Mrs. Parr made us write letters
to the hammering man that lived
in the radiators of those cold
Beechfield elementary rooms.

He got a lot of mail that winter - '70 to '71,
and we scratched our gratitudes
on the four line papers, certain
to keep our ascenders and descenders
in time and in tune with the peals
of iron and steam.

It wasn't until '77 that I got a grip
on thermodynamics and realized
there was no man in the heat
of those cold Beechfield rooms,

No giving hand with a maul
to pound away the nails of frost
and loose the stiff knuckles
of a chattering hand.

But back in '71, when mercury
pressed against iron, too young
to formulate disbelief,
we gave our penciled thanks
to the hammering man
that once had wrought relief.

I was always adept at disappearance.
Just silt and gutterwash slipping off the ridge.
Brown water and runoff, thick chemistries
down to the trout streams, crisp, unmuddied.

Perhaps, though eroded by my passage,
shaped, however briefly by this greedy torrent,
heedless of the lumbers and rounding stone,
I hope for a simple clear to surface.

I am stilled by the rippling eyes of you,
these faces above a drowning.

These each and varied grains of you,
these flakes of skin and hair of you
remain, held close in this current,
oft rabid, oft flat and running,
knowing only one nature -
to keep on - to keep on -
to keep on to the tides.

This morning,
the owls spoke Vietnamese.

I am not speaking metaphorically,
I'm telling you categorically,

The owls spoke - Vietnamese.

The air was a'crisp,
crickets and toads hushed
for this foreign refrain - repeated
coded over the course of a ****,
over the breathy hum
of fans drying grain.

As far as what was divulged,
well, that is mine alone.
I just thought you should know,
I'm a long way from grown.

Seasons turn the birds
like pages.
V's in the slipstream,
deny this place as habitat,
when Canadian airs
slump down in the jetstream.
Pelican pouches gone,
black tipped twirling
thermal phrases gone.
Stilt legged herons,
still and balanced on a single bone,
like prophesy, a blue note
scribbled in the margins.
Egrets, orange-beaked
and wading,
slow stepped
and stabbing,
reading slow
the ditch water
for movement,
paddling boats
of the many ducks,
wood, ruddy, mallard and wigeon,
gliding bloom algae scratchings
of summer, gone.
All the fattening
cushlings gone.
Even the Kingbird,
stout-shouldered,
Maltese,
relinquishes its kingdom,
surveyed from the fastening post,
The cunning moves Othello,
on these crisping griddled plains.
Dark-eyed Junco,
black over white,
return the wintering hedge,
to the shrivelled berries,
road grit, given seed
and stubbled white pages.
Great grays and redtails
lurk these simpler plumes
in simpler plumes,
and wait the white plunging.

In the gathering steam and sizzle,
innocence borne on the cleft tongues
and snake oiling scales of just and rust,
turn green in the enzymes -
the endtimes just months away
from release and streaming.

My god has it been this long?
Broth turned to black reduction,
caramelized,
forgotten on a back burning coil,
while I sniffed the air for musk
and cardamom,
while I taste the dirt and slick
crushed biscuits in the mat,
and for what?

Steam carries dissolution,
no two ways about it,
flavor is the concentration
of dead upon dead,
scraped up fond of burning things.

This is madness,
conflagration,
cultivated extermination,
but I reel and I swoon
and roll back repulsion
with a carnivore's lust for melting fats,
with a vegan's lust for imitation,
with a child's zest to burn ants
with sunbeams, focused
to a pinprick.

Stumbling into morning,
vague, unremarkable,
perhaps befitting a glance,
or a glancing blow to the jaw.

Stay cool in the thunder room,
soft pressures of mine
and mine alone,
impugned with the round
ticks
in a chipped cup
thick with lip
and quivers.

Vague, unremarkable,
perhaps befitting a glance
or a glancing blow to the jaw,
I must take that first uncertain
step into a quickening,
allow the hinge its creak,
allow the sun its stumbling gait,
that I, busted on the jagged even,
may return and find myself
vague, unremarkable -
alive.

Wind, don't speak my name,
no squash blossom thunder,
no snap bottom rain.

