Here we go again.

This first poem is a continuation of my poem "losses" from the last post. the second is what happens when a recovering Catholic reflects. The third is what happens when a recovering catholic gets drunk.


15. The old man is monkeying around
Under the hood and the sun
and mom
Is reading a book aloud
About a family that adopts a whitetail fawn.
They eventually have to tie pink ribbons
To its antlers
To show the hunters why this animal is unafraid
Why it would be foolish to shoot it
And one day it does not walk into the yard
Out of the dark woods.
Mom pauses and looks out the window into the pines
We hear the wind and our breathing
And the old man’s colorful language
And the ticking of the overheated engine.
Someday we will have a car that is dependable.
That will be a sad day.

16. A loon followed the boat
Watching every cast as if the lure
Were a new animal
It could learn to love
Something
worth building a nest
on a waterlogged stump for
Something
It could greet the sun with
Something
That would not go away.


18. seventeen fell before the invading hordes
And perished in the mud of history
Choking on the blood and bone
Of its shattered existence.
This lack of voice is its power
And its legacy.
A warm blanket covering its sixteen predecessors .
This is its being and its nothingness.

19. the gravel crunches under the tires
As I pull the car into the turn-off
And I hear the gulls screaming from down the bluff.
This dune country holds white and red pines
By their spidery roots
Until the water and wind exposes enough
Of the wooden labyrinth to upend them.
This is the building of the mountains of sand.
The dead and bleached bones of trees
Catching and holding and rising.
I look out past the pines into lake Michigan
And watch the burn of the sun
On the sharp whitecaps that break the deep green horizon.
US-2 will carry me out of the state of my birth
Into the nation of my exile.

20. this snowshoe hare shrieks like a child
For a slaughtered moment.
Redskin potatoes, baby carrots, yellow onions,
Rutabaga, cracked black peppercorns,
A half-dozen large cloves of garlic,
Three-quarters cup of water,
And a single bay leaf,
Will soften the animal’s pain
As its life becomes more life
As its body becomes my body.

21. what if the iceberg were not bigger under the water?
What then would we fear out on the high seas?
The truly serious lack of ice would force
The sailors into stories of giant squid out for the blood
Of the virginal.
That is what the unseen mass of ice would become.
The blood of the pure, innocent, and ignorant.

22. the arm he held her with is no more.
It went missing on a hot june day in the back meadows.
Fields full of alfalfa and clover
And sporadic patches of milkweed
That was grown to fill the life vests
Of soldiers during world war two.
The arm he held her with was torn from him
In a field that saved ten thousand lives
Seventy-years ago.
The man he was is looked for
Everyday
By the woman she has become.

23. tonight I sleep on the floor
Next to a man from cinncinnati
And across from a loud woman
On her way to san diego.
This train stops in cleveland
Not cinncinnati.
I fear for my neighbor.
I always do.






“on being raised knowing a wealthy god”
How many earthworms
have I killed
By opening this ground
To the winter-starved robins?

How many neighborhood cats
have I fed
By starting this garden
And inviting
those orange-bellied birds ?
Everything must eat
And I will thank the dead
While I savor the tomatoes
From this holy place.

This is the suffering of guilt
And the atomic structure of truth.



“zen”
I stole tulips from under beaumont tower for my mother.
They were gifts to the university from the queen of holland.
My mother admired them on her last visit to campus
And our scholars had more than one-hundred thousand.
Fifteen would not be missed.
They were dug up on a warm april evening
And put in a backpack next to a half-empty
Half-full
Fifth of jameson.
The moon showed its full fat face
And lit my efforts.
After I had pilfered the royal goods
I sat beneath the tower
And toasted the moon
and all the queens.
My mother loves those tulips
And the story
Of their origin.
A quality sin i say.

Trains, Writers, A Moving Truck, And One Pissed Off Panda.

I have been out and about quite a bit in the last month. I took my second train escapade to Washington and Philadelphia and found the whole mode of rail travel to be built especially for me. I remember when the Detroit & Mackinac line was still running and I would see those trains come through and think, fairly seriously, about chasing one down and seeing where I would end up. It is likely for the best that I did not act on that impulse because I would have ended up in either Detroit or Mackinac and while both of those places have, relatively speaking, very redeeming qualities they would not have lived up to the romantic notions that I had nurtured.

