THE RULE YOU DO NOT BREAK

You offer water
always in the desert,
water to anyone who walks,

water to every creature. Walk
even for one hour without water
and you begin to become desert,

every cell inside you, desert.
If you walk
here without water

your body soon waters the desert. Your bones walk.

 

 In honor of Scott Warren and No Más Muertes

 

 

THE MOON SHINES EQUALLY

It’s not a bad night for the moon.
The moon has a place to live.
Nobody took its kids away.
The moon didn’t lose
its job. The moon doesn’t
skip meals so its kids can eat.

The moon put itself through college.
Nobody can take that away.
If it wanted, the moon could secure
a second mortgage. The moon’s daughters
are not addicts, its sons
not in prison.

The moon watches
a new hatch of rattlesnakes.
Moonlit, they rise
from cold earth
hated
though they do not know

they are hated.  Like us
they want the best they can
to live.  The moon promises them
no protection.  It gives what it has
to give—second-hand wavery
light full of longing.

 

BETWEEN BREAKUP AND FREEZEUP

Afternoons the air gets bumpier, so light sport pilots take off early.  Brown now, the tannin-rich river leads to turbid waters choked with rock flour ground by glaciers.  Cow moose lead gangly offspring to kneel and drink.  Downstream, salmon flip, heading toward redds where they began.  Eggs release, clouds of milt settle over.  Five-toed paws, those claws, meander pigeon-toed into taiga.  Golden, the fur of grizzlies this far north.  How sunlight glints off fur as they graze.  Intestines soak up protein-rich grasses, appetizers for energy till they can hunt.  June days without end, nights without darkness.  Kestrel wingbeats, hovering.  Lupine tall enough to hide us mask eroded banks.  Mouths always open, lampreys dive into mud.  No one is here to hear the beaver-gnawed tree fall.  Osprey, unconcerned, scan from on high, hesitate… Plunge!  Quick work, the grayling still flapping, the osprey’s wings wide.  Remember the aurora?  Still there, still circling—just not ours in summer.  Take comfort in thimbleberries, salmonberries, lingonberries, blueberries to share with the bears.  Under us all the rooted world turns.  Vespers soon enough, evening soon enough.  Wildness inside us still.  Xylem pulsing root to leaf.  Years in each moment, decades, centuries.  Zydeco washboard, this road that leads us.

 

The Ox and Lamb Kept Time

Little Drummer Boy

And so it came to pass in those days
that the animals were musical.

Their cloven hooves, caked hard in mud and waste,
could thump a hollow sound at a steady pace
on the barn floor, muted in straw.

They never rushed, never dragged
against the steady progress of their beat,
which was music to the heavens.

It was only human
that the animals’ minders and tenders
–shepherds, stable boys—

thought they themselves played the principle instruments,
whether pipes in the field, or the drum of a child
in a song taken to be true.

For the humans in those times, as now,
saw themselves at the celestial center,
a kingdom that rules the kingdom of beasts.

Angels bearing gifts on harps and strings,
may or may not have been present in the scene
depending on your level of belief.

But the lambs and the oxen?  They are unquestionable,
beyond symbol, beyond faith.
It was a barn; we know they were there,

keeping time steady, inalterable,
out of reach of human hands
that shaped and misshaped the very planet

to which all children are born, holy or not,
on that night, or any other.

The carols are wrong.  It is the flocks
that kept watch by night,
who by instinct maybe felt a pulse we cannot feel,

and by their presence tell us
we are not the masters.

Security Question: What Was the Make of Your First Vehicle?

When I was 24, my father insisted it was time I finally owned a car.  He gave me his sky blue Ford LTD, the car my mother had driven to work to be greeted each morning by a young colleague who hailed, “Look, here she comes in the Queen Mary.”  Now, nine years of miles under its frayed belts, its old hoses were spilling their essence on expressways miles from home, leaving me at the mercy of small town mechanics with big dreams.

With a travelling job, it was time I owned a used car I’d bought myself.  I carshopped with Dad, who knew the ropes, and we ended up at a dealer, an uncle of a man my father knew slightly at work.  And there it was: a Ford LTD, the next year’s model from the one he’d given me, or maybe the year after that.  Different color–Executive Tan–but ambien online australia same white vinyl top.  They’d changed the chrome, Dad pointed out.

The next day I drove home by myself in a used Toyota Corolla, forest green, five on the floor.  Its engine hummed like a happy aircraft.  I drove it past the years, until I saw road beneath the floorboard, and then more.

But that day I drove it off the lot, to my father’s home now, my father said nothing.  No Jap jokes, no “less car more money,” no worry about the scant availability of parts.  That was wisdom, perhaps love.