I ask but a breath on dry tinder,
if just for a moment,
tender as velveteen fumes
between whispers, before a kiss
and her slow setting eyes,
while I, remiss in attending to time
and teeth, look back to the fall of things,
to the flint and the steel of things,
into the dull spark of advents
birthed into this chair,
this cigarette, this coffee,
this rolling silence,
to know that I,
if only for a moment,
have lived up
to all that I've burned.

Rejoice!
This sweltering band of pariahs raised
through one hand, one voice,
dragging chain like kitetails,
stable on cloud, though untethered.

The unfed gape,
pitcher plants in empty nests.
Even flies evade this truth.

Rejoice!
Mingle the sweats of our bare naked bones,
lost nosegays, groping green garlics thrown,
half-gnawed red raw chicken ******* blown
out and festering in pits,
garbage cans,
coffees slow whisked to instant
black ground,
whether silken and dazzling,
whether burlap and scratching,
linens that never hold a press,
admit the one stench
that no weave contains.

Rejoice!
All ye cast off jesters and janglers,
jasmine untanglers,
rejoice and submit
to this one sweet stench
that is we.

I know silence,
I breathe silence,
I am silence.

But when the harsh winds streak
among the ash,
when the leaves are stripped green,
when gaunt tarnished limbs hiss resilience,

I must humbly bow my head,
and whisper,
to the fallen bark and leaves,
lift my petty eyes,
to the bones of trees,
and whimper.

For it is not I
that rises unto time,
it is the coiled fiber,
the heartwood
and sheer elevation
of living into which
I can never reach,
but with clenched teeth
and torn grateful hands,
I climb
upon that
which endures
regardless.

Rain pounds the awnings like Parliament,
a groaning, moaning opposition to the motion
outward into morning.
Rain rustles in the street like referendums,
dense, verbose, broken into articles,
footnotes, addenda, dog-eared.
Drop by drop,
a gavel cracks in a plastic bucket,
the ayes and nays tallied,
it seems the roof is leaking.
But in a narrow victory, by god,
the clarity of water has been struck down,
must needs repair is denied appropriation.

We got 6 bars and 6 churches,
each with similar congregations.
You might say we got that perfect
balance between grace and humiliation.

It doesn't end there, though.
We're run by a council of six,
if you include the mayor, Orin,
who lost the state election
because he couldn't represent
a cow if he had
crayons and construction paper.
He's got some creds,
if you take into account
he built a tractor museum
in a train depot
moved a half mile down
a minimum maintenance,
travel at your own risk road,
frequented by the hormonal.

But I digress. Oh yes,
we have a council of six,
each from one of the six
similar congregations,
each from one of the six
houses of libations.

However, every first Saturday,
they meet, informally so to speak,
under the torn tarp at Ernie's,
next to the beach volleyball pit
nobody uses, between the dumpsters
and the railroad tracks,
to discuss matters too urgent
for the formal published minutes.

They crinkle their Grain Bin cans
like phrenologists picking
out small crimes that paint
this town true, rural,
downwardly mobile,
cordoned off at the rim.

Few years back, they annexed
Bob Olson's back forty
for one helluva football complex
for our losing team. GO DRAGONS!
But we gotta have it.
Pay itself off in five years they said.
Rentals, events and all that claptrap.
Gloria walks her dogs on the track
everyday. Return on investment.
R O I.
At least she picks up the ****.

Third and Main got ripped up
a year ago last April.
Ain't been paved yet.
I suppose we're waiting
for those more appropriate
appropriations to accrue.

But that's alright,
we saved a fortune firing
our Andy and Barney PD
while Andy was in Afghanistan.
Don't know how they got away with it.
We get two hours of laws a day,
Deputy Dawgs, and meanwhile,
somebody's siphoning gas.
Pretty much sure it's that Keiser kid,
can't hold a job anyway.

I thought better of mowing the lawn today.
I looked at it a bit. Betty, across the street,
is giving me the side-eye as she sweeps
harvest dust from her shingles.
Well Bets, you fussbudget,
I'm working two jobs,
six days a week,
to live in this runt of a town,
so back the hell down.
You may be eighty and spry,
but you got five, count 'em five
courters with John Deere riders tending.

