like a silly fish

     
     
although i
am only
a foolish salmon
attempting to
stand midstream
& leap
from the
crush of
icy waters
to the
bank of
spongy grass
& step
one foot
at a
time
into a
pair of
pants,

i will
love you
as a
man
     
     

song

 
 
once i watched you enter a room
felt you as a whole quilt
                                spiced and draped
across the length of me

there is something in your name
when i hear it makes me want to
                                burrow in the softnesses
behind your knees

i swore if i could sing i would
my heart was ever glad
                                a few simple minutes in a day
 
 

pieces of the son

 
 
the artichoke and pomegranate
know too well as subtle fluids
the full and sweet
of sweat and blood

as oil from the olive
and other viscous tides
can carve alluvial fans

so to do the placental nutrients
etch and nurse the embryonic rhythms
of the natal ebb and flow

this water follows us
and in the light and darkness
of uterine seizures
a small man knows
everything

i will to mine make known the ache of living

that the raven and the humming bird
will fight for food

that children sledding suffer freak accidents

that sunsets and young mothers
battle together against the bright allure
of a silvery moon

by the wayside lie pieces of the son

a low-running mountain spine
a cobblesome river
neither still nor stirring
a smudge for hope and dearness

runnels lead here
the heart closes and opens
yet nothing might pass
 
 

self loathing

 
 
there have been women here
cackling jews laughing loudly
in the front room
spoiling my morning coffee
their voices resonate across
apogee and archway
working ever closer to my ear
now singing broadway musicals
slightly off key
but with depth of timbre
lets you know they've had
a lesson or two
haughty bitches, these two
no longer here, of course
though i feel them in the wood
sense their very id-nesses in the grain
beneath my palms
smell them on the air through
bacon fat and coffee grounds
and expensive eau de toilette
sticky as incense
expansive as musk
mank and odious
as kelp rotting
on eastern shores
at sunlight's latest hour
 
 

maria christina carmelita de la cruz

 
 
bucking the old black pickup
against heat and elevation
over washboard and runnel in hard low

radio doling sad old mexico story songs
and gritty walking rockabilly blues
true as the aching road
hot and poisonous as the heart's deep core

my young mestiza bride bundled
cold in the truck bed
wrapped in the garment she wore
first to communion
and last to the wedding bower

end of the road
i shoulder her two miles
up goat path and glaciated
boulder field to hardscrabble peak
up and up to the green pinebough cross
over the girl child lily--
stillborn
dark and fatherless
in this northern anglo town--
so mary might hold those tiny
bones and grieve no more forever
under the watchful eye
of sacajawea's ghost

ascending through scree
a trio of haggard old goats
look me over slowly
i step aside and
the last one brushes
my arm in passing
regards me carefully
with a milky eye
and from its
bearded mouth
drops one
delicate yellow
tundra flower
at my feet
 
 

haying

     
through the reek of fallen hay
i smell your alfalfa brown
a ripe fomenting of chemicals
amid the tumescent fervor
of decomposition

after haying, corpses
of field mice turn up

two beside the doorstep
one beneath the hammock
one even in the bathtub

two men came to visit
asking had i seen you
i'm a poet, i replied
i've seen it all
they went away with a pamphlet
of my writings and several
apples in a basket,
bloated mice
tucked neatly
under faux grass

grain alcohol on the air,
thick as the redolent stink
of lavender and ammonia
on god's own breath

your cunt drying quietly
somewhere in the fields

hay hooks and baling twine
on a boulder
in the humid shade,
picture perfect
beside one lightly
rusted digging
shovel
 
 

the boy and god sat together

     
     
the boy and god sat low
together

a monkey harooed on the night

the two reclined on earth
as across large pillows,
looking upward past the stars

remind me to be grand,
said one

and the other, saying nothing,
smiled amply from his cushion
     
     

i was a bull

     
i was a bull
a hero
a fish
a mountain

several millenia
passed in ecstasy

tonight i am a tired
                              moon

the energy to bend slips me:
i run out of things to be
     
     

In Her Father's Eyes

     
     
I got blown for the first time
at a party when I was fifteen,
and my friends and I spent
the rest of that evening marveling at it.

