Available February 2015.
from LOVING THE DAYS poems
THE CROTCH ISLAND QUARRY, MAINE
from THE HURTLING
THE SOLOIST
STITCHES
FLIES
AS IF
from SECOND NATURE
JANIS JOPLIN
TRUCK
APPARITION
HOME
from DISQUIET
KINGLET
JUST THIS TRAIN
SNAILS
THE SURGEON AND THE POET
FIREFLIES
from ALL THAT MATTERS NOW
NOTEBOOK
POOL
OH WELL
MANATEE
A HAIR
from LOVING THE DAYS
THE CROTCH ISLAND QUARRY, MAINE
Deer Isle Pink, for seventy years, like roses,
floated across Jericho Bay,
gaining Stonington – granite
block stacked and numbered
on an oily barge.
Quick shrills on the Company whistle meant
accident and the children watched for
the boat with the broken.
A stone cut loose spun
Mary Prescott’s father into the quarry pit.
You could feel the crack: it went
almost around his head.
All he could taste was peas.
New York City starved for granite –
in 1902, one hundred twenty-one thousand tons
for Manhattan’s Ninth Regiment Armory alone –
and the orders lined up:
Williamsburg and East River Bridges, Fine Arts
Museum in Boston, the Security Building
in Los Angeles. Ida Mae Eaton’s boarding-house
angels wrestled quarrymen,
and dandies at the wedding-cake
Stonington Hotel Virginia-reeled the ladies.
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine
waited for word.
Herman Walker’s wife snipped off his socks
to pillow the thin of his wrists.
Apprenticed, he lit the charge
and ran. They sent him back
crabwise when the powder didn’t catch.
Nothing held together.
The stonecutters ground
to forty tons the fountain bowl
for the Rockefellers’ Tarrytown estate
They sank
into the gardens of their lungs,
silicosis blossom and bud.
Fifteen hundred stones
rose into the light
for Kennedy’s memorial at Arlington,
1966, and the quarry froze shut.
Come spring, there were snakes on the island.
The old quarrymen remember best
their round dinner pails, how their women
treated them on the job.
At the bottom was a well for tea,
over that a section for soup,
then a place for sandwiches,
and on top room for a large pie.
Set the pail over a fire
and the tea warmed your whole meal.
Boston is pinned by silver
slivers of glass and steel. No one calls
for granite. Over the island,
deep in timothy and bay bush, the quarry
rails meander to the wharf.
The stones appear fleshy.
Feldspars, the sorrel flecks
they call “horses in the granite”
catch your eye. Kennedy’s memorial
has them. A summer rainstorm and the stone
is skittish with horses.
back to top
This close
his lips pursed we could tell
how the slow opening phrase rose and broke through him his face
clogged his bow
arm rising and rowing how the music
eddied how he labored bearing the weight of memory and longing
over the water
how the body bends the mouth
works open gawping slaunchways in pain the stinging discharge
of song
how his cheek gleams the melody
surging like oil blood and honey the pouting and soft grunting
the way we look
making love in the dark his face
rapt the tongue ransacking its room the beautiful human face
the seed pearl
of spittle flecking the lip the smile
or leer or wince this pushing and hurting this bringing forth.
back to top
Threading the needle
is it you at work in the nimbus
of pain stitching my thumb folding the ragged flap of flesh
sewing a glove
a difficult seam grandfather nothing
but a name a needleman in the rag trade dragged into an eddy
of time I turn
away the wound swabbed and numbed
the long thread drawn through tugged tied and snipped sewing
like any other
tailor pushing in the needle
your shirts and coats going out into the world maker of this
good man’s suit
blood soaking the surgical napkin
how you pass through me through me pulling the stitches tight.
back to top
They’ll come
she says just smear some
jelly from your sandwich on the back of your hand and wait
how she passes
the drowsy hour of math before
lunch the initials carved like Braille into the desk a fly
alights on her
sleeve her wrist they are
drawn to us drawn to what is sweet in us our life is sweet
like summoning
a friend out of the sky
quick cute this germ of being the jewel of its eye seeing
her 8,000
times tough brown as a nut
with horses on her shirt she calls come down little fly man
little wolf
circling the room better you
than the teacher dragging his chalky hand across the board
a blur
in the air you are God’s
least angel after the seraphim and thrones after the powers
your hunched thorax
and fuzzy throbbing abdomen
your mobile mouthparts sponging and sucking. If you don’t
have any jelly
it’s enough to lick your hand
she says they come for us they come for the taste of us.
