What can I beg of tomorrow
that hasn't already been denied?
Am I a cup in hand, an avoided eye?

If I yearned for a lung not shallowed
with tar, would you grant it?
I thought not, I've asked before.

If I fought for one black minute
to toss the shovels aside,
to use my hands to dig,
to sift my own grave for riches,
would you give it?
I thought not, I've asked before.

And if I spit in your face,
take all the days unnumbered unto myself
and squander, would you take it?
I thought not, I've done it before.

I'll meet you in the morning,
yes, we'll face each other again.
But I'll want nothing this time,
I'll beg nothing but hard weathers
and grime. For that is all
you are want to give.

From once to somehow to somewhere,
The brittle language of hope cracks
Between my teeth, much as ice
Cracks beneath my boots as I,
Unhurried on a wax gibbous morn,
Make my way to the car.

For what is hope but an admission
That what is is not enough. Take this -
The assertion that on this day,
In this winter, it is the care of a step,
The purchase of a sole,
The purchase of rubber on ice
That holds this teetering balance
Upright above the ankles.

I’ve little hope beyond that.
I’ve little hope for I know come April,
In the surety of swelling streams,
Each once somehow somewhere
Dripped from the mind,
Stripped from the hope-bound winter,
Will babble on to the sea and die,
While the earth sinks a little
Beneath my feet.

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.

Weathermen are pushing the storm.
Nobody noteworthy died today.
Eight to twelve on the Twins.
Havoc on the plains and cancellations
pending. No travel advised.
The schools flaked out before
the first wind blew, and the office
is gutted parental.
Milks are shoveled in carts,
pricey waters too. Croutons
got hoarded like hardtack,
and only the lettuce remains,
only the lettuce, the leeks,
and a few fibrous cereal grains.

If in digging
through grim archives
I unearth those callous
epithets of my youth
Find on a resin smeared page
the smoke of anger
and the greed
for a touch yielding
to my thick dumb hands

Read the hormones
like a book of days
a book of sorrows
a book of shadows

In a salubrious haze
I will come to know myself
my ways and wend the
crooked maps of the ill-spent
where X marks the spot
turn left at the willow
right at the stump
and realize
I survived myself
if only for a time.

She had a long bore smile,
a smoker's laugh,
and a posture born of whips
and taking it.

She had a red onion mind,
a carrion wit,
three prison-ink vines
on her hip.

Her scent - a pudding
of ash and caramel,
hints of road ****,
burnt rubber and mint.

She'll cut your face
for a dime of truth
and slim recognition,
but not a penny for dancing.

She read Proust
and hated it,
spat on the spine of me -
dropped me a notch.

Soft-shouldered for gizzards
she was, taut in her loves,
tight with the greenbacks -
she called them gloves.

A proper stirfry
needs ten thousand bowls
of precise cuts

I find
not many lighters and too many cheap shades,
lain against a loose-hinged trifocal,
Expensive, lost and necessary,
upon the flip-top notebook
bound with crushed spiral wire.
And within, the gibberish
of a young girl’s day -
there are holes above the i’s
and myriad loves to Matthew.

I find
a green squeeze coin purse -
an old man’s plastic strongbox -
scavenged of coin
that only three washers remain,
three washers and a button,
nested in the scarves,
in the acrylic scarves
and the coarse wool plaid ones.

And I find gloves,
brown, amber and worn,
and taking them for my own,
slipping them on, I find
my fingers curl in the fashion of yours
and the momentary warmth
of your hands upon mine.

I tell myself one life
must yield to another:
fly to spider,
spider to bird,
bird to birdshot.

I tell myself one life
must, in the full course
of a day relinquish itself
to another savage dawn,
fall as each unbidden

yesterday fell, bleak
and ungrieved, twisted
on a rack of tomorrows
no more certain than a silk
spooled about a winch.

It’s fifteen below
And a fat buck lurches,
Spindle legged, four pointed,
And cardinal -
Fishtail and brake.

I don’t trust this road.
I don’t trust these tires.
I don’t trust these ditches,
Smoothed and driven with snow.

