I Easy is the waybut quiet the meaning.My neighbor will not sell me quiet.I can buy that only from the land,only from the maple and the nesting sparrow.Only from the ant carving a tiny tunnel at my feet.I tell my neighbor, Sometimes a field is just a field.But he doesn’t believe me. II What are … Continue reading Development
Category: Poems
There Shall Be One Form of Action
The sea leads to the cork-board sky
of stars linoleum-like and exam-ready.
Collared necks sweat furiously, sweatered
ships twist and creak—the eighth horseman
projects herself abroad, devoid of subject,
matter, and jurisdiction. No one knows
her civil breast, which arches nipple-free; bends
to the core beneath; stretches to heaven above.
Water flows one to each folk. Red ink, red wine.
Everyone is the master of form. His form.
The form we carve ourselves.
The Reward of Daybreak
The sunlight wraps its arms
around the place.
The cats lap milk and
lick themselves clean.
If it is a weekend
time stretches out before you
like a state you've never been in.
Maybe Nebraska, or the Dakotas.
Nothing but rock and wheat and
where you'll be sleeping tonight.
You go to bed old but wake up young.
Hamburger Stand
The slow ember burn of a cigarette night
lurches its way to the time-safe hamburger stand.
It’s just a little red shack napping on the back road
of a small mom’s-youth town. Still, its call reaches
out to the bicentennial highway, lapping at the ears
of those trucking visions of hot popping grease
and fries. Clenched-stomach truckers make
unplanned left-hand turns, beating back the
dirt road, their headlights fanning out
across the once-cut wheat like waves finding
the water-worn beach at midnight. The goddess
of ground beef, big of hip and thigh, sets
her thick elbow on the counter and asks
for several patties thick and sizzling.
We’ve got hungry goateed mouths to feed,
she says. Bikers and tourists kneel and salivate,
holding out their handlebar hands, looking
askance for ketchup and mustard. But the
goddess returns no onion. Her empty-bun
cry repeals all ablutions. It’s just ice-cream,
she says, going pink and cool at the center.
It’s just ice-cream.
Cab Fare
Is there room for you
in this cab? Yes, if you
can straddle the glass
between me and driver.
It is hot and my bare skin
sticks to the vinyl. Even
the windows are sweating.
He says there is not enough
gas for air. He sits up there
snacking on coffee beans and limes.
My door doesn’t work—the
handle busted. My luggage
fills the trunk. The meter keeps
running. At the moment, we’re just
sitting here on the side of the
heat-sheen road wondering what
you’re doing with your thumb
stickin out. But it doesn’t matter.
Climb on in. Tell us where to go.
Ninth Inning Rain
When it slowed I undressed and washed my face.It returned with lightningto tie the game at five.
Reality and Circumstance
There is no reality,
there is only life subject to circumstance.
Reality is how things should be—
it is never how they will be.
I danced once with reality.
I put my hands at her waist
and buried my nose beneath her hair.
Lights flashed,
the jazzband screamed.
She said, It’s circumstance that’s brought us here.
But she wore circumstance like a wreath upon her head.
I wished it a tiara.
I raised high her hand;
spun her away;
closed my eyes;
imagined a night with her,
bejewelling her tiara,
lapping at her jadestones,
shining tight her lapis lazuli.
Too bad, when I opened my eyes,
to find her gone;
the dancefloor emptied;
the jazzband packing up.
Circumstance, the trumpet player,
had taken her home instead.
He bragged to me about it the next day.
I said, Your playing’s flat;
and, She’s more real to me
than ever could she be to you.
Kramer Hair
we’d be goin we’d be goin we’d be goin the stairs, you know? Kramer, you buzzed me strange— that hair of yours? like a scorpion nestled in fedora brim
Black Shoals
You coulda been rich, boy; you coulda owned the mountains.We coulda done business, boy; we coulda hog-tied heaven like rodeo clowns.But you wouldn’t meet my aspen fist, boy; you wouldn’t flirt with the slightest sandbank.You shorted the wrong stock, boy, and got nothin but colors in return.
Desert Drug
Nothing, no effect, which is to say I’m not brilliant.Which is to say that when I pop this jaw my tongue only goes so far.It does not put out fires or fill parking lots. It does not taste basil.The stack of books I burn, the stains of paint I cover with newer, truer stains.And tomorrow do the same, sodden … Continue reading Desert Drug
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