So how should this poem end?
With the paragraph preceding?
Or with another leading
down another road,
the world changed again
in color, size, and pace
and I am that man standing old,
bemused, unminded in the driveway,
without sons or their complications
to temper my regret?  My dismay
at watching all the different models race
to their different, newer destinations?

 

TWO SENTIMENTS

 Resisting Irony

Oh heart, if I passed you on the street you would not stop
and neither would I.  I would
note your bruised clothes, the slow
movements pulsing from your chin and hairline,
your failing red. But I would not
offer alms or a warm hand.  Is this
cowardice?  Fear of getting involved?   Perhaps
I would meet your glance only at the moment we passed
–to profess my small music, which is sympathy.

But I would speak only to myself: there but by grace
goes some organ or appendage more necessary,
like the stomach or the tired feet.

Against Depression

Long live red pick-up trucks and fancy dancing,
hot tips, barbecued ribs, 1950s sci-fi flicks,
bobble head afternoons and out of the box bantering.

Here’s to the top of the batting order,
drinking from the bottle, losing battles,
getting better.   You can’t win

if you don’t enter!
But then you can’t win anyway, so enter-
tain the idea of going up and up and up,

trees taking measure of your hips then your heels
like a peasant flying through Chagal,
his sky turning from village blue

to the color of the winning ticket
in the lottery of love (which is love).
Here’s to all of the above.  You can’t have

everything, but if you don’t need anything
you’re part way there.  Nothing
will suffice, as one poet said,

and if your idea of luxury is on the level
of northern Wisconsin
you can smile

till the cows come home.
Bid them welcome,
they always do.

 

Approach

We rolled on metal wheels
hungry for the next inch of rail,
the next mile on the map,
surging towards a jagged seam of earth
through which we would have to pass,
a dark tear against royal blue sky
made as if scissors weren’t available.

The juncture stretched motionless
hanging above the edge of the gold-spun prairie carpet
along the entire horizon,
an event line beyond sight,
all of it crouching as it waited in perfect stillness
against our insistent momentum.

It pulled all eyes from the heat-dry grass
outside the train window, pulled eyes
from silvery duck ponds reflecting sun and sky,
endless prairie and mirrors submitting to something greater.
Gaining size and resolution as we were pulled towards it,
indefinite shadows resolved into massive peaks,
somber gray and streaked with white snow
down worry lines and crevices,
mountains between sky and earth
aged in that movie-star grace,
silvered with wisdom
and shrouded below
with greater shadows that robed the sides
holding mystery as long as possible
until shifting clouds took over.

Even from behind the window
the vow of silence could be felt,
all thought given to reverence,
as if it was an approach to a holy temple.
Foot-soldier hills warded the final miles
and outside, perhaps unseen,
but surely there as guide
Raven was winging alongside the train.

 

 

Unnatural movements through natural places

Water fowl busked in the shallow water,
poked
shining blue and green feather heads
out of brown reeds,
but we moved too quickly
to toss them money for their performance,
thinking all things are for us.

Clouds billboard the sky,
advertisements for coming weather
and casting durable shadows
over rough cut hillsides,
decorated only infrequently by sparse grass
and gravel roads
bisecting the view.

It is unseen but there must be
a moving wind
causing the struggle of birds
flapping in the air,
finding they had no movement
except to travel one direction.

With us.

Too bad for them, but that is why
they now busk for their dinner,
I guess.

 

 

Message

White feather
incarcerated by a strand
of once-empty spider web,
now a spinning pinwheel
in deepening dusk winds,
tapping a percussive backing
to evening birds
stretching last vocal chords
before bed, undertones
to the neighbor’s arguments
through an open window.

The wind speaks suddenly,
a Pentecostal tongue slipping
from feather to ear,
about a change of weather.

 

 

Watering

It doesn’t have to be morning, I used to say. Or even
Every day. But now it’s three whole months at home again

And nothing but aching for Mexico, where

No matter the mundane tasks—an Olympus of
Correspondence to conquer, laundry that had to be hung

During a break in the storm—

I once could mount steep wooden stairs to a high-peaked loft
Under a palm-thatched, jungle-palapa roof—

Loft which was my sacred space:

Sounds of large wings flapping, unseen, over my head
Sacred as that one blue stained-glass window over the altar