I’m a six-layered pig at the wheel -
Unsleek unchic -
But I’m warm, **** I’m warm,
And the road slides like pinstripe
On white gabardine.

And the waning moon,
The waning moon,
Low in the rise,
Gibbous and garish,
Scabbing a cloud,
Spills the whole thing blue.

I don’t trust the red eyes of mailboxes,
Always willing to dive the grill.
I don’t trust the farmer
That lives on the hill,
Behind the blue spruce line,
Behind the blue flickered window,
Counting on futures,
Clumsy as mittens,
Still as the finger drift
Thudding the glide
Like dull scissors
Snagged in gridded giftwrap guides.

I still taste the coffee
Down under the tar.

I trust my smokes.
Yes, I trust my smokes.
I trust my hat. I trust my boots.
I trust I’ll never find my roots.
I trust the jumpers, there in the trunk.
I trust every single roadkill thunk.
I trust every knuckled ill-advised ride
To tell me yes, oh yes, I'm alive, I’m alive.

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.

She chucked herself from the library,
Five stories blind and hung briefly.
I heard it from a friend.
                                    Laura’s dead.
She found three dead boys,
Hung from cable
                                    and that broke her,
He said.

We threw empty sixteens
From the roof where we gathered,
Spoke each a shattered dream
rushed upon the pavement,
One,
Upon another.
The sidewalk gleamed
In all the shards of Laura,
Green and Amber, Blue and Clear,
And ever farther than the eyes of her,
Splashed out in every blink night town,
In every flick night river where
Everybody drowns.

If the sun rose without you,
thin-lipped and petty,
a day would slump over me,
either frigid or thick-steamed.

And no cool wind will pass the trees,
And the sun, a mere mock of warmth,
will tumble west that is sure,
certain as rock in a dry creek bed.

For what is a light without hands
to hold it? And what is a day without
a warm return to a hazelled iris,
chiselled long and arced as horizon?

Just a forelimb on the road,
careless as a twig,
but no plunder for crows,
no worthy feast for a scavenge,
just hoof, hide and bone.

And that’s how they left her,
a narrow remain, somehow
shorn and distant thrown
as if her full and russet frame
had been lifted, held aloft
and in sacrifice taken up,
into some sanctified bounding
where car and deer ne’er met.

Like red leaves,
after tree had fallen.

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon bent
with wrestling weathers

winter and spring claw
at each others' throats
and uncertain maples
warily release their
saps

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon wet-shod
in a gray rebel snow

defiant on the nether
side of everything
melting to a smirk
that'll linger 'til
June

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon shorn
of the lost time spent
dawdling careering

From some forgotten cache,
a bur oak, scrawny, stunted
humble and tawny, high
on the red sheer palisade,
twists the moon into shards
and shattered pearl.

Raked by the ever wind,
a bur oak -
cleaved into cloven rock
abhors this ****** moon -
its waning wandering wax -
such mockery of clinging.

Sprung from some forgotten cache,
a bur oak rails against it's own
stripped rippling arms,
as if to proclaim and rightly:
I, alone upon this rock,
hold the blackest gray squirrel -
that hoarding, heaving vermin -
to account on this crooked,
blighted night.

Tobacco tar walls,
Resin ceiling,
Dun carpet floor -
all receding -
creased receding
to the elevator door -
and the doors -
the doors - the endless
doors repeating.

I drop a penny.
I squat but it's tails.
I look up at a girl
looking up.
Her hair is black,
tangled comely.

She has a chocolate smear
on her right cheek,
Her uncertain teeth
bared in child's
glee and caked with it.

She wears a mustard
blouse stained canary
and her pants are
frayed at the ankles.

Her eyelids are ticking
ticking the flickering light
She says,
"The light turns everything yellow
and nobody picks a bad penny,
that lift only goes down."

She says her name is Mara,
"Mara will be around."

S'always gonna be there,
that stain like a slitherin' dog
done nabbed a cookie.

Let's call it spilt milk,
if we must, but ****
that was a rabbit punch.

Let's keep in it the hutch
with all the chipped bowls
and riddled towels.

I know. But forgive
don't mean forgot,
just means put away
with split chinas
and red linen.

