there's got to be more below the surface
Somedays I am here
more than most:
Thin flesh over fragile bones,
unable to hold a thought
from dream, I wander
from room to room
metaphorically lost
in a house I once knew.
My hand on a window,
I feel the winter sun
briefly at my fingertips,
before the shadow falls
between the bare branches
lightly laced in ice.
(September 30, 2022)
the sadness grew
its tendrils
through the rooms
of their house
casually
laconically
until
it touched
and troubled
their lives
staining all
in a yellowish
brown smudge
as if an old
mattress
tossed to the side
of an abandoned
dirt road
(September 27, 2022)
Here we are
at last, lost,
wondering what’s next?
Desperate for a redemption
to justify
our petty striving,
we sacrifice our souls
for a future
we will never see.
While the present vanishes,
a silent effect
to an unvoiced cause,
the gate clicks
closed
on its own.
(September 19, 2022)
The rough stones, I stack
in a circle around me,
slowly wear the skin from
my fingers until they bleed.
Nearby, but far enough,
you too build your circle
mixing traces of blood
into the wet mortar.
This is how we live:
each day we wait—
for a new excuse
to slowly bleed out,
then lay the last stone
of our sarcophagus.
(September 19, 2022)
to eviscerate
all that could have been
and all that there was
each day since birth’s cry
to worry the wound
probing the center
as a bee a rose
deeper then deeper
to pin the skin back
exposing the flesh
as if broken dreams
to prurient eyes
to recoil in fear
until a last breath
rises from dry lips
as a final kiss
(September8, 2022)
Each day that summer as I walked home from concentrated classes at the University (Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Berkeley all in six weeks), I would wave to an old woman who sat on the porch of her disheveled house drinking coffee, I assumed. Each day for a couple of seconds, we would affirm each other’s existence in the other’s life. One day she called out to me, she wanted my help with something. I hesitated — for I had places to go, people to meet all afternoon. I was afraid she would take more time than I had to give. After I negotiated her neglected front lawn, she held out an old alarm clock, “It’s broken,” she said, “I don’t know what the time is anymore.” I took the clock from her crumpled hands, turned the key a few times, and it started to tick loudly. She thanked me, and I went on my way. The next day and the day after that for the rest of the summer, I never saw her again. Although, now and then, for the last forty years, I think of her, her clock, and the time she took that day.
(September 5, 2022)
Pattern’s traces, worn through
repetition, call from dance’s edge;
where shadows pulse like breath,
and flicker leaves against the sky.
I hear only the sharper echoes,
of the little dog at my heals,
whose yips and growls cut past
the surf’s surge far below, but not
the curved contours cloistered
closer to my heart. I am a fool
to trust so blindly in a god,
who allows me to languish
in faith’s certainty, as if
cowardice could protect me
from the final fragile shattering.
The bits and shards scattered
along the broken grounds are
difficult to winnow. I become lost
in a melodramatic reverie
where each memory excavates
a self-abnegation usually reserved
for saints confessing their silent sins.
(September 4, 2022)
Having returned a cow
with my horns clipped,
I chew my straw sardonically,
as my sad-brown eyes survey
the undulant fields.
The cow herd pats my neck,
looks across the open field,
and asks me, a mere cow,
with a casual disregard,
“What’s this?” then walks away.
I have no language to unlock
this moment from time now.
Each song ends with desire,
a flutter of a solitary bird
falling from a tree.
(August 10, 2022)
I crawled to earth
gasping for air;
I am no more now
than who I once was.
I’ve maintained myself
in memory’s traces,
tucked between the hours
and the tired minutes.
Centuries passed slowly,
like summer afternoon
shadows thicken over
slovenly trimmed lawns.
(August 6, 2022)
to throw into the fire
the better part of you
your heart as sacrifice
to the life desired
secure in the arms
of your clarity
like a child held
tight against the night
secure no danger lurks
beyond the fire’s edge
where the shadows flicker
with insidious pleasure
(August 4, 2022)
My voices echo within a labyrinth.
Scraps of some other’s stories without form
return as someone else’s dark whispers
where all our monsters are of my making.
My lies breathe wetly in the dark where
I take up my veins like a woolen skein
to braid these lonely secrets from my heart
to some broken cross I drag though the night.
