The Shadow of its Flight

One last poem, one thick smudge
across the page, one smeared fingerprint,
one more prisoner to be shoved
across the broken ground.

Somewhere a clear green sky rises;
somewhere the rain has stopped.
Somewhere bare feet step on naked wood.

"Tell them," said Jefferson Davis,
long after it was all over,
trying hopelessly to explain, "tell them
I only loved America."

A disillusioned follower, well aware
of the poisonings and absurdities,
the fifty-three Rolls Royces, told me too
that to be in the room with Bagwan Rajneesh
was to be in the presence of someone
greater than a human being.
"I still think that, it's still true," he said,
a mournful apostate, broken at the root.

A swift and skillful bird plays on the wind,
turns, rolls, and with a flourish, lands on the wire:
revealing, this close, the imbecile profile
and depthless eye of a pigeon.

The blue pulse at your temple
is the shadow of its flight.

The Pebbles of the Wrist

And what to make of that pile of rubble,
the carpals tumbled at the fingers' roots?
What storm washed them there? What mender
set to work with glue and ligament
and tethered each to each?

My fathers carried their fathers'
in leather bags for luck, rattling
like dice in a Yahtzee cup. You can cast them
like the guts of birds: you can read them
like the I Ching or the Tarot.

Where finger thumb and arm come to parley,
time tries its combinations,
the tumblers shift and click,
until finally the guess is right, the hand unfolds,
and the pebbles of the wrist lie open to the sky.

Massage Noir

A second session, and the headaches are as obscure as ever
hovering in the midrange, come-and-go, not thunderclap,
not migraines, not disabling, reassuringly bilateral. They ought
to be muscular in origin; the ill-named “tension headaches.”
But all the usual suspects have alibis. The lower traps have
confessed their petty crimes: they're going straight.

One of the wickeder, more inward scalenes, maybe. A strand
of lev scap cunningly twisted, hard to pin. Maybe
one of those outlandish muscles that only five percent
of people have? My mind roams among the more
freakish possibilities. Calf muscles. Wrist extensors.

Well. Next time I'm going to put her on her side
and see if something opens up. Interrogate
the lev scaps one at a time, where they can't
hear each other's stories. Let the SCM imagine
it's free of suspicion. Back the subscap
up against the ribcage and rough it up a little.

Sooner or later, someone's going to talk:
and when he does, these headaches
are going out of business.

Come, Tell Me How You Live

So, having no reply to give
    To what the old man said,
I cried "Come, tell me how you live!"
    And thumped him on the head.

Is it a faint smell of burnt toast, or a tang of citrus
that would rise from warm sheets in the morning?

Premonitory sadness draws me from
speculation: either would break a heart
that no repairman would touch. “You just
need a new one, man.”

No. On to the brisk day. The silver casque
settles onto my white head, and my U-lock
is couched in its rest. Laptop in my pack,
reading glasses in its pocket -- all wrapped

in proof: the yellow water-shedding stuff
given me by my daughter's partner long ago
to shield my basket's contents from the rain.

I'm ready to ride on my slightly ridiculous errantry.
Only that song, so familiar that at first
I don't realize I haven't heard it since the Fall --
the stirring of small warmths in the thicket --

the call of à l'arme! à l'arme! -- the danger
that I might take myself seriously, at last,
after all this time.


In response to this Morning Porch post.

Doppler Bird

I don't know much about birds.
I call her the doppler bird:
she begins a pure, liquid whistle,
not a bubble or a flaw in it anywhere,
and then its pitch drops, and drops,
as though she were falling, falling away from you.
Almost the comic sound
given to anvils falling in old cartoons.
But she's not going anywhere.
Right to the end, it's as loud and pure
as ever, and she reminds me
of Grace Slick, finding
somebody to love,
holding the note impossibly,
increasing the volume at the end
till you think her lungs will collapse.

And almost immediately she starts again
high on the cliff, stalked by
an immemorially frustrated coyote:
A sweet high whistle. A flute with a slider.

I hold an oiled foot in both my hands.
Hands fit with feet in dozens of ways:
they are just foreign enough
to be mutually fascinated.
Palm to sole, and fingers between toes,
heels cradled in a basket of fingers,
ankles held in thumb-straps:
everything the same and not the same.