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.

Sing forth the treasons,
the seasons have been sung
long before revolting - D minored
the winter, G majored the spring...
Bah, the seasons never heard
these grovelling breaths,
but ****** them deaf up.

Give lung to the unbreathed
rumors squat below the bridge,
that the tumors unskinned,
revealed pulsing on our red,
white - blue tunneled drums -
these cancers defiling the myth of us.

The fall does not applaud
the clapping of leaves, but
strips us to bone, and the
blown away come to us cardboard,
cornered in the cold sun, unsung,
mocking the radio comforts of disdain.

Our own unmaking, unmasked
and riven with lies - lies and all lies
reinforced with steel and striped beams,
stiff on a pole, snapping as whips
on a cotton bent back - crowed
as every patriot hymn
fades in a grumble.

Such joyful music this treason,
this treason not treason,
this discomfiting strained ensemble
sparing neither breath nor ear
the true screech of anthems -
beat, immobile chords,
chained and ghetto thirds,
cast-off tritones, contrapuntal,
scraped on gut and strung up,
and over the laminate woods of us.

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.

Again today a study
proves our immortality.
To run, however long,
reduces the risk of death
by twenty percent
in a sample of two hundred
fifty thousand.

And now they are running.
Running against the certain stone.
Running on the slim trails of hope,
gathering ticks as they brush
the closing blades.

The path gets thinner, old friends,
Narrows to a deer-path.
But the whitetail seeks only water,
forage, such sweet leaves -
never the headlamps, no,
never the headlamps
that creep up the road.

For what, then, do we trod
The husks of dead men,
And for whom?
Is it the trinkets improved?
For we are no larger than the beast -
And there the judgement - the beast
That fashioned the first *****,
Turned the first soil,
Laid the first seed,
Sure in the touch
Of sun, water and repercussion.
No, perhaps diminished, reduced
Upon that self-same soil,
To seek, beyond the seed,
Beyond the shoot and bloom,
Beyond the very grain of dulling truth
That all is not forsaken.

I tell you this.
Bone has fashioned socket.
And in that socket - an eye.
And in that eye, and in those eyes
Each a burden falls.
Look not to the lover or fool, fair prince,
But gaze upon the beggar
And find there inheritance -
Find there, centered in the iris,
The black pool of our communion.

And no greater is the elm
Than the hand.
For the one that prospers light to soil
Is the same as that which turns it,
Is the same as that which yearns
Beyond the follies,
But takes one into another -
Cupped and held -
Flesh over bone -
Calloused but braced by the other,
Alone, no, never alone.

The demonstration of love don't need no permit
ain't gonna be no counter-demonstration
no cops no barricades no rubber bullets twitching
in the chamber for that one yahoo that sets the whole
**** thing alight. Love in the streets is a whispering
riot with small hand-written signs in a style of smiles
and gestures not to provoke but to invoke a species
of politic bent on the destruction of judgement
stopping traffic with small recognitions that the other
is none other than oneself in a similar skin.
The demonstration of love don't need no big flags
honking horns or locking horns or riot gear
to wade baton-wielding dispersions cuz
it already spread down the side roads
and the thin avenues are thick with it.

Some dim tide strode the beach pelican,
had quarters for eyes, and a gull's sense for scavenge.
I found pearls under the boardwalk,
but they were just butts
and hunks of abalone
caught up in the pushing.

The skeeball racked out addicts
like melamine and spent rubbers,
but we were young then,
not known for drinking.

Safari had fake skin in the flukes,
Zulu shields too tall for a penny,
and some chump carved out Jesus in sand,
but the waves whipped that away.

I got all surf rod crazy
and hooked a dogfish in the belly,
and some **** took my kite,
so that's what's up for fish.

Later on, though, when the acids came on,
and them jimmies were ants,
and that ******* carny wouldn't stop the ride,
and footprints became skulls,
and the sea turned opal,
and the horsecops stayed cool,
and I became dolphin,
and undertow spoke of passage,
and the horseshoe ***** washed up
gray and silent - I learned -
that mussels cling
to jetties not for communion,
but in the hope that the next sap
would take the pounding.