We spoke about the important things like
how it felt and if I loved her and
did I kiss her afterward.

I talked too much that night,
happy and proud and aggressive,
and when her father arrived to pick her up
I shook his hand too hard with both of mine,
then kissed her right in front of him.
     
     

daybreak

                                                                             
we split each other open
then with bloodied hands
i brought in cords of wood
                                          for stacking

afterward, when my mouth had emptied
into yours and this tongue still tasted those breaths,
snowclouds rose above the mountain
                                  the spice of heartwood
skipped from under the maul

you touch me here
            you touch me here
and here

it was you cleaned my hands
                  smoothed salve on these palms
and held them to your skin

you gathered all the splintered spindles
and reassembled the forests

when that was done
we knelt together
                  by the heat of the woodstove
weeping for the carelessness

     

on thinking of you as i fell to restless sleep, & thinking of you still as i awoke

     
     
i stole away at dawn
to prepare great bowls
                of tea and oranges
from which we refill ourselves
to linger over names
and places yet unknown

those hands, this mouth
throw forms of clay across the earth
from the deep bosom of laughter

                                            hearts and bones
                                            aligned in length
                                            with one another
     
     

Traveling Birds

     
     
Today I walked with Moose.
I admitted I was worried for him,
that he'd seemed rather morose of late.

He told me he wasn't sad
and he wasn't angry,
a little lonely, is all.

When I asked after his family
Moose related how the yearling
got herself caught in a tangle of barbed wire.

He'd watched as the rancher who found her
put her down with a .30-30 slug and dragged her away.

After that his wife ran off east of the hills
with another bull, an old friend of Moose's,
in fact.

Silence filled us.
We walked the creekbed
with the current.

After a while I offered if there was anything
to cheer him up, I'd do it.

He huffled and snorted,
looked at me out of one immense
dark eye, passed a hell of a fart
but said nothing.

You've been eating the compost,
I observed.

I know it's not good for me, but I
can't seem to stop.
I get so tired of low grass and weeds.
I've taken a peculiar fancy to your
coffee grounds, he confided.

Shall I cover that?

Yes, (sigh), it would probably be best,
not even so much for me,
but one of the elk has been picking out
the egg shells, and he smells terrible.

Moose flared his nostrils,
turned his head abruptly.
I stepped back to make way
for the large panel of antler,
tufts of velvet furze singular
in the low angle of sunlight.

Do you smell something?

A leaf pile burning,
diesel exhaust,
wind out of Canada--snow's coming--
and the old cat, she's out prowling.

I saw her track near the wood pile.
Is she dangerous?

No, she's all but lost her teeth.
Still, she likes to come in,
drop some sign,
give the does a scare,
though at her age I think they'd outrun her.

Why does she bother? I asked

Why do you walk in the woods?

I pondered that a while
until he interrupted my thinking.

I'd like a cigarette, he said.
Caught off guard, I answered rationally,
I'm sorry, I don't smoke.

Next time, then?

I realized it was a question
and agreed to bring cigarettes next time.
I almost asked what brand
but checked myself,
smiling.

It'll be skinny this year, he mused.
I'd like not to have to graze the winter.
If I could lay down and sleep it off with a
warm dream, I would.
I've always envied the traveling birds.
They talk of the south in such colors
I can't imagine,
and always with a little twang
in their throats I've never
been able to place.
     
     

censer

i would fit you as a wheel in my palm,

or as an orange peel, that we might both

be lightly scented after mingling

Geographies

This is the ring,

these are the hands,

and the pledge that follows

we remake daily in a cadence breathless

                                                        with possibility:

I could not have gone farther to find you,

and now, knowing us, I know the latitudes

and circumferences of the world.

If I question where we're going

I might only recall where we've been,

from wind-raked deserts of ice under austral skies

to green mountains heavy with the breath of the tropics;

coasting bicycles south beneath

          the dense canopy connecting the Americas

or at play in coastal hollows off Pacific shores,

where sea beds and tidal pools

foreshadow us a life ecstatic

with whimsy, color and joy.