You see, here in the heartland,
where politic is a game played
with cheap beer and hard glances,
where the clapboard houses lose their paint,
where the new, polished surrounds
of seamless siding dictate appearance,
priority and expenditure,
where the churches and bars conspire
to define reputation and aspiration,
the manure-booted men
are denied the dignity of manure
for a sham - for a show
that barely covers the crust and wrinkles
of a town dying slow.

Winds don't speak my name,
just carry on,
foraging stone for beaches,
combing grass for a song
like a rasp on a bowsaw,
like a drop in a bucket,
galvanized and rusty.

Winds don't speak my name
and if I went to school tomorrow,
I'd be the the fool with the apple,
conjuring bribes of better grades
and gradients carved in sandstone
ledges.

Hedges don't smell the wind -
they turn noses -
let the stank come in.

Days of wine and roses
were nothing more than days of wine
and headaches, presupposing
that a functioning drunk
was less a drunk
and therefore unimposing.

So the winds don't speak my name,
but rather split and run,
as I stick my nose
in all that flows,
in all that liquid business.

Nothing broke east today.
Night simply collapsed,
feral and bloomed
with hard ******,
dollar-a-rack billiards,
two-buck-chuck chardonnay
curling my tongue
like the tillerman's fist
that coffees, highbeams
and bitter jaw breakers
can never wash clean.

I'm not thinking grim,
but those beams only grant
fifty yards of reckoning
into the blob of night,
that gaping maw with gumdrop teeth
and ditch green eyes.

Many tongues blithering
explode like cattails,
like plug cubans,
chewed and cancerous,
like doghair teasing my uvula,
like that five second,
twenty foot,
across-the-bar romance
with the square-shoulder girl
spending no time my way,
long drawn out and vagrant.

Your coffee's getting cold, my love.
Bella curls into your knees
twitching.
What are you dreaming, my love?

Copperheads tangle in withering steam,
and I'm fifteen again,
fifteen minutes late again,
hoping the first words
on your lips are a
good morning kiss.

On some nights I crave
bland starches and grave-rich
dishes of smooth buttered plunder.

Atahualpa, Oh Atahualpa,
what remains of your people?
What remains of your tribute?
What remains of your bent knee
and strangled betrayal -
having given all
and taking only a book,
a word, a promise?

Bags of Incan bone go cheap these days.
Bags of Incan bone fight for breath
among the well-heeled fad-diet set
and soft sweet rotting onions.

Boiled, roasted or shunned -
massacre lives on the skin,
brown and dusty.
Plunder grows from the eyes.
And the flesh weeps the milked tear
of the Andes.

A smattering chatter
revealed the prophet
to be a fool - a beggar -
a panderer to fear -
for bread, mercy or
perhaps, if luck
ensued - loose coin,
too much a pittance
for counting.

And upon the city,
the Lord of Wraths,
expunged of fatherly
duties, crushed
upon his children,
the light that was
Beginning.

Acrid wheezings then
and fuming,
ascended the ramps
to heaven
and cast the demon out.

Her eyes fold gently
as she takes bits of honeycrisp
from my fingertips -
the first from the tree,
still hard, ****,
warm in the thick after rain,
hinting at cinnamon.

Her usual distractions,
squirrel on wire,
bobbing heads of neighbor girls
on trampolines,
lifting reigns of monarchs
and viceroys, mourning cloaks,
slamming doors,  
jumbled voices beyond the fence,
bright musks of night prowlers
in the grass,
all ceased to beguile.

As if desirous of desire,
she stiffened at the first crack
of my teeth through the flesh
of this first apple,
then bounded across the lawn
and sat before me,
not as a beggar may,
but as an adherent
to the rites of giving.

Bit by bit,
taking each with neither lurching forth
nor brushing my fingers with her teeth,
her velvet black ears lain back,
her brown eyes reduced
to sweet slices of rapture,
she chews each in its time,
savoring each in its time,
not as a dog may,
but as a disciple
to Autumn's way
of giving.

Dangling on the burn end of breath,
a word -
gaunt, untenable, reliable
as the long tone of wind in tall grasses.