If I knew anything,
like a dog's tail wags,
like an iced wire sags,
I would know a hard mouth stings.

But there in the blaze of it,
in that thick tongued moment,
when your eyes glazed on a word,
a dry twig snapped beneath a bird.

And what fell there, what broke there,
now limp in the now dry grass,
was neither a bird nor a wing,
but a foot pressed on breaking glass.

So smooth and piquant then. Remember?
Our love a puree of roots and bitters,
quick peppered, swift boiled
blobbed up and sulphurous.
Melting the ladle, melting the ***,
smoking the burner, firing
the whole **** kitchen down.

Yes, it still stings my lips,
***** on my uvula, something
never fully swallowed
but scorched on a hard palate,
peeling skin on the blistered roof
of a recollection.

It was tough then, I know,
making soup last for days,
for weeks, for years.
We were young then
and fond of quick eats,
grabbed before a cab
and shoveled whole,
gulped like a snake
teasing eggs -
unhinged and transient.

But savor these broths unclouded, love,
clear to the windmills, blue and Dutch
at the bottom of the bowl.
Draw the spoon, gentle and away,
lift and breathe softly, eyes closed,
and take what remains, what lingers
velvet on the buds and nourishing.

I pray for winter. Summer is fat
and beyond repair. It hardly rains —
children on bikes, on swings
bite the wind. Children eat sky
from trampolines, take
clumps of it in their fists

And fall back on their fevers
laughing, yet to learn
the heft of sag. O! Manic youth —
you’ll throw your greasy chain.
Will it be cottonwood or cloud
that litters the yard come Autumn?
Who’s to know.

When I see children, I see cruelty,
decay and brown ache tumbling
from its stem: the rake,
the shovel, the whine and drag,
some lean deer breaking corn
by the grain bins, the short hex
of old cloud on my tongue.

Soon they’ll be shuttered
in winter’s dry heats these children:
cold-sore, chapped, their bikes hung
carcass from hooks in the ceiling —
like those old men that trim hedges, ****,
sip ambers and broth, wait for snow
like those old women that pry
ticks off their backs.

Would you betray a maple for its shade -
deny yourself the cool comfort of dim light,
sweet woodruff and fern, ground ivy,
violet in spring? Columbine refuses
full sun. Your languors burn, blister
and peel with each maliced stroke
of a chainsaw.

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.

It was something else entirely.
It was not the ripped yellow t-shirt
I pulled from between the boulders
Where the lake met Chicago.
It was not the penny or the wasted
Gull feather. Nor was it the child’s shoe
That no longer flickered as she ran.
It was not the rusted corkscrew that
Faintly read Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
By the gold and chipped cowboy
Tall in the saddle,
Nor the green and brown shards
Of empty glass, nor the used
And smoothed shells of mollusks.
It was not the bits of blottered pages
Whose inks no longer spoke of hands
But water and dissolution.
It was not the lensless knock-off
Rayban’s - severed at the temple. No,
It was something else entirely,
There, hidden in the rocks,
Where the water beats upon us.

It is red brick and steady.
Though the herefords tread the floors these days,
She is steady. And though the window frames
Carry little paint - it was white - and hold
Where they fell, and though
The creek has wandered, no carved,
Deep against the footing stones,
She is steady. Steady as the ma’am
That taught them. Steady as the hand
That scraped the chalks and simple maths,
Steady as the wind scraped eyes,
The chaff chapped hands
Tracing letters onto boards.
Yes, she stands forever
And only the bell is gone.

It is the peeling that breaks me.
It is the skin once a thin bastion
against dirt, against mandible,
against the boring small things
that blister the flesh, brown the pulp.

And as I slide a blade into the onion,
wincing in the sting of sulphur,
these fumes of disdain, it yields,
again and again, to the rocking steel,
humming unto the butter and pan.

But it's the peeling that breaks me.
Thin papers loose as sunburn,
loose as ribbon unwound
from the core, loose as young men
bound for the shore, loose as a living,
a living no more.

