Patience
How time collapses
even the longest
held dream – that
trip to Italy
or the stilted
studio to the
barn’s rear, or
even the first
book and its
publication to early
acclaim by age
forty, fifty, sixty…
“Patience” first appeared here in October 2018.
Flame
Drifting, she passes through the frame.
Reshapes borders, edges.
The way smoke scribes a letter in the sky with
gases and particulates. Intractable. Impermanent.
But not like a risen corpse
yet to accept its body’s stilling, or
the flooded creek’s waters taking
a house and the family within. Some things
are explainable. This morning you drained
the sink, and thunder set off a neighbor’s alarm.
From every moment, a second emerges.
Picture a man lighting a candle where a home once stood.
* * *
“Flame” was published in Poppy Road Review in February 2019 and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, available for order via Amazon.com and Finishing Line Press.
Bandera
I offer nothing in return, and in offering, receive.
My mouth is a river
whose current bears no words,
but the silence is not of my making.
Notice the streets and their grey
hunger, the rain and the sun
passing by much
as one passes an unopened door.
That question, unvoiced.
That shiver preceding the icy touch.
You may deny my motives.
You may deny my existence and
the very notion of shape unto form.
I offer nothing, and in offering, receive.
“Bandera” first appeared here in May 2015, and was subsequently published in The Basil O’Flaherty in November 2016.
I Praise the Moon, Even When She Laughs
I got drunk once and woke in Korea
with you watching over me.
Odd, how you spend seasons looking
down, and I, up. If I lived in a cloud,
could you discern me from the other
particles? Perhaps your down is
peripheral, or left, or non-directional. I can
fathom this without measuring scope,
yet I feel queasy about the possibility
of being merely one vaporous drop
coalescing among others, unnamed
and forgettable, awaiting the particular
atmospheric conditions to plummet to my
fate. As if we control our own gravities!
One winter I grilled pork tenderloin under
your gaze, unaware that the grass
around me had caught fire, and when I
unwound the hose and turned on the
faucet you laughed, as the hose wasn’t
connected and only my feet were
extinguished. Dinner was delayed
that evening, but I praised you just the same.
I look up, heedless in the stars’ grip, unable
to retrace all those steps taken to this here,
now, but still you sway above the branches,
sighing, lighting my path, returned once
again, even if not apparent at all times. Every
star signals a departure. Each is an arrival.
* * *
“I Praise the Moon, Even When She Laughs” was published in Sourland Mountain Review in January 2017.
Feeling Squeezed at the Grocery Store I Conclude that the Propensity to Ignore Pain is Not Necessarily Virtuous, but Continue Shopping and Gather the Ingredients for Ham Fried Rice because That’s What I Cook When My Wife is Out-of-Town and I’m Not in the Mood for Italian, and Dammit I’m Not Ill, Merely a Little Inconvenienced, and Hey, in the 70’s I Played Football in Texas, and When the Going Gets Tough…
I answer work email in the checkout line. Drive home, take two aspirin.
Place perishables in refrigerator. Consider collapsing in bed. Call wife.
Let in dog. Drive to ER, park. Provide phone numbers. Inhale. Exhale.
Repeat. Accept fate and morphine. Ask for lights and sirens, imagine the
seas parting. On the table, consider fissures and cold air, windows and
hagfish. Calculate arm-length, distance and time. Expect one insertion,
receive another. Dissonance in perception, in reality. Turn head when
asked. Try reciting Kinnell’s “The Bear.” Try again, silently this time.
Give up. Attempt “Ozymandias.” Think of dark highways. Wonder about
the femoral, when and how they’ll remove my jeans. Shiver uncontrollably.
The events in this poem took place six years ago. A lifetime ago. Life is good.
Theology of Carrots
We hide our best
underground
plumed by ornamental
headpieces
allowing the wisdom
of taproots
to prosper
in darkness.
“Theology of Carrots” first appeared here in September 2017.
The Neurotic Dreams September in April
Already I have become the beginning of a partial ghost, sleeping the summer
sleep in winter, choosing night over breakfast and the ritual of dousing lights.
This much I know: the moon returns each month, and tonight you lie awake
in a bed across the river, in a house with sixteen windows and a cold oven,
where your true name hides under the floorboard behind the pantry door.
*
Differences season our days — from flowers to snow, root to nectar — take
one and the other lessens in its own sight. One day I’ll overcome this longing
for things and will be complete in what I own, living my life beyond the page,
past the white space and dead letters. When I mention hearts, I mean that
muscle lodged in my chest. Genetics, not romance. Tissue. Arteries, veins.
*
Dark cars on the street. Cattle grazing in the damp pasture. The liquor store
sign glaring “CLOSED.” Separate yet included, we observed these scenes but
assigned them to the periphery, grounded in our own closed frames. In a
different time I would transcend my nature and strive to withstand yours.
Look. That star, the fog silhouetting the tombstones. A bobbing light.
*
Love is a gray morning, a steel-toed shoe or coating of black ice; nothing you
do will repeal its treachery. There, on my stone porch, I will inhale the smoke
of a thousand burned photographs. The sun will descend but you won’t share
it, and I’ll no longer hum your tune. When I rise no one sees. Or everyone
stares. Imagine that great cow of a moon lowing through the night.
“The Neurotic Dreams September in April” was published in deLuge in December 2016, and was written during the August 2015 Tupelo Press 30-30 challenge. Many thanks to artist extraordinaire Ron Throop for sponsoring and providing the title.
Maps
If we fold the map just so, the journey’s path
shrinks considerably. Sacramento enters the Hudson
Valley, Toronto meets Santa Fe, and Lee County,
Mississippi merges with Tupelo, Texas, joining music
to fruitcakes in a celebratory feast. Stroll down one
road and find a lost car. Exit a theater to enter bliss
or a good bar with craft beer on tap, where no one
discusses mileage and you may eavesdrop on
conversations about ancient nautical battles, the
history of chili, and radiation. Unfold the map
twice to find yourself in Swamp Angel, Kansas,
named after a Civil War field gun and not a spiritual
being, and wander to the next intersection near
Barstow, where Joshua trees tickle the sky’s belly
and I ate the best chili dog in my young life’s
experience in 1968. Look to the edges, where the
best places crowd and nowhere lives in a corner.
Jump from Busan to Venice, drive to Perth and
beyond. Slowly crease the page. Do this again.
Point blindly. There. Your destination waits.
My poem “Maps” iwas publishedin February 2019 at Riggwelter. Thank you, Amy Kinsman, for taking this piece, which was originally drafted during the August 2016 Tupelo Press 30-30 Challenge. I owe its existence to Ken Gierke, who sponsored the poem and provided the title (which I changed) that sparked this piece.
No One Knows
There, the dream of flying
cars, and the next,
tumbling through soft
glass, inconsiderate and
hopeful as a child
on his birthday,
hands outstretched, waiting.
Unsmiling. You might ask
where this story turns,
whether the glass reconstitutes
or the car crashes,
reminders of a childhood
reconsidered and the simplest
truth, which is no one knows.
“No One Knows” was first published in The Pangolin Review in March 2018.
My poem “To the Vase Whose Emptiness Beckons” has been nominated for Best of the Net by Cirrus Poetry Review. In addition, it was named poem of the month for January by Cirrus. I am grateful to editor Hannah Norman for this nomination and the poem of the month honor.
O at the Edges 