There is a sweet spot on the sole
before the metatarsals knuckle out,
where you can nudge a thumb
as though it had lived there all its life,
and with your other hand, your mortar hand,
you push the foot down on the pestle thumb.

That's where the doppler bird begins to sing,
just there. And every thumbswidth heelward
you go, the note drops, sweet and pure,
rocking lower, flooding your ears.
No hesitation, no vibrato.

Something does collapse, then.
The toast-crusts of the spirit,
the rind of the heart, the table
of the soul's contents. What was
hard and edged softens, what was closed
opens. What happens in that
tiny space of silence? No one knows.
You might guess the doppler bird
is filling its lungs again,
returning to the top of the cliff,
but guesses miss their mark here.
No one knows what pours quietly
into that opened darkness.

Everything Twice

Rain thrashes tattered blossoms;
sparrow says everything twice.

Water sheets in the parking lot,
lens of a windshield; gutters

rush for the river,
stuttering eagerly;

crow crawls under
a pole switchbox and glares.

Indian plum
gone, serviceberry going --

rain thrashes tattered blossoms,
sparrow says everything twice.


In response to this Morning Porch post.

Easter Falls on ANZAC Day

The criss cross leaves, against
the dark but paler sky
seen through the waving leaded glass

(installed in nineteen thirteen,
before those ANZACs had heard
the name Gallipoli)

A wind comes through them
and they come to a boil all at once,
the leaves, bubbling like a ramen pot;

and behind them the clouds are breaking,
and pools of light collect like the
ovals of olive oil

my son (just that age)
pours in to make the noodles
heartier. Tell me

that just this once
it doesn't have to happen again.

Matching Grant

The sun glows faintly through the clouds like a coin at the bottom of a fountain.

-- Dave Bonta, Morning Porch

. . . the color of plums, of Bordeaux,
of things that have lain a while in the clarifying
dark.

-- Luisa Igloria, “Mandorla”

It seems that Spring won't come
until I find forgiveness,
that the God of Cartwheels and Extravagance
is withholding his bounty:
that Spring is a sort of matching grant.

I'm the one responsible for the morning frosts,
the endless rains. The homeless man
who's lain on his side for forty days without food
is in no mood
to make me pretty prophecies. Not while the rain goes on.

Roll up the stinking blankets and begin again. Say the prayers
until you mean them. Take some comfort in knowing
that nothing comes clear, water or wine, without
having “lain a while in the clarifying dark.”

Forgiving injury is hard enough, but harder still
is to forgive the people we have injured
for being injured by us.

So fill the dusty offering bowls.
Stumble through the liturgy. Fumble
through the flyspecked pecha. Give us this day --

No, that's not right. Wrong God. Or is it?
Give us this day --

And finally the sun appears, wavering,
like a coin at the bottom of a fountain.

I think today we'll fill the bowls with wine
even if their cheap alloys dissolve. Why
call them offerings if you're not willing to give them?

Give us this day --
That can't be right. Until the summit
of enlightenment is reached I take refuge
in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in
something unintelligible.

I drop a sun, a bright penny,
into each bowl of wine.

Please forgive me.
Please give us this day.

Posterity

I don't really know why this itch
to listen to the dead, and speak to the unborn.
I could come up with reasons, but I think
they'd float away on the first stiff breeze.

Imagine our horror when Praxiteles
shows up one day with his studio crew
and sets them painting Adonis and Aphrodite
with floozy lips and baby blues.

I have been so long with the dead that the living
seem over-colored and fake: Marmaduke doggies
overturning end tables in the sickroom.
They're a breeding nuisance, and the unborn

don't promise better. Some professor,
inked all over with tattoos, will explain
the occult meaning of our poems.
“You're not to imagine,”

she'll say, “that they're really, like,
having crushes on each other.”
Nope. Not us. Hold still: I've got some lipstick
and a tube of cobalt somewhere in my coat.

Invasives

Stark Street goes feral for a few moments.
East from 60th Avenue she climbs
up the shoulder of Mt Tabor,
curving up in a cutting, shimmying north,

and then bucking south, before becoming
prim again, a straight Gresham thoroughfare,
smoothing her skirts: butter
wouldn't melt in her mouth.

