something like forgetting, a dusty let-go

Gone brittle, all over in dust
winter’s long whooped
its last shudder,
its final heaving chill.

On a corner I remembered you
in shades of geometry,
slender lamps slouching
dense yellow heads.

I knew long ago
how to sing out
in years and seasons,
but now you are lost on me,
plural, occasionally mysterious
or very truly passed.

My maps are fatigued,
estranged. They feel
too much
too often.

My maps are blank or
coffee rung. Mountains tower like monsters,
skylines shatter the grid.

I knew once how to cough up words for dirt roads, long slow
veins branched at significant moments, family plots
splintered off then full stop where the hatchet’s dug up,
rotten through wet, sagged across the palms.

I lived long with gravestones,
lived long on this decay
fended thirst with ashes
caked at the base of my gums,
breathed in the over echoed air of the last hymn
stuck on the high noon of a bright stubborn old day.

Weather the Storm (from last spring's final project for poetry workshop. A crude cut and paste job.)

weather the storm
 ghosts carry
 on the spine
 and shoulders,
 weighing their forms
 on skin,
 on flesh 
 binding white bones.
bodies turned
 in the seasons
 to ashes 
to dust
 to dirt 
dug out the ground,
 to make space
 of the solid,
 to hollow a hole
 in the thick 
 of the earth
to scatter 
 the soil
 in chanting 
a final say 
 for the love
 of god. 

weather the storm, 
 as the long scorch 
 of hot months
forgets
 as rain softens 
 barren weeded lands.
 water fills splits 
 in the earth, 
 mends faults 
 in the hard ground 
 while the pour 
 wets forth oases,
atones the cruelty
of a blind sun.
heat condenses,
 extracts damp
 from the fertile
 land, swelters
 a brining wake
 with a turn
of the other
burning cheek. 

columns crumble,
 perish to pillars,
 salts sifted 
 through a sieve 
 of cupped hands.
weather the storm 
 of sirens fallen 
 off facades, torn 
 off steeples
 screamed from 
 a pulpit of knotted wood,
 an assemblage 
 of crooking limbs
 begging alms,
 exacting penance
 in sundering sky.
wings of plastic bag angels 
 rattle in the breath
 mutter crumpled prayers 
 for a turn
 in the wind, a rift
 in the fold.
weather the storm
 when in winter 
 the heart 
 hibernates
 the beat slows
 the body gives,
 cripples in the freeze.
to hold the heart
 in the hands
 pulsing warmth 
 to cracked and dry
 skin
 dripping a trail
 as heat 
 burrows 
holes
 drops on the sidewalk
 sings on 
 the covered street
when another
 for warmth of body
 saves the avalanched self
 the soul
 buried months long
 suspended
months long
 in ice.





weather the storm
 in spring
 for this one,
 the darkest 
 of ever,
 and wet. 
 rain shores
 on the street, 
 shadows pavement
 as a receding tide
 on drying sand.
 in evening 
 if clouds part,
 stars persist 
 through up and outward
 urban light.
 the glow reaches
 wraithed streets
 lunar and delayed
 on the near hour
 and some billion years.
weather the storm
 sleeking manholes,
 pouring forth
from the rivering gutters,
 leaking off awnings.
 soaked rains 
 through seasoned leaves 
 anoint the foreheads 
 of passersby,
carrying through 

on the stop and go
 of traffic splashed
off fallen ponds 
 and straits,
 bodies warm on
 sewer grates,
 a heel catching stubborn
 for a moment 
 missed.
a slip 
in the shoes,
 slackens the step
 stairs slouch 
 in a building’s 
 slummed shadow,
 crumble as fallen rock 
 off the cut side
 of a stone hill
 plywood confines 
decay,
a rot from inside, 
 forgetting 
 the life 
 of a thing.

Slouching Toward

How we left, cleaved our hearts
in two. In my mind
we are pilgrims, dirty and sweating
grit in the eyes, orange clay
in ragged half moons
beneath clawed nail beds.

Bonnets and buckles,
tatters in burlap. Funeral pyres,
wagons. Dust floes, sandy red
apparitions that blinded
our course to the west.