Rail travel is an excellent catalyst for a romantic. I guessed at the lives of my fellow riders. I imagined the train falling off the tracks in the middle of the Allegheny mountains and into the Allegheny or Monogahela Rivers and floating the rest of the way. I watched trains like those I grew up with pass us by full of cattle, pigs, coal, iron ore, scrap steel, and chemicals I do not even want to guess at. I spoke to a nurse from Baltimore who hated her job and wanted to just stay home and teach her daughter. I spoke to a man who sells skyscrapers to anyone interested in buying one. He was on his way to close a billion dollar sale in Chicago. Apparently that is the general asking price for these imposing monsters of steel and concrete and glass. I watched a domestic dispute over an extremely expensive shooter made of two-parts vodka and one-part gin. This particular drink caused me quite a bit of distress for a while, not from drinking it, but from imagining anyone else drinking it.

Both Union Station in Washington and 30th Street Station in Philadelphia are wonderful pieces of historical architecture. Any of you who know me well can picture the scene: I am standing in the middle of a throng of people staring up at the ceilings of these gorgeous depots trying to figure out the designs and knocking over folks in my own special and clumsy way.

To make a long story short I helped Rachel move her stuff from Philly to DC over the weekend so the initial journey was from South Bend to Washington to Philadelphia to Lederach which is a nice solid twenty-four hours of travel. We spent a full day filling the truck and then had a surprisingly uneventful drive from Lederach back to Washington on I-95. With the help of a half-dozen fine people we were able to unload the truck in one/sixteenth the time it took to fill it. Yay for fine people!!!

Rachel's apartment is in the Mount Pleasant area and just across Rock Creek from the National Zoo which was my commute everyday to the American Writers and Publishers Conference. I saw an elephant playing with a squirrel, a gorilla demolish a pile of snow, and I made a panda angry with my constant questions and comments. Pandas are a bit uppity and do not care to converse all that much. I saw a male lion knock a cub tumbling over some rocks. I watched a tiger watch me and knew I looked delicious. There was much more but instead of telling the stories I would simply suggest that you all get yourselves to a zoo soon and keep your eyes open. Things will happen, as they do, in all kinds of spectacular ways.

Writers are an odd lot. I met some decent people and made some good contacts that I hope to keep working with for a long time. I knocked over Joyce Carol Oates. I heard some lovely poetry and had some strange discussions. I talked to more publishers than I could have even guessed existed. I drank whiskey sours, some good and some bad, in the bar where Langston Hughes used to work and where he passed a couple of his poems to Vachel Lindsay under a glass of wine while serving that cranky Russian. Interestingly I had no idea Hughes had worked there until I got back to South Bend and received a book from the lovely Rachel telling me this bit of literary history. It seems like something that might be shared with writers at a writers conference. I guess not.

I had many excellent walks in Washington with people from many different universities, publishing houses, and by myself, but the best ones were always with Rachel who knows the city well and likes to share her knowledge with me.

All of this said I have been writing, of course, about Washington quite a bit recently. I am thinking of turning it into a one-hundred poem project. Here are the first three. Be well friends.




The washington poems


"epiphanies & epochs"
A moment like that when the sun
Shines as the rain falls

heavy. Or when your mother finds
the porn under the bed

and cannot look you in the face
without laughing

and you know what she is laughing
about because she stole one

and left it on the coffee table next to
a good housekeeping.

There are moments that exist outside of themselves.
Like walking through the national zoo

And watching a one and a half-ton asian elephant
Playing games

With a black phase grey squirrel
And it is easily noticeable

That these two have been friends for
Quite some time.

Your mother would giggle and wink
At this.




“such certainty”
They whitewash the apartments to rid them of their history
But sometimes they forget to patch the holes
And we can see where the wineglass
Hit the wall
After missing the ducking head
During a discussion about healthcare policy
For theoretical people
In maine or texas.

I make up stories about the scratch on the floor
Where a drunken intern for senator so and so
Slid naked on a saddleback chair
All the while trying to not upset the two bottles of malbec
Balanced on the palm of each hand.

The outlet under the bed was broken after both occupants returned from work
With guatemalean fighting cocks under their arms
A strange but not unheard of coincidence
And the birds became indignant
And fought to a feathery death.
The winner dying later in the evening from horrific wounds
Suffered while being cleaned for dinner
The loser expiring after being thrown into the wall
And sticking a spur into
One hundred-twenty volts of pepco.

Did the others discuss cookware?
She was right about what I have said about non-stick surfaces
But I often forget what I say.
No harm done.




