung finger of cloud,

or, as I like to picture it,
sitting at a light draped
in a pearlescent Lincoln MKZ

with tinted windows, elbow
on the console, following
the approach of a pilgrim

brandishing a hand lettered
sign like the relic of a martyr,
silently praying for the green.

Good Nyet, Soon

Sad late night Tweets
Staged comings and goings
To and from the tower
On Fifth Avenue
Red hat, white hat, ducks ***
Hair-do, sinister Kubrickian sons
The daughter of his darkest fantasies
Pay no attention, shiny surfaces blind
Us to henchmen nominees
Foreign creditors and deals done
In the shadow of onion domes
The Constitution assaulted, old girl
****** and humiliated as if
She were Miss Paraguay or
A high end St. Petersburg call girl
No, keep your eyes on the prize
Investigations and charges
Corruption in high places
Discovery and deposition
Congressional hearings and maybe,
Just maybe, our old pal impeachment.

Winter

On a beach last summer between
Munising and Grand Marais
a glitch in the space-time continuum
a case of Someone dropping the ball
rent a nasty tear in the firmament
a real doozy I would have missed
but for the high voltage bite of a stable fly
that wrenched me into the letter Z
upended the blue horizon long enough
to catch a glimpse of winter
gunmetal grey behind summers
drooping curtain, a fluke of nature
like the platypus
like a knuckleballer  
like improvisational jazz
but I still pause in warm April rain  
beneath golden autumn leaves
while pressing a beaded bottle of beer
to the scar on my neck
hot July afternoons and listen
for the icy bite of my name
a faint rhythm
building to crescendo.

Wishbone

Holding things down
on my end, calibration
the name of the game
purchase gained and lost
longing for your exquisite
exertions palpable
the length of this delicate glyph
grace and menace
in equal measure
on display across the bight
floored by your gaze
play of three fingers against
your effortless pinch
my feigned contortions
leavened by a finning
hand to ward off
the snap of lesser wishes.

Work History

I lucked into my first job
building four-letter radio station
call signs from tangled bins
of consonants and vowels.  

In those days it was
all done by hand.

Sharp corners on the F’s kept you
on your toes, O’s easy to bobble
when you got careless, “slot four,
out the door!”, a newbie mnemonic

forever lodged in my brain.  
I bided my time on the K line

until a spot opened on the W,
the graveyard shift.  It paid
a little more, the hours going
toward my Creative License.

It was the seventies. We chewed
betel to stay awake during long

classical station runs then punched
out woozy, blind in morning sun,
fingers bleeding, teeth stained red.  
Top forty, we popped ‘em out

like biscuits and squirrelled
away X’s to slip onto the ends

of freeform formats, small acts
of defiance.  I quit to avoid prosecution,
nabbed sneaking parts out
in my pants, one letter at a time,

building words, paragraphs, whole
stories in my basement.

Lines Laid Down By Others

Days of measles spent cloaked in darkness
Veil of curtains and dime store sunglasses  
Between me and a sun gone cold with evil intent

Hell bent on robbing me of sight while I was busy
Looking inward tallying up the wages of sin
Bedeviled by an itch that needed scratching

Hands sheathed in white tube sock condoms  
To ward off nails rendered, I’d been warned, poison
As the fer-de-lance snake that glared back from the jungle

Overlay in the World Book Encyclopedia
Slammed shut for the sanctuary of a coloring book
Prophylactics and perpetual twilight incompatible

With proper grip and waltz of a crayon
To stay inside lines laid down by others
Alone in the dark with nothing left to lose

But Roy Orbison shades and a pit viper
Coiled, biding time pressed between pages
Made as much sense as a malevolent sun.

Wrestling My Father

The scent of gasoline and lanoline lingers
mingled with sweat and Old Spice, menthol
Winston’s from back before you gave them up

for good persist in half-life beneath Vitalis
sheen and Listerine, waves of Bengay radiating
off red hot coals of trapezius muscles seized

inside a white V neck tee from Monkey Wards,
thin cotton canvas worked with small fevered hands,
greedy, slathering claim, leaving myself open to

reversal and the pin, sting of ancient rug burn
still gracing my cheek, palms pressed to face inhaling
what little I can of you by lung full.