Lately I dream of deserts,
a trek. Boiling sun relentless
in its beating. Hardly in beams
but heavy columns yoked
across our weakened shoulders.

But then it is not so. Our distance,
an ocean, the sea. Steely birds
grind and whir, streak the sky
in earnest. Stomach hollowed
with a drop, a turbulent shudder.

Far below we carry along
a paved course. Outrun
our stumbling ancestors
with their high noons,
their five o’ clocks.

Those ghosts sink once
and over in the soft dunes.
Above I smile at the small hours
to pass before I see you again.

Along the highway we approach
the ends of the earth. Birds bounce
or quiver on half smug power
lines, all a hum and chatter.

I have not seen a road extinguish
on the horizon since the last time
I felt at home.

Frequency

We are fed through power lines
words in a woodchipper
our voices emerge, savagely cut
chunked and piled
on the other side
Filtered through time zones,
sifting exchange rates
placing you in spent hours
spent hours through grey afternoon
a slow twilight and single sky
I have not seen the sea in a million
years, we call it enemy
blame the vast water
the culprit of our crippled we.

I am Pangea longing,
my orphaned shores adrift
distant and jagged
hacked from my breast
stuck in complement
to my shape, skyrose
or deserted, black or tumbled
with an outward tide’s refuse.

then there are the principles of echo
when abyss envelops
your distant voice
when mine turns back,
sharp and how, I wonder,
one learns about the calm
or violence of open water
for that is where our words
and silences hover,
pierced or particled
rising and falling
on the heaving wet lung,
rocked on the turning sea.

Spring

Poor child was strung up by her toes upside down in a tree, taken by a bird mistaken for a bird could have been hatched out of an egg for all she knew bits of shell in her curls her hair slimed in white she’s devoured the yolk but this was an accident it was not meant to be for she did not wear feathers but lace and had not a beak but a few jagged seapearls stuck in her gums, fresh with ridges but there she was, helpless her dress hem up round her ears her frilled socks ripped to tears and tatters hanging up by her toes upside down in a tree.

Sounds all register the interior structures of whatever it is that produces them. A violin filled with concrete will not sound like a normal violin. A saxophone sounds differently from a flute: it is structurally different inside. And above all, the human voice comes from inside the human organism which provides the voice's resonances.

-Walter Ong, Some Psychodynamics of Orality

Houses I Have Known II: Taking Stock

My first home after
mom’s womb was
a matchbox apartment
on the beach in San Diego
there were lemon trees,
a bathroom skylight,
and the rushing ocean

the second place was the site
of my first dream
it was there that I crawled
through the clunking
insides of a clock,
all cogs and springs,
and I looked out across
a bulldozed horizon
a yellow machine
blasting piles of dirt
for no apparent reason

once my grandfather
and his wife visited

my mother said
I like your makeup
my grandfather's wife said,
thanks it’s pancake
and I’ve spent over
a decade trying to figure
if I heard correctly

after that we switched
country sides
it was a yellow duplex
near boston
where I think
there was a miserable Christmas

in the spring we
searched for easter eggs
in the early summer
my father found a rotten one
forgotten months before

I had the chicken pox
and scratched for days
examined my tongue
in the mirror
and tried to pass it on
to my brother

this is where the
circuits fail some

oh yes, we went a town
or two over
moved into a house
that smelled like paint
I put my nose
to the walls I loved it so much

my mother described it as
salmon colored

she exercised
on a Stairmaster
and prayed the rosary
at the same time
I’ll never forget those
heaving Hail Mary’s
the rhythmic Our Father’s
in time with
her flexed calves

My sister told me
what pot was,
my mother and father
screamed
I’m not sure
what was wrong
I remember rolling fruit,
apples and oranges

One day my father
got into his beat up Volkswagon bus
and drove away
to Oregon

there was another yellow house
near Boston on Six Park Avenue
my mother mentioned the address
to everyone
I wasn’t sure why it mattered

I read the Secret Garden
I listened to a 60’s box set
my father sent in the mail
my mother gave us a fish
and we had bunk beds

once she wouldn’t let
me sleep up top she said
if you fall off
we’ll be buying you a casket
and that’s that