Lines

When there seemed no other choice we pulled off I-70 and along the frontage road until it dead-ended next to a field of winter wheat cut to stubble and straddled by transmission towers two hundred feet high striding through the land like something sci-fi searching for humans to enslave.  But it was just the two of us, not even putting up a fight, standing beside the old Volvo and listening to the wind blow through the power lines, the crackle of the humid afternoon air ionizing, charging, and beneath it all the steady coronal hiss like the rasp of grasshoppers in the cheat grass along the road.  The car ticked slowly as it cooled, and when dusk dropped down from the hills, at last you asked if I could feel the ground shiver through the soles of my shoes, feel the ambient electricity along my scalp, or the slightest goddamn arrhythmia in my heart—because if not, you said, leaving the thought unfinished, letting it be carried away with the high wires instead, all the long miles up and over the Rockies and into a million homes where other people who are not us stand in kitchen light and porch light waiting for what comes next, for the end of the line.

(from Clapboard House, 2013)

Envy

The stone wall gives up before it gets to the stile,

petering out into a moraine of rounded river rocks

spreading to either side.  A gate holds to a leaning

post by one rusted iron finger.  It seems to matter

little, though, with nothing to say what was once

held in or out.  In a shallow depression near one grey

stone, a killdeer mother frets and whistles like a wind-up

tin bird before settling on her speckled clutch of four,

her neck and head still bobbing, spy-hopping

aspirationally from stone to stone.

(from Clapboard House, 2013)

Beachcombers

With their little fat fingers

they sift the beach for gifts

of jeweled popweed, opalescent

mussels, a pirate’s haul

of gaudy sea glass in a pail.

Just beyond is the rime

of sallow foam pushed ashore,

a lacy arch of brine licking

harmlessly at their feet, trailing

a line of gleaming crumbs, saporous

as candy.  Here is a land whose

darlings still believe something

can be got for nothing, where

every fish that comes ashore

has coins or miracles in its mouth.

(from Clapboard House, 2013)

Enough

I am coming along well enough.

I have cleared the brush

from the fence line as far

as the river, where I watched

a young hawk diving and coming up

empty on yet another morning

when the frost stayed ‘til noon.

I will set my sights on the rest

of the day, soon enough.

I expect habit will lead to a look

toward the kitchen window, down

the old rows of corn, or at the porch swing

hanging slack in the afternoon.

So I will see to it there is wood

to split and horses to shoe.

Later, when I have made my way

to the bar in town, no one

will say a word.  But someone 
will buy the first round, and others

see the glass stays full.

(from A Clean, Well-lighted Place, 2013)

My Number

I have forgotten my PIN number, forgotten

which anecdotes I have told to whom

and, come to think of it, most of my best stories.

I have no longer read any of the books that lean

against each other now with their dog-ears

and grease stains.  I may have taken my various

once-daily doses several times or not at all. 

The bathtub has long since drained and still

I sit here, blinking, naked as the day I was born.

I remember the way to the trailhead

of the mountain I always said I would climb

when it came to this.  I told myself I would sit

on the peak and face into the sun until it was gone.

In the last light my mind would hold as tightly

as it could to Peter-boy . . . and Jamesie and . . .

the rest, urging them to live wildly happy lives

and not wait as long as I have to stop being afraid—

things I may have told them once or a hundred times before.

(from Oberon, 2013)

Askew

There’s something not quite right today.  Askew.

Not on-kilter.  It’s as if you, all of you,

are pod people now, and no one seems able to tell

but me.  As if one insignificant satellite fell,

so everyone’s GPS calmly sends them just 1.3

degrees off, north-northwest.  Have you jointly

agreed not to notice the vertigo

of this day, how even the mad concerto

of evening traffic is maybe half of one half

step flat?  Because what I see in your quaff

of coffee, your bus stop stare, the insouciance

of that bluetooth laugh, is an ignorance

born, I can only surmise, of a Stepford Wives-

like blind eye, when clearly nothing jives,

nothing about this day is copasetic, nothing

passes the smell test.  Can no one bring

back yesterday, that golden day when a person could

be counted on to tell you where you stood,

before she—or someone very like—would move the fulcrum,

nudge the lucid universe one bubble off plumb?