back to top
A swift two
or three flitting over
the abandoned school then more plunging into the chimney
a blurry funnel
their chee and chirring overhead
a multitude scattered across the sky it’s their coming back
that gets us
the air trembling troubled as memory
whistling satiny feathers arranging and rearranging in the dark
cramped shaft
over the dead furnace birds
hurrying down now like smoke billowing back into the chimney
as if smoke
could return to its fire
the wood to its tree in the sun on the hill as if flesh returned
wheeled back
through the locks and chambers
back into its clothes onto the crowded train backing away.
back to top
from SECOND NATURE
JANIS JOPLIN
THE TYPEWRITER TAPE
Hit play
and your injured voice goes on
without you sweeping along the debris of memory nowhere
more than here
on this bootleg tape laid down
in the crowded apartment you are present raw inevitable
not yet drunk
but on your way a wavery blue
wall of noise crashing from the amps it doesn’t matter
the phone ringing
the dog barking while you sing
through the daily sounds of who we were a distant siren
a typewriter
in the next room someone
pecking out the letters writing a paper we were students
after all
we hardly noticed the brittle
mechanical chatter like locusts like an argument
we were going
to lose the heart singing along
with the music but the machine keeping up with the mind.
back to top
I shall now
praise my neighbor’s truck
crouched on its slab black and metallic candy-apple red
emblazoned
with chevrons and swashes of gold
his only chariot why shouldn’t he treasure it glistening
like unto
the color of beryl the mirrored
grillwork and foglights on the roof the little trumpets
of annunciation
the leaping trout and bull elk
the eagle airbrushed wheeling over a mountain lake
who can tell
the shape a dream might take
the appearance of animals round about within it moving
in a cloud
of exhaust the waterfall spilling
over a fender a great plain spanning the hood the desert
silhouette and deep
ocean all the world the likeness
of the firmament and its weather why shouldn’t he cherish
this his ark
his rescue carrying him forth turning
neither right nor left but whither the spirit might go.
back to top
Music of voices
on the street music in the form
of oranges or kisses it could happen to anyone a middle-aged
man stumbles
on the walk ahead of me spilling
his paper bag of clamps glue and screws he must be going home
to fix something
whatever it was he touched
and broke he looks up and I see it’s my dead friend but how
can that be
I help him stand and straighten
his rumpled clothes his cheeks ashen creased raspy traffic
music or is it
the greasy throb of work turbines
braying in the sky spirits in flight he’s been gone so long
he’s changed
which is only to be expected his coat
silky glimmering who used to find his clothes in the free box
and he’s calmer
almost peaceful now who used to hurl
curses stoning the police awash in hate and love and terror
wan polite we waits
for the light to change his hand
beginning to twist who used to gnash who used to burn and burn.
back to top
Returning to earth after his life
of weightlessness the astronaut cannot
lift the small bouquet of flowers the child gives him.
He cannot raise his head off the pillow pulled down
by the gravity of a dream.
He remembers nothing no sound
in the absolute zero of deep space
the pounding of his baffled heart. He lifted
a building on one hand and a pencil in the other.
This was what he wanted: the world
like a worn stone cast into the water.
He wanted to break the promise of the body
to the earth. To stop the long descent of everyone
he loved under the ground. He wanted to rise an angel
in a paradise of exact data.
He spills his milk on his shirt. The earth
has darkness and then light. The earth has birds
bickering over the last seeds. His fork slips
clattering on the plate. The road is shining.