I think of where we've been, the improbability of it all,

these continents which by turns divided us until geographies--

                                                                  yours, mine, the earth's and ours--

folded one upon another in a complement to everything known,

and yet I remind myself these distant places,

                                                            these grand adventures pale

before the simplest housebound morning,

a pot of strong coffee,

a crust of warm bread,

& your arms to repair to again

                    and again, again and

again, again and again

          and again and again.

This the affirmation and fulfillment of our marriage vows,

this the most remarkable among remarkable journeys

as the gradual gathering of our days together obscures

                                                                      the lengths of our lives apart

and each we scarcely remember

what it ever was to wonder where lay our home.

Capricorn

You--

brazen and sturdy,

obscene as the peony,

prescient

as the austral night,

you towering constellation written

from the kestrel's insatiable wing

or the full mouth kiss

of webbed amphibia--

I choose you.

How It Works For Us

I say I don’t think I can blah blah blah

          blah blah blah, blah blah blah,

and that’s why blah blah blah blah

          blah blah blah blah. And blah blah blah blah

          blah blah blah.

So unless blah blah blah blah blah,

          blah blah blah blah blah

then we can’t ever blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

She takes a moment for composure. In the silence I know I’ve talked too long and said very little.

Listen to yourself, she says,

with grace and fortitude,

then with a word makes

debilitating love to me

before leaving me alone

for the night.

Wildflowers

for jw

Tom Petty,
desert highway,
summer heat.

This is a truckful of grief.

We spread your ashes
with the rattlesnakes
at Devil's Cairn, N.P.

For your last you swam
with the lost sisters
of the Pleiades,
a whisper in the trees
as you fell.

The rest of us,
the ones who'd
seen you last,
never heard you go,
only a knotty
thickening of dislocation
in the sudden silence between.

I imagine myself there,
that I held the fractured lengths
of you and strained
above my own heart's wild agita,
again and again and again,
again and again and again,
for the sound of your
breath.

Confluences.
Three forks.
Ragged buttes.
Montana.
Sagebrush.
Cedar bark.
Coyote scat.

Pelicans witness riverside
for motes and scales, dusts of you
they'll stow away in swift bills for transport.

A graceful coup,
this vertiginous spill,
this final transubstantiation:

Bright tiles unpacked against a blue sky;
volatile bodies cut through the black night.

Mourners write the new mythology.
I'm naming all the stars for you.

Ghazal, Oil, Cancun

I found a word that's not in my dictionary, ghazal. In the morning     light
I touch it again and again. Today the snow swallowed the mailman.

Birds tapped at the scrim of ice on the edge of this window. A Carolina wren, in the eaves, stuck its tongue to the metal, squawked and beat its wings in a frenzy until it expired, right there, hanging off the gutter by its beak. The bird twisted in the wind until the temperature warmed enough to let it fall.

Out back we tapped a maple tree and drew a barrel of oil. I saw the     genius in this,
and launched a bid to win government funding for R&D. I would
    later lose that bid

to Halliburton, because Dubai is more exotic than Brattleboro,
but this particular morning we were so pleased we drank champagne and orange juice

and lit a fire in the backyard with the excess oil. Somewhere IEDs were ripping skulls off children but we couldn't give a shit because we'd just won a free trip to Cancun.

That's how it goes. You give them a solution and they ignore you; complain loudly enough and they offer distraction. Cancun for cheap, a blue bracelet, a buffet, and all the rum you can drink.

Sugar Season

I drank Harrison's Ghazals in the morning with a quart of vodka and vomited them up in reverse order, LXV to I. After that we went down to the ice, mid-March, and listened to the river crack apart. You gave me three hundred days to look forward to, and then, you said, you'd be gone.

This is just another of another, Sunday in Vermont. Trees explode in sweet duress because the pastor from the Midwest let the sermon ramble. Later, college ball on the tv, and the last skating of the year before the ponds open up and swallow rural boys with sticks and pucks. Somewhere a snowmobile opens its throat for the last time.

Mild winter, brutal spring. Vociferous nor'easters dump twenty inches that melt the next day. Flooding, followed by rain, followed by snow like ash that thickens the mud. When the sky drops gravel and teeth we know our bulbs are ripening.