(from Subtropics, 2013)

Always Expect a Train

Newspapers in yellowed stacks lean

nearly to the floor.  Out the window,

afternoon settles like an old saddle.

Later, your sister and her greasy

husband will sit on the porch

well past their welcome and complain

again about your pot roast

even as they pick it from their teeth.

You phoned the children, Sunday,

only to find that all are quite well—

with health and money enough.

Our trip to Palm Springs is not only

confirmed now but imminent.  Yesterday,

I smiled to see the new buds of yellow

Dream Come Trues but with any luck,

caught myself in time.

(Western Humanities Review, 2012)

Vacation Reel

A hint of yellow around every edge

and white scratches like shooting stars

but my god, you, stepping out of our ’56 Ford

and onto the beach, you slipping out of your shoes,

the wind filling your hair and there

from behind your skirt a little girl with matching face,

just-walking, falling to the sand, brushing off

and running crying from the waves

and into your arms to be twirled high

in the air, your lips saying look, look

at daddy but mostly the way you looked at me,

then, as if to say, see what you’ve done, and what’s more

if you’re good we’ll do it again just maybe

and oh I was very very good.

And did you know at the time—does anyone

know?—that this would be your best time,

that your smile would never again be so true,

those legs, flashing in and out of sight,

never so inviting, so quick to dance, this 8-millimeter

life now swimming in amber would taste

the sweeter year after year even as and because

we would so soon stop believing in such summers,

flickers of doubt finding their way

into your eyes, captured by a single frame or two

but all the more painful to watch now

for all your trying then, your impossibly red lips

and bleached-out hands blowing kisses

willy-nilly into the wind?

Here

It’s not so much a heaviness,

the oppressive weight of wet wool;

instead, it’s as though my molecules

are moving outward from the center,

mimicking the universal flight

from the Big Bang—though I hear

how grandiose that sounds.

It’s just that the edges become indistinct

and you may begin to see the busy streetlife

right through me, in patches

of color and noise and volition.  And soon

I am mixing with the pollen of elms,

the billion billion motes of skin cells

catching fire in the afternoon.

So when I tell you it is almost painful

to see that precariously pregnant young woman

climb the steps to her brownstone, hear

the cans of olives and jars of ragu

clatter and shatter against the wrought iron

because some idiot failed to double-bag,

and that now here I am stooping to help,

here I am cursing bag boys the world round, insisting

that she (Antonia) sit; when I tell you I can actually feel

my joints re-knitting, cells lining up again

with their proper organelles, feel gravity

pulling on these coalescing and corporeal tissues—

you will understand, perhaps, that I am not altogether

happy to be back, but I am here.

(from New Ohio Review, 2009)

Spots

Everyone just calls me Tom.  It’s late afternoon

so the CNA pushes me into my spot

in the dayroom, facing away from the television,

and they tie dishtowels around our necks

because dinner will be here soon.  Not soon enough

for that guy with the wrinkled tattoos, in his spot

across the room, who always yells for his food

until the nurses say, like they always do,

they’ll bring it when they bring it. 

And not before this girl from hospice

with the big red heart on her badge asks

if she can visit with me, maybe read a book, do I like to read. 

The best I can do now is mumble “pilots,”

meaning I wouldn’t mind hearing about the days

and the planes I used to fly in—navy fighter, WWII,

San Francisco—but she only gets “pirates”

from my muttering and finds a battered Treasure Island

on the shelf somewhere and starts in, page after page

—doing all the voices, too— probably imagining

she’s all but allowed me to smell the sea air, feel

like a kid again.  But this half smile is only

me waiting for it to stop, wondering

if dinner will come soon and when

will they let me sleep and could I

lift my arms to strangle her?

(Pebble Lake Review, 2006)

Lines

She said she had seen me in church

clear as day, dressed in my best suit,

and she was sure it was a sign

I would be coming back soon,

sitting next to her in the pew again.

So I said, “No, mom, that vision

is more about you than me,” and she,

after a quiet minute picking at her sleeve,

dispassionately, like this was a blind date

gone wrong, “Then I guess we have

nothing more to talk about.”

So there it is.  That’s the line

you always wonder about, the one

that begins to fray as soon as the DNA

has played itself out, the real crack

that ends up breaking her back. 