Dangling on the burn end of breath,
a syllable -
unto nothing, unspeakable
as the split airs among the spruce
wind
breaks.

Dangling on the burn end of breath,
the better half of Bartlett pear,
lightning struck,
bows and groans along the cedar
fence,
into the bass clef of everything
that clings.

Orange pulse light and embers
conspire to darken a moonless night
blacker than eyes, blacker
than the slurs of late tires
commuting,
communing
with cricket brushes,
the snare beat of toads.

Dangling on the burn end of breath,
music -
unconducted, underscored, decomposed
by the rattling rains of silence and smoke.

Dangling on the burn end of a breath,
is a word -
gaunt, untenable, reliable.

Dangling on the burn end of a breath,
is a syllable -
unto nothing, unspeakable -

until the rattle rains its verdict.

Oh ye slaveholders,
hesitant emancipators
and empire builders run manifest -
time will have its way.

Grain by grain,
nose by nose,
eye by eye,
you will return to stone - inpressed.

A monumental hypocrisy
blown into a mountain
will no longer preside
over ponderosa pine
and in that place, once corrupted,
the granites will prove this vanity.

In another age, perhaps
some distant race, chiselled, inflected
but unknowing shall squint upon these
weathered myths and wonder,

as we look upon the Sphinx
and so wonder -
why these haunches,
why this withered broken face,
staring blankly into sand.

She hates mushrooms
says they smell like dirt
and grow on **** and darkness

She hates green beans
because her thumbs still ache
from seven summers
snapping tips

She hates kale
because she don't wanna
chew for days
and her jaw clicks

She loves onions and garlic
the baseline
of everything going right

She loves the sweeter cabbages
melted down in bacon fat
topped with snap peas and walnuts

She'll cook for anybody
willing to listen
to her sizzling grease

She'll caramelize your mind
question every savory intention
every bitter herb in your teeth
salt every wound till it sweats
and goes limp in the pan

She travels with her tongue
her pantry her passport:
cumin, coriander, cinnamon,
cilantro and cardamom
in simmering stews of goat
and collard greens.

Her knife has a keen edge
and she cracks the joints of dead birds
like splitting cheap bamboo chopsticks.

Her eyes go wide and silent
at the range
and when the burners fire
the whole world gathers and waits.

Dogfish bait and a late teasing wind
slacks the line, the one binding
monofilament of time
and lost momentum
sagged from a raft adrift -
waiting -
and never enough
to sum the formulae,
the vagaries,
vicissitudes,
uncoiling from the reel
set with loose drag.

A stag in the sea still drowns,
still thrashes until the rack
goes down
one
last
time
one
last
breath
before the flounder is spitting
hair and bone
and the titanic hulk
becomes the soft stuff
of mollusks.

He seemed modest
until he ran a zip line
between the cell tower
and the high tension
wire.

Dirt don't call the lightning
blue or femoral.
In a furious upstroke
my mushroomed spine
explodes in the crown,
splinters of bone
and black lit pumas.
Driven to hell
through a straw
and all the trees
are dead on the road.
My dry lip
adheres to a dry gum
and my teeth are broke
and purple.
The lyrics are garbled
and tongue-spoke.
Guttural curses
cling to my head,
both hands holding
back the temples
of past myths,
lies and discontents.

Marriage of heaven and earth -
strike down, down, down,
that I may shut you up.

Duly noted -
that million dollar baby donation
to United Way
or some other contribution
to whatever charity
the strategists
deemed would
promote the interests
of the body
corporate,
devised as
noblesse oblige,
designed as good
corporate
citizenship,
to veil
the larger sapping
of riches
stripped
from the backs
of workers
hacking out
double shifts
with machetes
and dull knives.

The cook and the teacher,
paid low,
trusted
to feed the body,
feed the mind,
clean,
left unfed and fettered
to the edge of a dime.
Lower down
the chain of demand,
two rungs below
the garbageman
that swiftly whisks
our waste away.

The CNA, the DNA
of the elderly
trash-heap industry,
scraping by,
just scraping by,
but trusted,
regulated,
called to task
for a stain,
three rungs below
the garbageman
that swiftly whisks
our waste away.

