Below are recent poems which are not included in my books.
HOPPER
What if they're not after all lonely,
those women and men each encased
in hard light like a beetle inside
a carapace?
What if these stark rooms stunned
with emptiness suit them, skins as suits,
solitary, yet whole souls at home
in the world exactly as it is, and which
they inhabit whole-heartedly?
LOOSESTRIFE
Almost August- roadside ditches burst
with color: chicory, vetch, cow parsley, joe
pieweed; loosestrife wild in the fields beyond
fills my mind with Leonard, years ago, fugitive
Catholic making confession to me, therapy the sacrament
he could accept, about the landscape he and his wife,
artists both, stood side-by-side to paint for a local show,
canvas wide as their bed of loosestrife splattered in vivid
glory all over the Puritan Rhode Island marsh near their
home. Any other time of night or day, the two leaned
apart, distinct. The years they'd been bound were come
undone, ties loosening, love going like geese that lift over
tall grasses like color leaking from sky, from brushes
in linseed, losing all brilliance. Since then, what? For him?
For me, who knew about losing, too? What have each
of us since worshipped? What canvases stretched and prepped,
left waiting in emptiness for story or paint? Love? Peace?
The luckiest-both? All certainty sits with this constant: fall
on the wind. Blaze before fall. Loosestrife.
LATE, AT THE STARRY NITE CAFE
across the wall's expanse
cobalt moon glow
what the painter dreamt of
is flowering
you settle in
what's brewing whistles
something calling the lost
the room's air swirls midnight
rises. a tilled field
reaching out, you cup
the burn of night sky
taste the burst
of how a soul implodes
BIOPSY
After three leaden turns of no-sun, it comes:
one call splits the rest of your life off
from the whole like a calf from a glacier. Even
so the kitchen's full of light and the scent
of vanilla and apple. The dog's dancing at
the door ahead of her walk down the neighboring
road where she's got a friend, another dog whose
name you don't know. Along the ditch at the cornfield's
sere edge, where silver-bellied birds gorge on fallen
stalks, you watch the two of them mock/ growl, leap,
play/ fight, frolic, as if there were no before or after.
THE TENTH COMMANDMENT
To hold up against another's your life as if comparing
ensembles at a gala reception is not wise: every piece
of fabric reveals one flaw or another: the nibble
of moth, the sagging hem, the stain no miracle
solvent could ever remove, the missing button no
match for was ever found. Maybe he gets to keep
all the trim on his collar, but I'll bet she has split
seams plus a tiny cigarette burn on the sleeve. He didn't
patronize a good enough dry cleaner and it shows. If
you snuck into her closet after midnight and stole
the quilted jacket and long velvet skirt you covet
and donned them yourself, leaving her the lesser-
quality pants and top you wore to that awards dinner,
you still won't receive the award and still die the way
you were going to die and when, and so will she. Neither
Women's Wear Daily nor GQ will know your name. Every-
body's outfits are going to hang side by side, limp
and covered in cat hair, anyway, at the Salvation
Army. Only our naked souls get a whisper of a hope
for the raiment of perfect joy,
no unraveling edges.
TWO WIDOWS
1.
Her sister's about to plunge down a cascade of highways
through landscape of lakes to the Jersey shore where she's
been doling out to herself for three heavy years the bitter pill
of each day without the husband Hodgkins took at forty-eight,
refusing all calls, trashing the mail that comes. Last night
a thorough surprise: the phone line crackled with her resurrected
voice: I'm ready. Come get me. Let's go. Cross-country to
Taos. Drive straight through. I want to walk the land he and I
bought for our Golden Years. It's all paid for now.
2.
Eight weeks past that plunge her husband took over an
escarpment while they were hiking; she's serene as a nun,
In the time it takes one pebble to rattle down a rock wall,
all gone: what was, what had come to be, spilled into what
is now: paddles dipping, dripping green streams, Heron
rising, angel-winged, surrounding her a flotilla of women
easing her down a placid river, nowhere near the falls.
JACKETED
While bombs dropped in the Mekong Delta, all
senior year I wore around campus the blood-red
Sgt. Pepper jacket with gold buttons I'd bought that
summer on Carnaby Street with the last of my traveler's
checks. Really, what it was was the dress uniform of a
soldier in the Boer War. Back then I weighed 105--it
barely fit. How small he'd been and scared, I imagine,
a company bugler unsure of what he was fighting for,
scared to die, the way we all felt the next year in Berkley
when the Tac Squad of the Alameda County Sheriffs
with their gold shields and flak jackets bombed us with
tear gas in the university quad because we didn't want
a park paved into a parking lot. That jacket also looked
just like the one I saw today on a woman with streaky
blonde hair in the Atlanta airport, except hers had a shamrock
stitched to the collar, and she probably marches in it on
St Patrick's Day, playing on a clarinet the same song her
great-grandfather bugled at Gallipoli.