But what had we ever had to talk about,

really?  She didn’t get Narnia or Macbeth

or divorce, and I was mystified by Mormons

and Reader’s Digest and the little smile on her face

all the way through Cops.

For another ten years I would praise

her Christmas hams and cherry tortes

and she would try to set me up

with the nice receptionist at her doctor’s office,

and though we didn’t say it—would never speak

of it again—both of us knew

something had broken.  It would show up

in her eyes, occasionally, then more and more

until some Sunday visit, sitting next to her

by the dayroom window, it becomes clear that look

will never leave—the one that says you could be,

you are, any stranger off any street—and that now,

young man, one warm cup of Postum

and the TV Guide will entirely suffice.

(from Pebble Lake Review, 2006)

Schrodinger's Wife

The first time Galileo’s figures came out wrong—or right—

the morning after that first night when the truth

in planetary orbits he has tracked across the sky for months

dawns on him like the irresistible phases of the moon

so that walking out the door and into the bustling marketplace

the very earth shifts beneath his feet, he can no longer look his neighbors

in the eye, and there seems no place to hide

from the sun—something like that.  I know,

I know: wave-particle duality; the bending of space and time; uncertainty.

Still, I was not entirely naïve, having dealt in due course with both gravity

and God, so how did I not see it coming—more,

how did I not imagine, knowing my own perfidious, quantum soul

that you would have it in you, too?  And how futile my wish

to know your position and your speed—only a fool would ask

so much.  As it turns out, not only had others observed you leaving

your hypothetical box, but they will swear you were happy, and not alone.

(Green Mountains Review, 2005)

Raccoons in the Chimney

I noticed that the raccoons in the chimney

responded to Homer Simpson’s voice.

Before I could determine, though,

whether they were frightened or pleased to hear

predator or kin, or just annoyed by the sound—

and you know I would have, too; I was all set

to go Discovery Channel on them, to run elaborate experiments

involving a Skinner box, amplitude modulation,

t-test analyses, and maybe saliva—the phone rang

And it was my son.  Which was a little weird

because he hardly ever calls anymore.

The phone calls stopped about the same time

he announced he wouldn’t be able to come down much

anymore, at least not regularly like he had, every other weekend

for fifteen years.  It’s not like I didn’t understand—hell,

what did I think of my father, at his age?

He has a girlfriend, a job and a band, for chrissakes. 

Oh, it was to tell me about a new gig

That he phoned, a real gig, he called it, and sure

I’ll be there, I said, why wouldn’t I? you know I’m a rocker

from way back.  By the time I got back to the TV, however,

the raccoons had gone quiet, even though Homer had Bart

in a chokehold and was yelling at him like it was the end of the world. So perhaps there’s nothing to it.

(Green Mountains Review, 2005)

The Razing

After all this time, it should not have been a surprise;

it was, after all, unlivable.

Parts of the roof had given up any pretense

of shelter, and the world before the house

was beginning to show through.  Still,

I could not have imagined that thirty years

of life would endure so poorly, that ghosts

would already stare from empty sockets

and every wall breathe with every wind

like some discarded Kenmore box, both ends broken through.

And now it was coming down.

When I’d heard, I expected the gothic, towering crane,

that it would take some apocalyptic wrecking ball

to make such an end, this vivisection and monocide.

Reality made do with one yellow bulldozer—

looking especially bright now that morning was here

and it could in earnest begin the few swipes

from front lawn to back, dismembering perennials

lying in riotous beds beneath each southern window—

and a rust-pocked truck to haul it off.

Before noon, the other men unpacked sandwiches by the truck

and stomped the dust from their boots; good enough men,

they spoke in quiet monotone—seeing me

picking through limp strands of re-bar, mock oak

paneling, porcelain shards—of the Dodgers, perhaps, or women

they had known, the sleeker condos that would start here

then snake along the wood’s edge as far as the river.

The elms seemed larger now with no house for comparison;

what sun came through played tricks with these open rooms

where shadows danced like half-remembered dreams.

Near the old fireplace site the glint of glass

was only a piece of photograph frame that cut my hand

neatly across the palm.  It would bleed until I sucked it clean.

(BYU Studies, 1993)