There are not any guides to trace the way,
no straight lines to unravel obliquely
as if some kind of redemption were there
waiting for love and forgiveness for all.
Hope is the final lie, the last true lie:
the sun breaks over the trees without us.
The fences were in need,
as always, of repair,
not mended like Frost’s,
but more of a courtesy
to recognize an accord
with a tone of enmity
slipped in like mortar,
or a knife beneath bone,
as an acknowledgement
of a division where X
does not equal Y,
even in the abstract.
(July 27, 2022)
Late at night when you cannot sleep
and you step silently through the house;
or lost in thought driving to work
and you do not notice your normal exit,
then the niggling whispers gain a clarity
that cannot be partitioned or pardoned.
No little boxes filled with secrets to be
placed locked in other larger boxes
appear to safely hide your face within.
When all your variant stories disentangle,
and fall away like petals on a dying rose,
how do you begin to confess the lies
manifested through accidental negligence?
How do you begin to open the sarcophagus
you have for so long hidden within? How do
you even begin to begin to live again?
(July 23, 2022)
There is no truth to face;
these circles are closed and reflexive.
War is endless: we walk blindly
through one blooded field or another.
Nothing matters. Her one endless song
is too full of flowers and mockery.
*
I float between sleep
and dreams of sleep.
With no other joys,
no other pleasures,
I sink beneath
waves of dry tears.
(July 18, 2022)
I talked too much, saying little.
Then a decade of unbroken silence
followed without your laughter.
Yet, I still felt the silent trace
of your fingertips along the length
of my bare arm, as you spoke.
Our intentions were never clear.
Then we left, each to our ways;
and, I became a ghost to you.
(July 10, 2022)
Summoned from Shaman Mountain
as his lover for the night, she steps
lightly from dream rising on waves
surging from a storm. The flowers
give way beneath the plum tree’s
branches; and, the scent of narcissus
lingers like the moon before the dawn,
as she wraps her thighs around his hips.
(July 7, 2022)
“If I knew what I was doing, I’d be doing it right now…”
—Radney Foster
Another morning sun trickles
through the cottonwoods. Today,
I have time to write. Instead,
I watch the cardinal pair twitter
from branch to branch, fluttering
like drunken dancers in love.
I have nothing to say; yet, today
that is enough. The cottonwoods
slowly clatter in the soft breeze,
while the grey cat purrs at my feet.
(July 1, 2022)
Each day I shuffle about the house
lost within the duties of the day.
I wonder: all these poets with their advice
full of absolutes and disdain for others—
when do they find time to write;
to sit alone with their words;
to scrape the burnt rice from the pan?
(June 30, 2022)
In the early evening silence,
cicadas and doves, hidden
in the trees, whoo and trill,
as the sprinkler fans the grass
with artificial rain.
This is enough,
as the sun tips the tops
of the tallest trees
with a light-green fire
before it sets behind the hills.
(June 24, 2022)
While degrees
prove persistence
more than
knowledge gained,
one cannot pretend
through screams
and violence
to know anything.
If one attends
to each breath
and stumble along
the garden path,
one’s practice should be
enough; yet, life
disguises wisdom
in each rose’s bloom.
(June 23, 2022)
The ghosts enter my dreams again. They dislike the arrangement of the furniture. So, they move the leather couch to the opposite wall, reset the clock, close all the doors, open all the windows, letting bugs get in, and finally turn off all the lights except the one over the kitchen table, which glows eerily as if in a noir movie from the 1950’s. I have to admit the new arrangement of the room makes for a better flow overall, yet something is still wrong. Although I see all of this, I am not there. I am somewhere else, disconnected from my life like a mirror. I try to speak, but the words come out backwards, the syntax jumbled and slurred. The ghosts look perplexed, but as an act of condescension, they don’t pay any attention to me. They serve themselves tea from a fine china teapot into matching china cups. They speak to each other nonchalantly, about memories I recognize as mine, but do not recall well enough to contradict the revisions they are making. After I wake, and then through the rest of the day as I wonder about the house, I pick up scraps of what was said, and try ineffectually to sew my desires back together as if they were a patch work quilt collectively stitched on a Sunday afternoon over gossip and prayers. Yet, something is missing: I think it might be me.