Minimum wage
daycare slave,
entrusted
with the safety
and well-being
of children,
four rungs below
the garbageman
that swiftly whisks
our waste away.

Iridescence on the neck
of the boat-tailed grackle
is a trick of light.

Much the same
as the swirled acid
rainbow slitherings
of oils on water -
slick - metallic
the call.

Much the same
as the prismed arches,
aloof,
heavy airs slashed
by gut level
blades of low suns -
never there, but chaste
and chased by the eye.

The blue jay hoards
no pigment blue,
but gray conspires
the barbules,

interlocked
to lift the remains
of the speckled shell
under any light or lack,
slackened back,
flashed on limbs and wire:

back to the clutch,
back to the hatch,
back to the wide red cups,
back to the ratcheting call -
the screech of all things blue.

everything paused when you waved goodbye
just going to work

every possible tragedy occurred
on the empty sofa cushion
on the arm of the chair
where one of your hairs
waved and cast the slimmest grim shadow

bella on her bed
pudding-eyed and half asleep
chewed a clump of dirt
from her forepaw
and flit tongued
it to the floor

the coffee un-poured itself from the cup
and I was ****** eastward
in your absence
yanked down the foothills of appalachia
slurred across the bay bridge
smeared like butter on the pancake peninsula
past the flash and clunking plinko machines
past the skeeball thunder and flickering schemes
and a summer week's worth
of crab thrashers and spent grease
stuck in my sinuses
past all the great juggling spectacles
of joy to find myself
ankle deep in some other ocean
breakers hammering to buckle me knees
as you turned right at the top of the street
for another sweaty shift
in the back kitchen
of someone else's dream.

Bob Wilke
excelled at the close up
kind of magic -
that pick a card sort of thing -
great at parties,
when the chatter
is lacking
and the astonished
were a bit off-plumb
and didn't notice he ain't
practiced much.

Now Roy Dennison,
on the other hand,
would pull a maggot
from your nose
if he knew you were lying -
a fait accompli kind of thing.
He always said doves were too big,
too flighty, rabbits nibble his pockets,
and Roy, just too ******
lazy to feed 'em proper.

Emma McFadden,
oh - now
she
had
the apparatus -
that steampunk clinking thing
with exposed gears,
whirling barber poles,
horns that puked blue smoke
and methane, chain,
sawblades and springs,
flywheels and pulleys -
all the things necessary
to rip a body apart
and leave the choking crowd
gasping for more,
always wondering.

Some say they spotted her,
one or two times with a shovel
under that old scraggly sycamore
behind Dennison's place.
That may be the case or
just a bunch of flap, I don't know.
I ain't going back there, though
I do have some ideas
on the supply side
of Roy's maggots.

What a show.
Man oh man, those were the days.
What a show.

O! Praise upon the cloven-hooved beast,
the fawn, the doe, the buck
that bound and warily snip the leaves.

O! Praise upon the moose
its dark muscular tranquility,
slipping out then into shadow.

O! Praise upon the bighorn sheep
who cling nimble to cliffs and know
to climb sideways, cracking
resolved conflicts down
the mountainside.

For blessed are the cloven-hooved,
named and unnamed,
surefooted, fleet, horned and innocent,
that grace the graven icons of demons.

Sharp edge of a coldfront
stands west of Dells,
a rigid lead line on a ridge
where the leanin' broke-roof barn
stands ready to take in buckets.

Ain't been scavenged
for old wood yet,
for picture frames,
sold,
where the upwardly mobile,
shop for the quaint, rustic things,
reshaped for authenticity,
and a clipped last year
wall calendar
image of a red barn
in a yellow field,
below a blue
cloudless sky,
following
the perfect rule
of thirds.

When she entered a room,
conflict dissolved like sugarin'
lemonade.

She has a kindness rare
for possessing such a dressing
down mind.

She free-style fingerstyled
her Martin with a well-trained swing,
and her voice could melt concrete.

She could outrun a gazelle.

She saw the world from a catamaran,
taking each swell in her teeth.

She took the world by the pants
and threw it down.

She picked it up,
brushed it off,
and let it know
that everything
would be okay.

