I, of course, instantly notice
The bare skin of your back exposed
Between the top of your blue jeans
And your blouse as you, oblivious
To my wandering gaze, sit reading.
I wish, like a boy on his first date
Longing for a kiss, to lightly run
My finger tips across your patch
Of skin as a prelude of caresses
Still to come. Yet, as is too often
The excuse, there is too much to
Do for the day: another paper to
Grade, a dinner to plan; so I move
On toward yet another distraction.
(April 2011)
by
“So close and yet so far away
And all the things I’d hoped to say
Will have to go unsaid today
Perhaps until tomorrow”
– -Townes Van Zandt
Again I fall before your charm,
My brooding befuddled by small talk;
I think of light replies too late
Driving home replaying conversations,
Reshaping meaning to suit obsessions.
The delusions of my truths
Trouble with their desert shimmer;
An oasis I desire, yet fear exists
Only in the thirst for it to exist,
“and that leaves only sorrow.”
(April 2011)
I pick through the rubble
For remnants of my heart.
All these troubled, shattered
Parts (my students, my friends,
My family, my self, all
The detritus that falls
Along the way) stand like
Broken teeth cutting my tongue
As I try to speak of things
Best left unspoken. Not
Out of some misguided
Etiquette do I keep silent,
Rather a deep exhaustion
With having to explain motives,
Rationales, deep beliefs
Developed through time, both
To myself and the ever-present
Judges of normality, while
Remaining cognizant of the
Fragility of our souls
To hear the unfettered opinions
We speak when we are alone.
It is hard enough to follow
The blade of pointed self-reflection
As it descends deeper through the layers
Of deception I donned with such ease;
Much less so to slice into the soul
Of another for the sheer delight
Of proving I can eviscerate
You as easily as I surrender my own skin.
And so I move through the smoldering heaps,
The maudlin nodes of my mistakes,
Treasuring each emotional shard
I unearth as if it meant something
More than what I make of my life.
by
I am frustrated with the world. I blew up in class today. The genetics of my father flowed out of me: one crazy red-faced Irishman. But that was the end result of an overall deep downturn in my psyche over the last couple of days. I am not sure what caused this fall. I noticed years ago that I tend to fluctuate between feeling ok, and being depressed and gloomy. I have assumed that I was not manic-depressive because I did not have the ecstatic emotional highs. Sadly. I suppose this current emotional collapse is just a culmination of events comprised of Lisa’s loss of a job,the layoffs occurring on a daily basis in the building where I work, the state of education in Texas where 100,000 teachers will be fired this year, and the general turn to a fascist state exhibited by the Republican party’s attempt at gutting everything created for the good of people since the New Deal. But that would be too simplistic. I really am not that paranoid.
A friend, one of the more intellectually complex persons I’ve worked with in years, always wants to know how people feel about things; so instead of trying to analyze cause, I will describe effect. I have a tight constricted ball located just below where the ribcage comes together. It feels like the moment before one vomits from too much liquor without the dizziness or nausea. I want to cry over anything and everything: newscasts, sappy television, poems I have read for years, words. An overwhelming sadness sweeps through me, similar to how I felt, in waves, the year my mother was dying before I was prescribed antidepressants, and then felt nothing.
A few months ago, an old friend from Bread Loaf came through town. When she came to dinner she asked how I was doing. My quick, and honest answer was that I was happier than I had been in years, which is still true. I feel (think) that I am writing some of the best poetry of my life over the last few months (even though I feel no one reads it). I enjoy the conversation with the friends I have made over the years on both an emotional and intellectual level. I work with a collection of big-hearted, smart, funny, articulate people whom I love deeply. My three children are wonderfully fascinating young adults who I delight in listening to as they negotiate the world they are creating. I am still in love with the woman I fell in love with thirty-one years ago. And all of this makes me want to cry.
by
for an “assignment” from C.D.
Many years ago I felt when I wrote as if a geometric figure rotated slowly about three inches above and in front of my forehead: a green figure glowing red along the edges of each facet. I would trace lines (words) along the edges of this figure as I wrote, or thought about what words to place on the page.
That, however, is not a feeling, but an image. The image did create a trance like state – – a mandala, as it were, to focus my attention – – to not be distracted by the noise of the world, nor by the noise of the words. So in that sense I feel calm, centered and safe when I am working on a poem. I feel closer to myself, in a place I can speak with a brutal honesty, a space of stark self-evisceration, a space to hide beneath metaphor from myself and others; a place of enlightened obfuscation.
My skin itches as if something needs to get in,
A constant trend toward a location not here.
Angstroms of ephemera swarm like the hum
Of bees, the chatter of others; but not the bees
Nor the others: I am who I am,
A patchwork facsimile of all I hoped to be,
As are you as well. We are never apart:
Whitman’s atoms, Lennon’s goo goo g’joob,
An interlaced amalgam of each interaction,
Of each handshake, each mumbled explanation
Of the last big game, of her last affair, of god:
Each a part of the tale I tell to myself
When too tired to push back sufficiently
To create space enough to breathe on my own.
(March 2011)
by
Half-awake at five a.m.
A line, then a poem forms.
But the mind, like the poem
Shifts, a play of metaphor
Between the thing
And the thing
Translated.
So, I can’t follow,
Or remember
Beyond a trace,
An outline:
Not enough to reconfigure,
To replace, the ineffable
With the shape of words.
(March 2011)
“Do we communicate in mirror languages, through some inherent sense of form, in every respect but touch? Do we ever know each other; know who we really are?”
–Susan Howe
I become an echo
To what I wish to hear – –
My voice to your voice
A whispery misdirection:
In case I eavesdrop
Words meant for another,
I worry your lines
Like a scar, a palmistry
Read in a different text,
Weaving new cloth
From unraveled sleeves;
An old fool’s motley hopes
From wilted narcissi
Beside a still pond.