Yesterday in Albuquerque at the Airport University Inn,
I met a veteran attending his annual reunion with the 18th
Bombardiers who flew, he said, the Pacific Theatre from
1932 through the Cold War, and I imagine him and his buddies,
not portly in pastel golf shirts like now, but skinny like my
Sgt. Pepper-jacketed soldier on the Veldt, the way they'd
been, flying over Corregidor in their bomber jackets, like
the one I have on now, khaki, with olive green botanical
designs, except theirs were heavy, dark leather, no buttons,
no gold, and like my young soldier they'd been just as scared,
just as unsure. Some of the 18th, the vet needed to say,
had been lost on Bataan, marching.
On the flight form Atlanta to home, the perky flight attendant
in her cropped navy jacket with shiny braid asks us to write
in a notebook she passes out along the rows. She'll send it she
says in a CARE package over to the troops in Iraq. Everybody
applauds, and she gives us blankets. As we lift into the gold-
streaked sky, we're buttoned up tight, like the 18th on a mission.
Our individual hearts, lonely, open, like the hearts of the people
they had to kill, who were scared too, and who had no warm
blankets or jackets to cover them, in bunkers or trenches or
bombed-out houses, and we're all marching, all of us, in a
parade begun long before we were born, one that we show
little sign of stopping before it stops us, way out ahead of us
a small scared lonely bugler, whom we follow, his jacket
the color of blood.
WATER
Truth? Water invented god. In the
beginning water was, then us, who we
are, inside narrow channels inside us,
winging to all our far parts rivulets
of nourishment. When finally our own
particularities go rushing out to sea, that
water is still us, going where water takes
us and holds us close to her godly beating
heart, the one as small children we hear,
sleeping on cottage vacation porches, inside
shells that look like ears we press our own
ears to, water we pour like small crystal falls
falling into crystal glasses and take
into ourselves.
2.
Dreams are streams we swim/ sleep
ourselves into, flowing, dark, rapid as
heartbeats. I remember climbing toward
surface, toward wakefulness, deep inside a plane,
that womb-dark bird, having dreamt of belted-
in souls like ourselves gone flaming down,
no water to douse them, no god-only to look
up, to discover angels in blue serge streaming
down narrow passages bearing on trays small
vessels for each of us, full of pieces of rivers:
take drink become each other
What if they're not after all lonely,
those women and men each encased
in hard light like a beetle inside
a carapace?
What if these stark rooms stunned
with emptiness suit them, skins as suits,
solitary, yet whole souls at home
in the world exactly as it is, and which
they inhabit whole-heartedly?
LOOSESTRIFE
Almost August- roadside ditches burst
with color: chicory, vetch, cow parsley, joe
pieweed; loosestrife wild in the fields beyond
fills my mind with Leonard, years ago, fugitive
Catholic making confession to me, therapy the sacrament
he could accept, about the landscape he and his wife,
artists both, stood side-by-side to paint for a local show,
canvas wide as their bed of loosestrife splattered in vivid
glory all over the Puritan Rhode Island marsh near their
home. Any other time of night or day, the two leaned
apart, distinct. The years they'd been bound were come
undone, ties loosening, love going like geese that lift over
tall grasses like color leaking from sky, from brushes
in linseed, losing all brilliance. Since then, what? For him?
For me, who knew about losing, too? What have each
of us since worshipped? What canvases stretched and prepped,
left waiting in emptiness for story or paint? Love? Peace?
The luckiest-both? All certainty sits with this constant: fall
on the wind. Blaze before fall. Loosestrife.
LATE, AT THE STARRY NITE CAFE
across the wall's expanse
cobalt moon glow
what the painter dreamt of
is flowering
you settle in
what's brewing whistles
something calling the lost
the room's air swirls midnight
rises. a tilled field
reaching out, you cup
the burn of night sky
taste the burst
of how a soul implodes
BIOPSY
After three leaden turns of no-sun, it comes:
one call splits the rest of your life off
from the whole like a calf from a glacier. Even
so the kitchen's full of light and the scent
of vanilla and apple. The dog's dancing at
the door ahead of her walk down the neighboring
road where she's got a friend, another dog whose
name you don't know. Along the ditch at the cornfield's
sere edge, where silver-bellied birds gorge on fallen
stalks, you watch the two of them mock/ growl, leap,
play/ fight, frolic, as if there were no before or after.