It has been awhile
since we strummed
together.

It has been awhile
since she played my tunes
much better
than my cramped hands.

It has been far too long
and I am mute and afraid.

For that raging joy,
has been forever,
caged.

Fist upon the sun gods.
Seek among the goddess earth.
Chant and clang before icons:
oh please, good fortunes,
new birth and wealth.
Sacrifice a goat - the blood will dry
at the foot of the temple.
The blood will dry
and still no rain.

Scream into the night
for a pittance of hope demanded
and stir a neighbor's peace
a dog's twitch into soup dreams
of portent and panic. Yes,
that, once done, bestows
upon us the riches, the riches
the ancients cached:

Dishes wash smoother when soaked.
A grain in a bowl is not empty.
Basil brings life to bland fare.
The herbs of spring strengthen
once dried and stored for winter,
and the yeast of us rise unto heaven.

I know neither ******* nor Liberation.
I have no Holy Day in June.

I don't need to beg for status -
whether legal or human.

I don't run when the laws arrive,
and no clerk counts the items
in my hands going into the fitting rooms.

Nobody checks my receipt,
and no trooper trails waiting
for me to drift over the line.

Ain't no door been closed,
no fountain restricted,
no glass in my ceiling.

Listing these truths reveal
what's been in plain sight
all along.

But I tell you this.

If every crayon in the box
were melted down in one great ***,
the wax will be brown,
and if molded around a wick,
and lit,
the flame would reach
unto heaven,
and light a brave new land.

I like burnt coffee,
the black half cup in the ***,
evaporating into syrup,
tongue-rejected but swallowed hot.

I like bent smokes,
cracked at the filter,
pinched and squeezed,
dispersing joyous poisons,
some to the lung demanding:

Each day begin bitter, imperfect,
stiff into addictions of dawn,
into the drawn curtain ways
of waking.

Passive frictions generate little heat.
Strike the flint hard into steel,
and let the kindling flare
to dispel the spell of darkness
of hate and the grim fuels
that burn without fire,
without compassion,
without warmth,
without the near spent coals,
still glowing,
that nourish the soul
with clear broth
in tough bowls.

I lost something that night,
after the play where the gun
ground across the stage toward us
and stopped.
The final movement
in the final act
before the dim
and applause.

It never grew old,
a ****** comedy,
with ****** songs
of prisons, ***** and ****.
It was our fourth time
at the Annoyance Theater,
where we could smoke,
laugh, bring our own beer,
trip on acid, sit on pillows,
and laugh.

Trip walking home, a yellow cab backfired,
you ducked behind the mailbox,
Clark and Belmont,
"That ain't no backfire, *******.
Get down."

But I froze.
A boy screaming "Pendejo!"
through a hole in his thigh,
thrashed on the pavement,
tires screeched, pigeons jumped
to distant perches, and everyone
was running, running,
running away.

If I
had not leapt upon the weathers,
I would not know the rain,
neither the soil soaking violet rain,
nor the mountain rounding violent rain.

A train upon a scheduled track,
rarely derails. It is calculated thus.

If I
wonder whether leaping forth or falling back
into safer briars leaves fewer scars,
exhilaration would be a foreign land
of laughing fools with burnt hands.

Gain versus loss is the work of accountants,
profiteers and venture capitalists.

If I
had not turned away from her,
turned from evaluations of with or without,
turned from the doubt, the wish, the one last kiss,
my hands would never have found yours,
and blue upon hazel unite in the faint
few seconds, standing on a cliff,
together, above a deep and narrow pool
into which we plunged unthinking.

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
to every hard to find
creek bank in the world,
there's a busted dinghy,
a forgotten sloop dream,
with a mudstuck sprung transom,
a sky beckoning bow,
tied to a cattail or some other
tenuous stem.

Down the deer path, thick with ****,
the willows, reefed in a gale,
cringe in the rising crest,
and a busted dinghy
lifts on a swell and bellows
against the cleat to slide clean
to the sea, to a young boy's
landlocked dream of spray,
hard weathers and anywhere
but here night-watches.