"the farmer's kitten and the cooper's hawk"
The police look on
But do nothing
About the man sleeping in a box
On the steps leading to the senate side
Of the capital.
I wonder at their thoughts.
Do they judge or suffer for him?

Likewise there is a cooper’s hawk
In the main reading room of the library of congress.
It is like the one I saw in the barn chasing a tawny kitten
After a third cutting of decepit hay
On a mid-august morning.
It did not seem to want to hurt the tiny thing
Just the chase was enough.

The experts believe this particular raptor
followed a rat or pigeon through an open door.
There is no sign of the vermin.
Experts are known to be wrong.

There is the chance that this hawk saw
A door with shadows
And possibilities within
Like a hopper window
With the curtains blowing into another life unknown
And it just said “fuck it, let us see what we can see.”
And it exercised its rights
Like the guy sleeping in the box.

The police should escort him to the library.
they should let him settle
next to the Gutenberg
that cost as much as a block of rowhouses
in adams-morgan.
it should be his manifest destiny.

Open the doors that I paid for
And let this man
And all the hawks
And rats and pigeons
Tawny kittens and tired farmers
and adams-morgan hipsters
in.

let us all in
and we can see
what we can see
and that should be
just enough.

Back from hiatus.

It has been a hectic, sad, and wonderful time for the last month. I am pleased to say that there are plenty of grand goings on, errr, going on. I have spent some quality time in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Northern Michigan, a train through the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I have drank and danced and played and written and thought and loved and been loved quite nicely over the past bit of time. It makes for difficulties in trying to post updates on this thing. I remain very busy but have decided to pick this all back up and give it another run. I appreciate those of you, my good and kind friends, who care enough to bother me about such things. I wish you all well and will try to be more timely. Again.

Here are some poems I have been working on. They are all still in progress but they have been finished enough so that you can get the gist fairly easily.



“losses”
1. It can be as small as a key
Or a lucky coin, rabbit’s foot, phone number
On a napkin.
It can be the leaves dropping from the maples along the street
Or the opening of the ice on the bay.
Burying a dog
has sometimes brought more suffering than
Burying an angry man
who happened to share my blood.
I remember
the white ponies that burned in the barn
The black bones.
Thinking
This used to be one thing and is now another.
No certainty
as to what was removed
and what gained.

2. This café is going somewhere
And they are holding the secret close.
The view of the bad traffic pattern
will soon be gone.
It has been a comfortable and dark cave
Where many worthy projects were born
friends and lovers laughed and talked
It had done well, as cafes go, successful.
There has always been, to me, confusion
As to what success actually is.

The landlord was angered by the politics
There was no reason given but this is the one inferred
And rightly so.
This place pays for itself
By itself
In a dead sea of commerce and ambition without soul,
Without thought.
It is too real for this particular reality.
All of the good things are.

3. There is a canadian geologist living in sweden
And an american biologist in france,
A Michigan painter in iowa city
A government aid worker from philadelphia
A sad poet in south bend
And this is what travel gets you:
Movement and missing parts.

4. A weathered piece of paper on the light pole
Surrounded by the tacks of former occupants
Shows what may be a dog,
Maybe a cat,
At least something in the mode of a pet
That disappeared
On a wet and grey day a month before
When a man stood in his front doorway
Coffee in hand
looking out at the bouncing pebbles of water
a slight body brushed past his pajama clad leg
Never to be seen again.

5. This song reminds this girl of that boy
And she moves her head back and forth
Without meaning to
Forgetting that she hates him.

6. Under a crooked stack of books
Is found the one
that was read
during he death of the woman
who fed him,
Cleaned him, loved him, built him.
It was about a crazed sea captain
His crew and a terribly angry whale
Of an unnatural color.
Finding the book made the coffins
Explode to the surface
Open
And allow life
Once again.

7. The chickadee looked at the feeder
And was saddened by the fact
That the squirrels had been the earliest
Visitors to this once perfect place.

8. A mechanic of the brain
Told him a lie
About how things would go back
To what they were.
Money was exchanged for bad theories
And the only normalcy to come
Was the setting of the western sun.

9. A thousand words are shown to her
And she acts as if she remembers
But
Actually
Her history is at odds with the facts
And if
In the evening
She could remember her dreams
She would know this.
Her invented nightmares seem to overpower
Her blessed existence.
Nothing gets better.
She will not let it because there is excitement
In the fictional foundations of her pain.
Happiness is
To her
The most boring of trends.
She would even argue
with the smile in the photograph
Just to make sure it never happened again.