Which so many years ago carried me high above every

Long, long sermon.  Sacred: that one single
Chord upon which all of Bach’s

B Minor Mass revolves, the polar star, long scarves of Northern lights

Swaying, twisting, green streaks
Fading to white, dancing

Across the whole dark sky over my head, turned up

In wonder—and words
I thought were gone forever

Would always return, though slowly,

The way the first
Tentative birds greet the dawn:  Mockingbird,

Kiskadee, Great-Tailed Grackle straggling in and

Then the chorus: what we learn to sleep through
When we need to, what we forget

Will be right there, come dawn, come bedtime, come

Whatever time and place will
Open us up to just

One, small moment of radiance, where

The sacred resides, and anything can happen – like memories
Winging Their way to my fingertips, shimmering

Flashes of birds in the jungle— like

The path through these words, which took three
Long months to appear, and came to me here, at home, in my own

Patio garden, late last evening, during the heat wave, watering.

Awakened Too Early, I Consider the Nature of Beauty

Again this morning the same Tropical Mockingbird (in-between
flitting from branch to branch, gulping down berries) pours out

non-stop every tune its DNA-programmed brain can sing:

trills of warblers, trills of canaries, house finch tremolos,
coloraturas of house wrens and even

birds who never venture this far south:  heavenly solos

that could be taken for glad
tidings—Look! The sun!—that could be brave

refusals to echo my own despair of a world headed

down the path of destruction:  bird
who only yesterday chased away the larger, fatter,

yellow-bellied Kiskadee, claiming

all these thousands of berries for its very own, though clearly
no bird stomach could have that much room.  Cruel

bird, whose California cousin I once watched

peck to death a nest of newly-hatched mourning doves,
then skedaddle. How

can a bird who sings with the voices of cherubim

be so horrible? This
I ponder, though I know better:

beauty and goodness are not always on the same team.

Bless this bird who has no concept of savagery.
Bless each holy interlude of my forgetting.

Poem Ending with an Adaptation of a Line by William Stafford

Red sun in the morning, but I’m on land, drifting,
drifting, and only the nearby owl cries “sailors’ warning,”
if that’s what it is and not a call for celebration. My choice,
I’ve been told, and yes: so many daily wonders

to choose from. To walk to the rocky edge of the sea
to greet the dawn, to walk the narrow, packed dirt road
through a jungle just now waking, a chorus of birds,
to be able to walk at all, to snorkel, to be

right here, where I’m working
hard at being alert, to letting myself fully accept each
and every invitation. But call to me as it will, the world
receives not my full attention, my mind wanders

from one undone task to another, guilt nibbles
the edges of joy that used to be mine, all the while
I’m putting on walking shoes, never expecting,
in the stillness rising from the very depths of my being,

where my beloved, my anchor, resides, these words,
gentle, as he was, and firm:
“You’re doing just what you should.”
The whole wide world pours in.

Murmurs

Gone, our friend,
though now whispers
to keep him in

good standing. He fought it—
the murmur—

from the start, ran
long distance, track.
What about the time, though,

in his forties
he pushed too far, almost completely

left us— that heart of his
pressed harder than any of us
knew? Woke in—

was it a foreign hospital?—
with his partner bedside,

on either side of her
others— he’d discreetly continued with—
also responding. Unplanned,

then, someone in our clan
saying, “Get out. That’s right

out of a clichéd movie. Never
happened.” Just released
again: after that, when living,

he really left us. And lived alone.
At his worst? Or with?

Oh funerals, weddings,
theaters, don’t we all go to entertain
others’ weaknesses

to be with our own? Now showing,
shouldn’t we have seen it

from the beginning— that obsession,
his first love?
But who wasn’t absorbed

with coupling at that time? And now, taken back
to that age, resorting

to one summer day; from that porch
shadows playing, the mottled lawn sighs.
Oh, that cottage on the lake of his. His

out-of-town girlfriend there. Everyone
was. She disappeared

into the bathroom to slip
into a two-piece bathing suit. No lock
on the bathroom door,

she changed in the dark.
Like our friend. We didn’t know

who was in there. One of us
stuck his hand in the door
left open a crack,

reached for the string—
we all knew as weighted

by a miniature anchor—
to pull on the light—
and touched her breast. Twice.

Because he couldn’t believe what happened.
Or because he could.