All the colors of elsewhere,
the splendid regatta of the never-seen,
the gleaming spice and bent strange
tongues of the could have been - mold,
dip and sigh, lift and strain,
again and again,
upon a cleat,
upon a rope,
upon a cattail
or some other
tenuous
stem.

The first time I saw you cry,
even the flies got wet,
worms scrambled like Israelites
before chariots and damp chaos.

I never knew your aunt,
but maybe this was your first
touch of dying.

You told me she gave you Chex
on the brittle days, cookies
on the soft lazy days,

Spoke Danish and laughed
because the horses knew the ways
and all the sisters were named for flowers.

The rocks tumble into the glade,
and all the flowers wither,
even the flies get pummeled,
and the nightcrawlers
drag the mapleseed down.

The AAA guide says Jesse and Frank James
jumped Devil's Gulch on horseback to outrun
the Northfield posse. A must see locale.

Though that story has largely been debunked,
Splitrock done built an small tourist industry
around the myth.

Gordy sits all summer long in a cabin
with no A/C, black flies on the screens
like dog hair on a furnace filter.

Gordy sits all summer long in a cabin
with a couple Coleman coolers filled
with all the best brands of soda,

Hawkin' the t-shirts and postcards
he didn't sell last year or the year before,
but that's ole' fly-swattin' Gordy.

He keeps a list of the origins of tourists,
that's all his talk down at the Sports Cabin,
where he sits all winter long.

Between sips and drips of foam above his lip,
he'll say "Norway, Pennsylvania, Mississippi,
Japan, Iceland, Kansas..."

He might ask you if you're gonna eat that.
The pizza got cold anyway - so why not.
Plus he knows what Gloria did yesterday.

He gave a '57 Chrysler to his 10 year old granddaughter,
but she lost it after the divorce.
Her dad signed the title and left the state.

I guess that's about the state of things around here,
disappointed tourists, skunked out beer,
cold pizza, the little girl who lost her
dad and her car on the very same day.

The bereaved must sing to the passed,
must wail upon the deaf skies our frailty.

Given just moments upon this crust,
like toothsome bread to savor until swallowed,
we must praise the baker his craft.

There is not a noise we make
more truthful than the chewing,
the soft crumb yielding to the jaw.

Put an ear to the loaf to hear
the children's song of the womb
in faint wisps of steam and contraction.

Yes, the bereaved must sing,
must wail upon the crust and the crumb,
must howl upon each sawn slice,
must sob, perhaps stoic and silent,
upon the torn, chewed and swallowed frailty.

My dog laps the flavors of morning
flicks her tongue to the dew
sniffs at the haunch hanging apple
dangling low and chosen
when still but a flower
knowing ripe this coming fall.

I wait for the coffee
neither smelling nor knowing
but the dew is cold wet and
clean as Mary's hair on a broken toe
and the apple clings low
expanding in a blushing green skin.

Settling accounts in cuneiform
is the work of Sumerians,
ten sacks of wheat in autumn
for two goats today.

Should retribution or betrayal
stab the soft clay, the reed
breaks in the fist of the scribe
balancing credits and debits,
destroying the ledger.

In the distance of ages
come lines gaunt in their pointed
leanings, revealing neither the source
nor reasons for their differing orientations.

It is for the scholars to reveal
what lies hidden in these ancient tongues,
much as the poets in the older ways
distant from the reader, unacquainted,
fenced off by industry and protocol
from the immediacy of commerce
speak to everyone or even perhaps
to no-one at all.

"Fifteen miles as the crow flies"
So let's break this down.
You're telling me that a crow
cruising a straight line
at 30 miles per hour
will take a half hour
to reach the tree.
Well I'm cruising at about 70,
got a detour for construction on I-90,
some snail farmer in a combine
thinks now is the right time
to hit the county roads,
and I gotta drop down
to 20 because the paint
and the rise say passing
is no bueno, and he ain't
waving me by.
The crow,
on the otherhand,
is getting mobbed
by eastern kingbirds
not liking his shadow
on the nests.
And yes, that bloated
skunk is fine feast
for a crow flying
as a crow flies,
hopping to a fence
when the implements
pass tall and reptilian.
Given that and some quick
calculations based
on what I remember
from my high school
geometry class -
Pythagorean Theorem
and all that -
the crow and I
should arrive
at precisely the same time,
******* and hungry.

