I hang on you like shirts hang in your closet
and I cling to you like clothes cling to your skin
and I wish for you like you wish on stars
and I wait for you while your patience runs thin
I cry for you like you'll never cry for me
and I'm close to the end and you've yet to begin

you told me you loved me on the cold metal stairs
with tears in your eyes
and of course I said it back
but I've known all along you needed more than you could ever give
and you took my young heart in your hands
and told me you were all I would ever deserve

the light shining off your hair blinds my eyes
so I shield them from you and our all night fights
and I never learned not to wait
so I'm still here wondering when they will come for me
and take me to the warm place where all we breathe is the trees
and all we see is the heavy air that pushes us down and up and back and forth
unlike when my little hands push against your unbending will

My grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister,
but from the way people talk about him, you’d think he was Jesus himself.
I never met him, my grandfather, but I know he must have had big, strong hands,
And a smile that would make his eyes light up
like the only things that mattered were family, God, and a warm dinner.
I know that sinners would have swallowed the Devil whole
rather than face my Pennsylvania preacher.
And I know that he was handy with a belt, when he needed to be,
But generous with a pat on the back or a firm handshake.
Most of all, I know that he broke my mother’s heart
when his heart couldn’t beat anymore,
and so he left the preacher’s wife and their babies to find his Maker in the sky.
Sometimes I wonder what he would have done when he got there,
And no one met him at the pearly gates.
I wonder how long he would have looked before giving up,
and if he would have tried to come on back home.
I wonder if he hadn’t been sure his home lay above the clouds,
If he would have fought harder for his time in this paradise.

Stacks of records filled my bookcases like extinct animals just looking for a home
And you told me to burn them,
so the music could float up into the trees and teach the leaves to dance
to Talking Heads and Tchaikovsky.
But as the records burned,
the smoke filled my lungs and smothered the leaves,
and I realized that even the best poetry will leave you empty,
wondering when words stopped being the truth.

It was hot.
So hot that the sun that burnt my skin was not the sun at all,
but rather a deep warmth in the atmosphere.
It didn't come from above.
No, this sun was in the trees, and the grass, and the earth.
It was me. Or, it was of me, with me, on me.
The heat was more than anything else.
I was drowning in it.
That whole summer.
I couldn't let it go.
Or rather, it couldn't let me go.
Of its grasp.
Which held longer than anything else,
felt deeper and sensed who I was.
This heat that followed me,
beside me and in front of me.
I felt it.
More than anything else.

I've never been much of a religious man. I know I don't seem it, anyway. My hands are rough. My body lingers in the empty, old house, not in the tall steeple among the heavens or the barren earth and the hells.

My family were farmers. They harvested, and when they didn't, they played cards at the dinner table and slept heavy nights. The dark was always darker and the night always deeper. But the days, my god the days, they were bright and mean like you can't believe.

I've worked my whole life. I was so young I could barely wrap my hands around the levers I was pulling, or reach the pedals I was pushing. But I can still feel the work, the tough, wreck your head, break your body kind of work. Carrying, lifting, burying, digging, dirt-under-your-finger-nails kind of work. It made my hands rough. It made me tired. But my father, he never tired. He never fought shy of the heavens and the hells. His spirit rejoices in the tall steeple, and he laughs when I try in vain to learn from the preacher these many Sunday mornings.