The magnolia is shameless in the rain.
back to top
A smoke-gray snippet flicking
mist from the madrone we had forgotten
it zipping through the limbs huddled inside
all winter its brisk
swagger ramping and sizzling loopy freaked
flashing its tiny gold crown as if to say
see how in love we are how brief
how fitfully burning
back to top
ruckling past flatcars
stacked with lumber cattle cars
and rumbling gondolas of coal the strobing
light between boxcars between phrases a drifter
in the doorway not my father traveling
town to town looking for work
not a poem we’re not talking about
the engine crowding forward its burden of memory
or the last car trailing a streamer of silence
just this moving wall this smell
of hot metal the flickering
tons the ground shaking
back to top
So that’s why we close our eyes
when we kiss so the tongue
can work in the dark the way it likes
so slick and nimble no wonder the mouth
feels so empty to the tongue how it fills
with words slithering and pushing we cannot
get more naked than this
our tongues touching and sliding together
like snails shooting their tiny
love-darts our empty skulls
spiraling behind us
back to top
from DISQUIET
THE SURGEON AND THE POET
Entranced the surgeon reads
his patient’s poem its unruly blooming
and lurid coloration the poet suffering
the usual symptoms vomiting ataxia
aphonia he saws
and lifts the skullcap the tumor
a gleaming spongy network bizarre
anaplastic he cannot tease out and sever
the mortal entanglement he cannot
save the poet and the poem
though blossoming like an unutterably
beautiful flower in his mind
cannot save him
back to top
flying home I see you
in my dream stricken dimmed
flustered by fireflies you smile
grimace and smile sending a message
too ephemeral to grasp what was
familiar then their on off
seems distant now exotic like angels
beckoning us from the heaven of childhood
they cannot cross over the mountains but hover
in memory where our bodies gleam with longing
and love the light blinking at the end
of our wing our lives so briefly
plunging through the dark
the light the dark
back to top
from ALL THAT MATTERS NOW
NOTEBOOK
It says here proceed as the way opens it says something
I can’t read it maybe words are deeds it lists ten uses
for the tongue it talks of wind and breath and Beulaland
the treacherous swamp of memory and a short history
of spitting followed by notes on the voices of machines
it goes on about Goya hunting for teeth and will no one
untie us the writing smudged it gripes about fame and
paper cuts and wonders if the gods have become diseases
there’s a chronicle of slipups and bloopers some funny
it mentions here Cassiel the angel of tears and solitude
it says money costs us and don’t apologize for anything
(from Wittgenstein) look and say what it’s really like
back to top
POOL
Who can tell the shape a dream might take
your best friend’s older sister longing
for a swimming pool in their back yard
lolling in the sun her warm flesh scented
with chlorine who can say how far we’ll go
to fill a desperate emptiness she pleaded
with her bleary father who snarled dammit
you want a pool so bad go ahead and dig one
and so she did stubbornly shoveling all summer
her shirt clinging to her pitching the dirt
out of the pit grubbing deeper each day until
the sludgy groundwater began to seep in then
dragonflies and swallows appeared and a turtle
in the twilight of your childhood the riotous
choiring of frogs over which she presided
back to top
OH WELL
Then the words began to swim on the page my mother
stopped reading it was too much too many characters
coming and going who were these people anyway and
how had she become entangled in their lives and why
won’t Nora just tell him and did Jason need to be
so nasty oh well life goes on the telephone rings
in the foyer in the novel she found herself reading
the same page over and over the characters returned
complete strangers like her son she cannot remember
the child he was lost in the prairie grass growing
darker she was awake the book a weight in her lap
like a plate of food oh well there are worse things
to lose than stories her mind for example being
swept away from shore unable to swim her voice
too faint to be heard she closes the book
the wind rippling in waves over the field
back to top
MANATEE
This is the way your life began to end with the words
“I don’t feel so hot” but when I think of the red-eye
to Florida the plane wallowing in turbulence my memory
is not of you in a diaper gonged on morphine drifting
up out of sleep but a manatee approaching the window
in the underwater viewing chamber curious about us
transfixed behind the cloudy glass your granddaughters
gazing openmouthed having forgotten about you entirely
or is this the way you loom up in memory whiskered
thought to have once been human
back to top
A HAIR
The pastor delivering the eulogy paused as if
remembering the sound of your voice or was it
something in her mouth she pinched from the tip
of her tongue a hair rough as a hank of rope
yet invisible between her fingers she had lost
her place in the story of your life forgetting
for a moment why we had gathered here breaking
the spell of death as if you had never left us