(June 18, 2022)
Together we drank and sang
into the night; we were true
to ourselves and each other.
Today, even the half-hearted
are cut down by the heartless.
What chance did our song have?
Tonight in the distance,
I hear a solitary flute player.
I think of you, and weep.
(June 17, 2022)
Which side of an equation
creates the balance?
A young student struggles
with algebra’s abstractions.
A butterfly floats obliviously
over a barbed-wire fence.
A peasant carries buckets of manure
balanced on a pole across his shoulder.
Which part of you is you,
and which part is not me?
(June 16, 2022)
The light fades again
across the mountains
outside the window
above his desk
where he reads
the old masters.
He looks up,
then, as if struck by a sword,
he furrows his brow.
But now is not the time
for blood to rain from heaven:
the war, as before, continues
unabated and unnoticed.
If he is to find purity’s root
within his world’s manifest divisions,
he must leave his comfortable chair
and charge into the heart of his war.
This must be done, again
and again, with an iron heart,
until he can laugh again;
and, the earth absorbs
the spilled wine
as if it were an apology
offered too late to a god.
(June 12, 2022)
talking to fellow Texans at the Grand Canyon
We stood at Yaki Point, silent, awed
content in the silence of the wind
through the piñon trees.
They walked up the trail behind us:
There are no words,
she expounded as if someone asked.
(But there are always words
I thought, even in the canyon’s silence).
Yet, they kept talking:
how Yosemite is more Impressive
Oh, you have to go there
The hikes— so strenuous
We were so sore afterwards
Then they walked away talking
as if to someone else.
While the wind moved through the piñon trees
filling the silence they left behind.
(June 9, 2022)
Death’s daughters dance
seductively
a slow strip tease;
their delusions draped
in our desires and discontents.
Without the diligence
to be dissuaded,
I take delight
in every turn and twist
of their exigent dance.
With my attention split
between hesitation and fear,
I fool myself to think
my life is more, or less,
than some other’s. Thus
distracted, I lay my hand
on the earth’s warm skin
to reassure myself again,
that I am still here.
As we spend the summer debating
death’s vague dichotomy (as if
the dead stay up late worrying
about personal liberty), Evil walks
casually along the rows with a scythe
leveling the field with each slow swath.
In early Autumn, night’s splintered
with lightning storms, first dark,
then light, then dark again like a child
flickering a light switch indecisively:
the world about us is exposed briefly
before vanishing into memory’s shimmer.
I have forgotten so many things
I thought I once knew; I remember
I shut the gate to something, but
forgot where it was, where it led to,
or if there were cows there to escape
into the empty Winter pastures.
(June 1, 2022)
A poor response to terror— again,
to children slaughtered in their classroom—
And again, will we learn anything this time?
The politicians and news pundits
gossip and chitter like crickets;
and nothing, again, nothing is done.
Here, a few hours distance to Uvalde,
Black-eyed Susans and Horse Mint dance
to the wind, as if nothing changes.
Each time (so strangely common) I think
of my students and the possible horror—
and pray (in my way) for redemption.
Tomorrow, my students will graduate,
and head off to college— with the hope,
again, that they will change this world.
(May 30, 2022)
I’m in this snapshot
laughing at a party.
I look old, like a skull
embedded in a wall.
I do not know myself,
at least not enough
to admit what I’ve done.
I deflect, disengage;
yet, I am still there,
disembodied: a voice,
thin and transitional.
My splotched skin’s
stretched thin
across my skull.
The bones show through
like field’s slow erosion.
I wear myself
against the day,
until I am erased.
(May 28, 2022)
I have said this before: There needs to be photographs published of the aftermath of these shootings. Not the bodies of the torn up 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders (6-9 yo), but the destruction of the room. Blood spattered across the walls where their work had been displayed by the teacher. The work the children had been so proud to see hanging on the wall. Walls that are now blood stained. These common classroom artifacts desecrated in blood need to be seen…these murders are not neat and tidy, easily forgotten (obviously). Do not show the dead children, show the bullet holes in the walls, show the blood. The blood of the innocent. Maybe that would help in bringing enough rage to the surface to bring about meaningful change. Maybe.
subtext