Intellect; Our Friend   

leaving town for good
for the city
where feral-growing vines went
’round and ’round and ’round
choking the staked-
to-hold-it-up spare poplar tree
of knowledge next to a parking meter for how long
did our friend feed stiff company with postulations like “Fog
always fog if so never really lifting” so never was that is
never existed only acted to fit
and like him came away with?
fog is fitting
and no intellectual pursuit really
seeing people in the fog first
just hearing them walking in it
like they did back home
but in the city visible offline institutions
like Facebook or leaders like Daniel Ortega
as revolutions moving people at their edges
but circling back to first take care of their own
fitting he came away with anxious anticipation of what
others were going to say—
“You’re so absolute. What about the balance of
selfless and noble pursuits which helped humankind?”— and left—
our friend?—
before they asked finally moved
as far as we knew
back to another small town
for just plain, simple words as he remembered
which they weren’t now
more than townspeople as emptied chambers
of commerce working too hard at attracting people by letting
the world know their town would take care of more than just their own
would not be controlled by could not
live in fear of Facebooks or Ortegas would remain open
and just to show it no one
ever locked their doors—  world welcome if
so how come we never found out everyone like our friend gone to the city then gone back
someplace close to home never really moved
till night when no one in their homes our friend turned feral broke in
though breaking totally unnecessary— the doors unlocked—
broke in anyway had to
bust and unscrew
and prying ruin why
a lot of beautiful doors
intellectually speaking
our friend no longer inquiring
and after he broke in stealing nothing just disturbed things and that felt cozy
for a couple of seconds till
What about the person living in this house that poor person now
would never again convince himself
that whoever broke in wasn’t still in his house our friend
couldn’t stand in it any longer so moved farther out
to live off the gird with his dyslexic sister she after all said it left her whole life full
of incredible notions
her whole life unemployable till she’d landed
on a hybrid cultivation of black and white one variety of gray flower called cushion bush
which looked like dining jacket buttons grown for
distinguishing matters as she advertised
not distinguished occasions
but she also had life-threatening allergies
at pollination peak she got dizzy collapsed
almost died at the foot of her flowers
but as far as any ideas went
that was her best yet
she could no longer be near them
and while she recuperated her brother our friend
more than ever
couldn’t waste time
drove those flowers down to the superhighway
to one side and then the other side either side
people on their way country to city or city to country stopped
and he handed them gray bouquets
out of five gallon buckets full of water everyone thought they were left over from
a wedding or a funeral
and maybe they were
and maybe they weren’t
but nobody asked
they were free weren’t they?

From Rachel Carson to Paul Bunyan; the Stranger Camps        

Spring, something deep in the brains of the people in the little town said,
and their winter-pinched shoulders eased down,
away from their ears to allow bird song in,
but there were few birds, so people’s shoulders came down
but went back up again. So shoulders as headphones
and faces as if hearing new music but disliking it,
and mouths mouthing, “Somewhere deep in the woods”—
though there were no woods anymore—
“the stranger camps.” As that story went,
at night the stranger kept stealing into the completely exposed town
but could not be located.
“Where did that strange bird come from?” people continued,
with their shoulders up, their arms, as if wings
coming out of their ears filled with so many threatening words
that they unfamiliar-ized, “He’s scary.” But once a year that changed
to “The smelt are running!” Though fish couldn’t run, finally,
many troubling days ran into The one night
men and boys rushed out of town to net smelt. For pickling,
the life a head, men and boys still forged the cold pour
of the lake’s tributaries, trying,
as the men said, to keep to something,
one constant, regularity, though the air lacked the funk and willow and spunk enough
to make the nostrils flare. However,
among those men was an old-timer with very broad shoulders,
shoulders so broad and heavy that they never went up like everyone else’s,
so large that the rest of him falling below his shoulders,
navigating the rapidly shifting world below,
looked more like clothes hung on a line,
when there’d been wind. Flap was his name.
Flap paid attention to nothing stranger
than his own loss of sleep, when there was time,
when that’s all there was to deal with,
along with his own struggle to find words in his head
disappearing— no matter what unnamable season—
making it impossible to push against his own inevitable,
if the inevitable already here. “Oh never
mind,” is how he put it,
though getting harder to do. So Flap
made damn sure – as he was apt to say – “Just make damn sure” –
that he was never left behind,
left out of the smelting and pickling.
And someone always pickled him up,
brought him along for his damn sure-ness.
He was damn sure that he could still carry a net
and tip the lantern to help the young
see into the dark water in which they stood,
find the pool where the few smelt spawned,
when that’s what it had always been, he said,
a few smelt upstream circling, mating,
staring face-to-face as if seated around a table playing cards.
“Deal!” That’s what the men and boys smelting in the creeks heard
that night, all night – “Deal.” It cut through the bad music,
punctuated the shortened reach of their arms.
“Flap,” they said, “Come on,” but then Flap jumped
too quickly and scattered what few smelt there were.
“There they are,” Flap said, “and there they go.”
“Oh, Flap,” they said, and flew off for a while,
but came back with new, possibly new locations
for the stranger.