10. As the soul left the fox
Did it ask the question:
“have I lived my life the right way?”
Or
just let out that one last reluctant breath
And cease the worries of its hard life?
Neither question
Stops the wind and rain from bringing down the mountains.

11. That thing that made me jump out of bed
Every day and run from moment to moment
Without worry.
That thing that made me smile at the barn cats
Chasing one another through the shadows
In loft that always had the smell
of july.
That thing that made me take someone at their word
And believe that their mean ways were
Simple mistakes.
That time before my brain cracked my skull
And invaded that fine world.
Here I sit knowing exactly what I want to say
And hating it.

12. A woodcut of clean light through
White pine branches
That I disrespected enough
To put a cup on
And one drop of coffee ran slowly down
The side to create a bronze circle
In the sky
Of the setting or rising sun.
It was given away against my wishes
And now I only see this outline of thought.
I sometimes spill coffee
With the hope that I can rebuild
The beauty
That the dark liquid will grow a tree
And the light
Of the most ambiguous of times.

13. When I did not drink
I was a terrible bastard
And the most judgmental fool I knew.
We must never fear the bottle
For it is the best of friends.
It kills the bastard
And throws away the gavel
And makes us all grow up a little.
Leave the keys on the table
Empty a bottle or two
On a walk through the city
Along the river
Or into the trees.
Commune with that which is hidden
By ugly sobriety.

14. the radio was not always this painful.
It used to play merle, waylon, Johnny, willie,
Some paycheck.
Now we have the travesty of modern twang.
An evil imitation without the busted bones and bruises.
Even the steel of the guitar is tempered.









"routine"

A dusting of hoarfrost on the leaves
Of the maples and oaks
The branchs look like glass
And the cold morning wind
Rattles them without tone
In gorgeous perfection.

I am reminded of a late October morning
When I awoke to the same
Scene
In a different play.
I went to water the horses
And on the trough’s thin skin of ice
Stood a single chickadee
Moving along with the breeze.
A tiny black and grey figure skater
Not concerned by the audience
Consisting of a boy and three Belgian’s.
The horses were waiting patiently
For the bird to finish its routine
And I looked to hills ten miles north
Thinking
“I hope I never forget this”
And here
In this city
With sirens and gunshots and angry yells
Exists trees wrapped in frozen water
Making sounds
Like a small bird full of life.
there is a healthy world under the thin skin
of this place.






“two short stories: a critique”
In the Pretrushevskaya story “The Arm”
the pilot tells the colonel not to be concerned
by the appearance of his decrepit plane
the stump of flesh
that used to be his navigator
or the smell of cooked meat.
“I had a small crash on the way here.”
And the colonel accepts this with military grace.

Murakami’s “The Folklore Of Our time”
is resplendent with outward success
smothering inner turmoil.
The pain of popularity is thrown in the face of the judgmental
and ignorant.
The golden boy never gets his angelic other
although she promises herself to him after she becomes betrothed to another.
They try but they fail
look lovely in their suffering.


the end.








"there is no moderation"

On my travels of the morning
The leaves of three trees
Through some happy circumstance
Found their way to me.

The leaf of the cottonwood was large and rough as a farmer’s hand
But a muted yellow that gentled it
Making it sweet and comfortable
As if the farmer were holding his daughter
After some disappointment or heartbreak
That he knew would pass
But felt her pain all the same

The oak leaf
Fell on me like a stone thrown
By some angry youth who knows not the damage that can be done.
It was a crisp brown
The loss of life was the loss of color.
It was an atheist leaf
holding out for existence but not for death.
The end was the end.

Finally a dainty and serrated river birch leaf
That seemed made of copper and gold
Found its way onto my leg.
Of the three
it should have been the quickest to blow away from me
But it seemed anchored
As if it were a part me
It seemed to have a more serious weight than that of the other two.
It was the runt that held firm to be respected.
The small birch leaf
Was the one that made me
Truly happy.
It fought to be.
it made itself important.
It was a small leaf
But it was also a painting
And a book
And many thoughts
Flowing
From the bending tree
In the wind and the sun
Its brothers and sisters floated on the river
To other lives
To the lakes
To the cities
To the everywhere
While this one traveled with me
Telling me its powerful little philosophy
In a quiet but noble voice.