Oh these blind trajectories,
these pure set conditions,
initial, merry, just so wandered -
a shell thus thrown, a plunged
albatross beak, a sheared
stab of ice, a moon’s pull
and a breath elastic -

All these and a calculus,
as crest to valley lumbers
in its way - sine to sine -
chopped though ever free
and unlapped after.

Yes, that is how to build a rogue,
how to find our love - our love
stacked crest to crest -
to lurch up, snag a gilded gannet,
round about a hunk of sun
and fist on some stiff unwary hull -
cast our cargos upon the sea.

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.

At the still axis of revolution,
about which our tortures churn,
the pure and toddler self remains,
present and young,
uncoiled, unlearned.

Such that a top, spinning,
poised gyroscopic on a point,
traces a path on a floor,
spiraled to the delight
of a child's fresh gums attentive,
must wobble in the end,
must with those most
stupendous frictions fall.

Neither the lean nor
the circumference, dead on the floor,
succumbed to turmoil,
defines the top, no - it is the axis -
that about which all things turn -
stiff spindled, silent, and spun
by the pink and toddler hand,
in the wonder that is yours,
in the wonder that is ours.

Some days smell like years
like the dinge of sprung sheetrock
when the rain came in
the cricket loose against the chimney
and the attic floorboards
expand with the frosts
of every winter spent in this house
insulated with cardboard and crates
ransacked from the floorplan
and catalogued renderings

And some days smell like years
like the blistex on your lips
when the rain came in
and we kissed this tired old place ours
and the attic floorboards
velvet pine underfoot
whispered tall rooms in this house
and the stuccoed walls spoke
of a lost craft revived
in your freshly washed hair

I can smell in your eyes
the brine of a ceiling
when once we dreamed
beyond the rafters
and collar ties
beyond the shingles
and the familiar maintenance
of our lives

Espaliered vines hang like convicts,
strung out in the vineyards as portent
to passers by.

But the tasting rooms are open with cheeses,
retribution and grim justice -
verdicts of wine.

I see them, the tasters, the gawkers,
giddy on the road for sips of vengeance
and sublimation.

I see them, glued to the glass,
glued to the crushing of grapes,
calling it justified.

Pick one.
Step out of the book clean,
any book, whether bible, cookbook
or blue novel append the phrase
“In the beginning” to the mouth of it:
Harissa & Preserved Lemon.
In the beginning step off from there.
In the beginning there was
Harissa & Preserved Lemon.
Go forth into the worlds
reasonable and unforeseen
& flush with the knowledge
of nothing that precedes thee,
flush as nothing precedes thee
& graced that every fowl or beast
or behemoth fish or mite is
beholden to the tongue
that would taste its name
& every breath spools out
a world anew spewed from
the mewling attentions
of short—tenured gods.
We,
short—tenured gods know
nothing of what we make
until the meat is tendered
& the stew of our lives
cools in that blue porcelain
bowl we save for Sundays,
velvet to the throats of those
that would devour us.

Otto rode filthy down the slumpline onto Cowpers - past Bleaker's Brick, Mole Rat Slim's and Dave’s Sour Onion , on down to quayside all hooked and hungry. Flyer said Gracey Mae Beam was hoarding the stage at eleven, hitting the planks of Varlot’s Velvet Rope with no back-up - no thunder drum brass or strung out string section to stifle the hoots and howls of them mongrel boys scrapping over leavin’s. He knew the drill. Gracey would lead with “Heaven” then lilt dissonant into “Hell and Lula”, spin down into “Luna”, swing out riffs of “Hypnosis” and barrel into “Gun Metal Blue” and run “A Lass To Mara.” Yes, he knew the drill cuz the set was theirs, arranged in a one bedroom walk-up shotgun with a Wurlitzer and bad plumbing. ****, has it been that long? But Otto knew, felt it in a rib, it was coded on the leaflet - Gracey was playing Varlot’s - the first haunt - going it alone this time, no Wurlitzer, no Otto, just a dim lit backdoor black-smudged around the ****. He’d wait for her there, three smokes left and rationing. Three smokes left and hoping for a glint-eye nod.