On clear days it rains buckets,
swelling the headwaters
and the algae blooms gluttonous.

Rufous clay breaks into wider trenches
and the towhee flashes away.

You never flinched when I crushed your hand
on that first day on the ****** rise before a charging
buffalo sun, gnat swarming my wild panicked eyes,
giddy with each hill blue upon bluer receding.

I'm a woodland kid, baby, creek crouching
with roots and canteens of sassafras
in the leopard light and leafmold;
the wannabee Tarzan swinging
on wintercreeper vines.
I'm the scurrying rat in the stormdrain,
taking the shortcut home for supper.

But there you were, straight as loblolly pine
in the canyon lands of Chicago, prairie drifted
in with the drifters and the hawk winds
of winter to find the woodland kid dragged
blind before the gridiron sky.

Two rivers led nowhere, two rivers
and a chance confluence of running
merged and pooled in a one bedroom cave
on Belmont, hatching our tadpole dreams,
fattening the swimmers with mustard greens
and gaudy hotdogs.

When we crested the banks,
on the continental divide,
one to the woodland, one to plains,
the water ran as waters do,
and as in each great story,
the boy follows the girl,
to the ****** rise before
the charging buffalo sun,
where you held my hand
and I saw the sky for the first time.

What I have sown and hence reaped,
whether piles of stone or heaped loose
chaff threshed out and stacked,
beans sold as commodities
on the open markets
of acquaintance,
leaves the fields barren, ready
for an autumn cleanse,
fresh spreads of manure
to percolate down
with the cold rains
and held waters of winter.

The waning day conducts the night chorus
in the clicking of the chipping sparrow
in the electric pulse of cicadas
and rasping claws of gray squirrels
on flaking bark and cedar fences.

Robins tremolo puddles like dogs
and cut grass fumes with notes
of parsley and cracked pepper
as the starlings dig in for the night
shoulder to shoulder in the ash
raised like a baton for the next movement

When the lights dim and a nail
of the moon polished smooth
plucks a single string and strums
the minor chords of owls on frogs
and the nightswift's perfect fifth.

Same dull knife that ain't been sharpened in years.
But the fingers conform to the worn familiar grip,
between the sweat seasoned tang
and the callous building heel.

Same old blade, same old balance,
that once never bled the eyes
with blasts of sting onion vibes,
now cuts with a thump,
the panic of propane
clings to the nosehair,
with each successive
crossgrain slice.

Same old blade, same old balance,
used to slice garlic thin as almonds,
now gotta lean heavy on the clove,
snap-busting compounds as unstable
as this thin crust hand cracking
the sulphur vents of Vesuvius.

Driving to the lone tree,
the one that marks the right left turn,
the tree full and round,
uncluttered by the muttering
tangling limbs of crowd oak
jostling pine and mobbing
silver maple that snap the wind
into fingers and clenched fists
of hale big as jawbreakers.

That's where the twist lives,
just past the stump yard
trying to petrify, turning
wood to stone,
before the rot hits home,
before nobody knows
where to turn no more.

We found our way
once the willow went down
but it took some time
took some time til
we saw that the redtail
always dives into the same deep
culvert where asparagus
is marked with upturned
boots that never fit anyway

We all find our own way home
the blind Rand McNally instinct
of Get 'n Go coffee stained maps
splitting at the folds.

It takes some time
but we always find a sign
a whitetail spine
or a naked brown christmas tree
or a sag bottom Bud box
thrown, that leads us through the
nameless roads home.

If I take to my drill and tin snips,
cut slits for my eyes in a bucket
of galvanized steel;

If I fashion from spent, inked
aluminum plates the newspaper
doesn't need anymore
a flimsy laminar armour;

If I stride donned in these and
perhaps with a blade of splintering
moulding left after the renovation
into the yard to hack at the vile
violet hyacinth blooms
laying siege to the aging tulip,
presuming to take the edge
gardens by attrition,

would you see as once you saw,
my sweet Dulcinea, the quixotic buffoon
so deep in delusion,
so madly in love with you.