Gray skies for days. Mornings I see my breath inside this house.

I tell you all of this and you kiss the tightness in my chest, sing a beautiful, thick warble that looses a raft of snow from the slate roof. Our room shakes under the slide, windows tremble and the earth groans when the slab hits the front walk and obliterates the path we'd shoveled a thousand times. We run downstairs to check for boots skewed up from under the pile.

Instead there is this simple doe, scraping the air with her front hooves for purchase, hindside buried beneath the weight. Though she shreds my palms we pull her free, heaving, her pelvis crushed. She refuses a drink, says she needs to hurry back to the children. She shows us a picture in her wallet, a puckish young needling & his sister, a tiny spotted fawn. She thanks us, insists she'll be okay, and drags herself into the forest despite our protests . At last we can only watch her go.

First her ragged path through the trees, then listening, listening. When we turn to go in the front door is buried, and the shovel, so we dig with our hands.

Fossils

We ate rich brown fruit,

drank water from skins

beneath shade of the cyprus and willow.

The cold river ran neatly

in its banks.

Distant tropes of prayer drifted

over us, much as ash sifts across

the cava leaves

at Krakatoa.

My fingers plunged the fiber,

I cracked stones between my teeth

and checked were you still sleeping.

A rare tiny emerald scarab lit on your lip,

consumed an invisible morsel of the fruit you'd eaten,

unsheathed its wings and fled on a series of golden clicks.

For the briefest moment I saw my god in you.

A sand fly bit our dozing guide on the ankle.

He cursed aloud and slapped furiously,

scratched a gouge across the earth.

A resting camel spit ambivalently

onto the Sinai, inure

to the sweetness of your fruit or the

terminal dis-ease of our guide.

You came around as a baby from an afternoon nap,

fat and groggy with the intensest lucid dreams of daytime sleep,

disconsolate to be woken for this.

A Letter to My Lover

4 February 2007

Good morning, my sweetheart.

I miss you so much that the degree of my longing melted all the snow off our roof overnight. Last night was very cold, 2º or colder, and all the streets and sidewalks, porches and stairs, railings and mailboxes; the skins of the trees with their branches and tines; the window glass of automobiles parked outside; all of them, in their slick new coats of yesterday's wet snow, froze immediately after the sun went down. Yet I heard a trickle, late, from the eave above our bedroom window. I stayed awake after our telephone call, reading Nigeria in your magazine, the same article you'd read, fingering the corners of the pages whose corners you'd already fingered, growing more and more alarmed about the price of our oil, and the costs of it, moral and human, and as I read my worry grew, as did my alertness, so that I was even less sleepy after an hour than when I'd laid down to read myself to sleep. Finally, the anxious global ringing in my ears gave way to the gentle, hopeful dripping of water, a steady pluck, pluck, pluck, a reminder that, even on these coldest nights, desire counts, winter gives way, my lover will return.

This morning there is a pool behind our house, and a few of last year's ample leaves, freed from under snow, float carelessly in the water that is still too warm to freeze. There's a funeral next door, and all the mourners travel our stone pathway to the church. I call to them from the second story window to be wary, for the red bricks, even where shoveled, go so slippery in the cold. One by one they nod their thanks. A careworn gentleman in a long black coat and handsome cap, walking alone at the rear of the group, pauses to call up: Have you seen the pond in back? Yes, I tell him, I have. It's the damnedest thing, he says, those goldfish survived the night. It's love, I tell him. It's always love.

Yours,

Exfoliant

I tire

of the well-dressed

at these parties;

even after all these years

I long to go home

and unlock the secrets

between your proud hips.

Leave the crostinis and the bellinis

to the haute couture.

You and I rock back and forth

together on a bed of almond stems

until we've ground the protein

to a fine powder.

Add water, add essence of plum,

add lilac, citron and the mildest daub

of stone-pressed olive,

and sell it back to the well-dressed,

that they might wear our scent in tender places

beneath their clothes.

Even as they mingle--palming tiny crusts of bread,

sipping demurely from delicate flutes,

posing in careful sympathy, surprise or judgment--

there I smell the breath that gives them life

and hear but your call across the room.