THE TENTH COMMANDMENT
To hold up against another's your life as if comparing
ensembles at a gala reception is not wise: every piece
of fabric reveals one flaw or another: the nibble
of moth, the sagging hem, the stain no miracle
solvent could ever remove, the missing button no
match for was ever found. Maybe he gets to keep
all the trim on his collar, but I'll bet she has split
seams plus a tiny cigarette burn on the sleeve. He didn't
patronize a good enough dry cleaner and it shows. If
you snuck into her closet after midnight and stole
the quilted jacket and long velvet skirt you covet
and donned them yourself, leaving her the lesser-
quality pants and top you wore to that awards dinner,
you still won't receive the award and still die the way
you were going to die and when, and so will she. Neither
Women's Wear Daily nor GQ will know your name. Every-
body's outfits are going to hang side by side, limp
and covered in cat hair, anyway, at the Salvation
Army. Only our naked souls get a whisper of a hope
for the raiment of perfect joy,
no unraveling edges.
TWO WIDOWS
1.
Her sister's about to plunge down a cascade of highways
through landscape of lakes to the Jersey shore where she's
been doling out to herself for three heavy years the bitter pill
of each day without the husband Hodgkins took at forty-eight,
refusing all calls, trashing the mail that comes. Last night
a thorough surprise: the phone line crackled with her resurrected
voice: I'm ready. Come get me. Let's go. Cross-country to
Taos. Drive straight through. I want to walk the land he and I
bought for our Golden Years. It's all paid for now.
2.
Eight weeks past that plunge her husband took over an
escarpment while they were hiking; she's serene as a nun,
In the time it takes one pebble to rattle down a rock wall,
all gone: what was, what had come to be, spilled into what
is now: paddles dipping, dripping green streams, Heron
rising, angel-winged, surrounding her a flotilla of women
easing her down a placid river, nowhere near the falls.
JACKETED
While bombs dropped in the Mekong Delta, all
senior year I wore around campus the blood-red
Sgt. Pepper jacket with gold buttons I'd bought that
summer on Carnaby Street with the last of my traveler's
checks. Really, what it was was the dress uniform of a
soldier in the Boer War. Back then I weighed 105--it
barely fit. How small he'd been and scared, I imagine,
a company bugler unsure of what he was fighting for,
scared to die, the way we all felt the next year in Berkley
when the Tac Squad of the Alameda County Sheriffs
with their gold shields and flak jackets bombed us with
tear gas in the university quad because we didn't want
a park paved into a parking lot. That jacket also looked
just like the one I saw today on a woman with streaky
blonde hair in the Atlanta airport, except hers had a shamrock
stitched to the collar, and she probably marches in it on
St Patrick's Day, playing on a clarinet the same song her
great-grandfather bugled at Gallipoli.
Yesterday in Albuquerque at the Airport University Inn,
I met a veteran attending his annual reunion with the 18th
Bombardiers who flew, he said, the Pacific Theatre from
1932 through the Cold War, and I imagine him and his buddies,
not portly in pastel golf shirts like now, but skinny like my
Sgt. Pepper-jacketed soldier on the Veldt, the way they'd
been, flying over Corregidor in their bomber jackets, like
the one I have on now, khaki, with olive green botanical
designs, except theirs were heavy, dark leather, no buttons,
no gold, and like my young soldier they'd been just as scared,
just as unsure. Some of the 18th, the vet needed to say,
had been lost on Bataan, marching.
On the flight form Atlanta to home, the perky flight attendant
in her cropped navy jacket with shiny braid asks us to write
in a notebook she passes out along the rows. She'll send it she
says in a CARE package over to the troops in Iraq. Everybody
applauds, and she gives us blankets. As we lift into the gold-
streaked sky, we're buttoned up tight, like the 18th on a mission.
Our individual hearts, lonely, open, like the hearts of the people
they had to kill, who were scared too, and who had no warm
blankets or jackets to cover them, in bunkers or trenches or
bombed-out houses, and we're all marching, all of us, in a
parade begun long before we were born, one that we show
little sign of stopping before it stops us, way out ahead of us
a small scared lonely bugler, whom we follow, his jacket
the color of blood.
WATER
""Imagine God, inventing water...."
1.Truth? Water invented god. In the
beginning water was, then us, who we
are, inside narrow channels inside us,
winging to all our far parts rivulets
of nourishment. When finally our own
particularities go rushing out to sea, that
water is still us, going where water takes
us and holds us close to her godly beating
heart, the one as small children we hear,
sleeping on cottage vacation porches, inside
shells that look like ears we press our own
ears to, water we pour like small crystal falls
falling into crystal glasses and take
into ourselves.
2.
Dreams are streams we swim/ sleep
ourselves into, flowing, dark, rapid as
heartbeats. I remember climbing toward
surface, toward wakefulness, deep inside a plane,
that womb-dark bird, having dreamt of belted-
in souls like ourselves gone flaming down,
no water to douse them, no god-only to look
up, to discover angels in blue serge streaming
down narrow passages bearing on trays small
vessels for each of us, full of pieces of rivers:
take drink become each other