(March 2011)
by
My skin itches as if something needed to escape:
A writhing turmoil with the liquidity of smoke;
The curl and twirl of a rose unfolding in time;
The abdominal ripples of a child tumbling
And fumbling in an amniotic swirl;
Wax as it hesitates between itself and fluidity
For an instance neither one nor the other:
We are all more than we are within our skin,
A permeable differentiation between
Our belief and where we wish to wander.
We hold our beliefs loosely, like a cloak
On a warm evening, or the reins of a horse
Who knows the way home without our
Unnecessary awareness of where we are.
(February/March 2011)
I don’t want to be here;
I don’t want to be who I am;
I don’t like it here anymore;
I don’t understand happiness;
I don’t want to be anything more;
I don’t like the array of options;
I don’t want to ignore any options;
I don’t understand the choices;
I don’t like the complexity;
I don’t like the simplicity;
I don’t like the view from here;
I don’t want to change position;
I don’t think grass is greener;
I don’t want to do this yet again.
(February 2011)
I am tired of connecting the stars,
Telling stories across the night sky;
My soul is hard enough to maintain
Against the unrelenting onslaught.
What did he say? and what about her?
They all speak at once, demanding
What I must define myself against,
That I justify my self to their limits.
The sea is a dangerous place,
Yet, so is the shore; jagged rocks
Flash through surf like wolves through flesh.
I seal myself within this sarcophagus
Of talk, my tropes, my clichés,
And cower beneath the untamed stars.
(February 2011)
Your hand upon my arm
Transient like spider’s silk
As you speak to me
Not there, yet there still
I’m lost falling, following
Stray strands of meaning
Weaving from desperate threads
Tattered rags into a motley’s truth
Such small scraps feed me
A casual toss of your hair
A phrase plucked from conversation
Create tremors for days, rattling
Like bones in a cup, an
Augury I cannot read
(February 2011)
1. Text
circa 1965
In the doctor’s office
Waiting eternally to be called
Studying the Child’s Illustrated Bible,
Or in Sunday school, fingers tight
Around old broken crayons
adding color between the lines:
God hid behind the clouds
Except for fingers of light
Slicing through the air
To illuminate some distant goal
Some promise to come soon
If the people pictured, Caucasians
Dressed like Arabs, standing in verdant
Fields of sheep, if they would just
Keep moving toward the picture’s
Vanishing point, then they would
Arrive like the nurse at the door
Calling me by name.
2. Summer 1980
We had eaten them like the Eucharist
A communal act draped in mystery
Trusting our hope to be transformed.
Soon I was kneeling at the toilet
Every bit of blood and bone of my body
Crawled up my throat like porcupines
I was in my own level of hell
Every atom of every strand of hair
Screamed through eternity for release
Then a voice outside of myself
Like my sixth grade science textbook
Spoke in sonorous reassurance
“This too shall pass . . .”
And within that instance, it did.
I rose again,
Brushed my teeth
And walked back out
Into the bedazzled day.
3. Flying on the floor
1984
the words outside had become too much
too many perspectives to follow
too many bunny trails into the briar patch
inside only music, no people
to twist my thinking past coherence
inside only me, calmly breathing on the floor
so I lay there, breathing, watching the ceiling
like clouds, creating patterns of possibility
vague, comforting, whimsically transitory
the Rolling Stones sang on the stereo
of time, sympathy and power
a perfectly simple single narrative
when splayed between the bumps and lines,
a full-color Byzantine Jesus manifested
hands open, stigmata dripping love
before I could wallow beatifically in blood
silent gunfire pocked the fresco
plaster dust coated the air like fog
I stood quickly as the song changed
Stepped back onto the sunlit deck
Back into a conversation with the living
4. After Being Apart
Burlington Airport, 1989
I wandered aimlessly about the terminal
early
with little to do
I found the gate again
checked arrival and departure times
again
watched the model airplanes,
the history of flight,
that hung above the terminal floor
I returned to the gate
sat next to a pillar near the escalator
I waited, pretending to read
then there they were again
her eyes I fell into
years before
5. Silent Cliff
1991
Rain and light fell from the canopy.
In the air, patterns of shadow danced
With the mist falling from the leaves.
The deep green immanence of the trees
And brush darkened the light
Into dusk along the thick forest floor.
The humidity flowed like rivers about the path,
as I negotiated between the trees slowly
moving up the side of the mountain
The trees were unrelenting and oppressive:
the sky obliterated behind the thick green;
I trudged on switchbacks toward Silent Cliff.
I crouched over a creek on an improvised bridge;
Tired, frustrated, claustrophobic and almost lost
I pushed on through the never-ending woods until
Finally stepping out beyond the tree line to cliff’s edge
And nothing but empty air for twenty miles but
The blue haze of the Adirondacks on the horizon.
6. Improvisation
New Orleans, July 2005
In the cobbled grey streets slick with rain
Lilith slipped her shoes off and
Walked bare foot across wet stones
Near the St. Louis Cathedral
As she slapped her feet
The rain still swirled
Lightly dancing the afternoon sun
Like glitter through the air
The world widened like an iris in delight
Gathering the light from my darkness:
In that
I live forever still
7. the eyes
her eyes, always her eyes
dark brown spattered about an iris
which I fall into forever
to watch them as she speaks
to see her mind move within them
a bright dancer between her words
during sex their sudden widening roll
as she leaps and sings beyond herself
eternally fuels my desire
(January 2011)
The words become soundings
A tap on a wall, a test
Of what lies beneath the façade.
Was what you wrote a reply,
Your own sound check,
Or a disconnected comment?
I sense a depth, but fear
My meanings echo only
The emptiness of my desires.
(January 2011)
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