Rocking on the third rail spark
and grinding on the steel wheel
taking a well arced curve on the El
winding its transit plan to the loop
passing second story flat dreams
and the messing about before
the office coffees are brewed
and the day begins as an abstract
smelting of glass concrete steel
and the eyes drift from a hand-holding
two, to the crochet hook fingers of the
night shift lady, to the suit and tie
guy with trading in his eyes,
to the bronze trumpet girl
sure footed, on point
below a new sky.

But the train bends down
for the subway
a spine bends for a dropped book
the train bends down
and yellowed signs cracked
at the corners flicker on
and ceiling lights flicker on
a fist tightens on a pole
and we look to our shoes
our papers, the news.
Eyes avoid eyes
and the sick blending
of massed perfume
perspires a choking distance.
A spent soda can rolls
the one last connection
from foot to foot
and each taps it away.

Black Aggie presides on the Druid Ridge,
taking children to her lap
that they may convene with bent-feathered
birds felled in her shadow.

And there on the Druid Ridge,
in the red eye of night she foots the grounds,
drags each from their slumbers,
calls forth to discuss the marrow.

Oft scorned and feared by black grasses
burned in her passing, stained by vandals
unfeigned hatred of grief, Aggie
remains for to harrow.

Cold, still, tormenting the Pikesville shroud
such that none could rest in the lime
of her stone-eye, such that none would test
the hand to reach into the pits of their loss,
to find each one a pulp for the barrow.

Live!
Deliver!
Emit no on-time reviled evil.

No devil ere lived on.

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.

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.

Joy and similar discontents
break wheaten on the all-weather
radial steel-reinforced sidewall hum,
on the defog rasping for a service call;

Break on the near treeless plain
stitched loose to the sky with rivets
of silos and grain bins - clouds
dive porpoise behind the rise.

Joy and similar discontents
hang like flowers on a bleach
wood cross surviving another winter
to tread sobbing on the green ditch water.

Every X and Y coordinate of the plains
etched by gravel side-ways and field
entries too rutted and ragged
to suit the conglomerate need

or the tilt houses and stripped clapboard
banging against the thistle, milkweed
and swallowed dreams in the foxgrass,
with turkey buzzards circling thermal overhead.

But the crows plunge faster into red
fresh carrion sloughs of whitetail and ****
to breach at the presence of a larger scavenging -
and each bent marker tells its own tale.

Count the bullet holes and shotgun splatter
in the stops and yields when the road was empty,
when the night was dry, when the callous boys
had time on their hands instead of hog blood

and badger-eyed girls that left after graduation
for the starless haze, crowded parades,
sidewalk shops, umbrellas on the rain side
of things keeping each at arm's length.

But it was never about the city,
never about the glitz and pizzazz
of everything running baffled into gridlock;
less about the thick dumb flannel boys.

It was always about that low fog,
the night eyes in the beams, the manure, chaff
and split seams of the midwest furrows,
the haybales that bob like rafts over the horizon.

Herefords lying down,
***** to the wind - this bodes of rain.
Cloud gray and anvil,
clobber shot and some ways off,
a cliff falls precipitous.
There's manure in the air
because it's November
and the harvest is in.
There's manure in the air
for the fields need a feed
before snow tangles the greeds
of Autumn, and the Aberdeens
crush stubble leeward,
beyond the spruce breaks.
And there, atop a shaved hill,
a misthrown cone of gold,
shoveled by the shade hands
of gamblers in the **** winds
jangle in a pickup.

A prairie skink on the edge
warming his stripes
on the granite palisade -
crystalline quartzite
redder than the short sun
amid the prickly pear
above the cling trees
and cliff swallows
swirling for the bugs
from spit mud hollows
twitter down where
the snapper lifts a
stone head from the
murk still water
below the falls
logs cans and tumble
down rocks and ******
dams until the blue
tale fades away.

To become fluent
Is to walk with the hands
The resilience of starch
Dried on the steep ***** of the bowl.
And what may seem clean
Is a trick of the eye
For the residue of rice
Resists the towel and scrub
And clings there,
Known only to the fingers
That would seek this knowledge
And ignore the one thin hair
Afloat in the soup, yesterday,
As we closed our eyes,
As we closed our eyes
And savored the broth.

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.