But when she goes wild on the hill, all bets are off.
Thickets of invasives everywhere. The slopes too steep
for proper lawns: blackberry strangles the shrubbery;
ivy throttles the trees.

Martha points out to me
the massive stems of dead clematis,
dangling like Richard of York's head
from the city gate.

Are they left there for a warning? I ask
She answers no, when they're that big
it's too dangerous to pull the vines down. You don't know
what's up there that will come down with them.

So you cut them at the roots and leave them there,
more like thick and stranded rope than branches,
gray as the sinews of an ox
freeze-dried on the Oregon trail. They sway

and shiver and twist, and do little grisly dances
in the Spring rain. The war goes on: York roses,
Lancaster roses, lickspittle playwrights, virgin queens,
white skeletons twined with the living wood.


in response to this Morning Porch post.

Anger

. . . God in my mouth
As if I did but only chew his name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception. -- Measure for Measure

I have been thinking about rancor.
About the petulant anger of
those of us, used to having, once denied.

I have been thinking of
the turning points of my life:
all of them a stumbling through

a white sheet of flame,
an opacity of anger, to come to
unexpected places beyond.

I am unused to anger, I began
and realized the lie as soon as spoken.
I am old in anger, old in resentment.

What then? What next? I sift through
a scanty toolbox: plastic screwdrivers,
hammers made of chalk,

Chalklines of sugar floss.
Shantideva says the same thing
your grandmother did:

count to ten. And Thich Nhat Hanh
advised a method of confession
that I can't bring to mind.

I tried to write, to inquire,
to apologize, and found myself
iterating my grievances again,

like Thomas Jefferson ticking off the sins
of George the Third, uglifying
what ought to be the most beautiful poem

of democracy. “A decent respect
to the opinions of mankind...”
Maybe that's the problem.

If you are the water ouzel
swim now. Catch the sun, carry it underwater,
wrap it in cold weeds.

Strip off your skin and turn it
inside out, make it a bag for holding
memories. Think.

Now cross, skinless and shivering.
Cross that scrawl of charcoal
on the coarse cement.

Vomit this morning's breakfast,
yesterday's dinner. Let the bile
in your sinuses kiss the coming tears.

It is always something simple, in the end.
Kneel, and press your forehead
against the sand-flecked concrete.

To desire and not to have:
that's all it ever is. That's all it ever is.
Put your skin back on, boy.

Swim back and bring out the sun.
Shake the water out of your wings;
say the shortest prayer you know.

Now we can begin.

Outside the Walls

That's what I want to be. One fish
in the numberless fish of the snow. -- Chase Twichell

Easter is the resurrection: the renewal
of the blood sacrifice, the enshrinement
of killing the innocent to protect the guilty.
Oh yes, we're all on board. Wash while
you sing the alphabet song: wash while
you sing the cathedral program.
You'll never be clean. Not if you strip
the flesh from your fingers: the stain
is in the marrow bone. And in spite of that
we call this Friday good.

This is my last visit to the church,
my dears. Thank you for letting me in.
Thank you for letting me gaze
at your strange and bloody pictures.
I will never tell the truth again. You've won.
I am going to live outside the walls:
I always have, I always will. Still, thank you:
thank you for letting me sit in an alien pew;
thank you for letting me pretend, a while.

What To Tell Her

She came to me
diffident but insistent,
as the dead do,
filled with the urgency to speak.

Would you please
she said, but then worked silently,
internally, like a modern dishwasher
on some fancy setting
for a while.

The last time I saw you,
I said, lest things grow awkward,
was bad times. Goblins
sorting organs in the basement.
I'm glad we're done with that.

Would you tell her,
she finally said. It's always words.
It's funny, the dead
don't care about things anymore.
It's only the words, the words
they're desperate to get right.

Would you tell her I'm sorry, I'm sorry
that I loved her so much.
It was the only thing I could do.

I could tell her that,
I said. But it's only
what any of us would tell our kids,
if we could,
if they could hear it.
I don't think you came
all this way to say just that.

She laughed, suddenly,
so that the curtain stirred.
Ah, you're like her father:
she said, not nearly
so soft and drifty as you seem.

I know what I think
you should tell her, I said.
Tell her you could only protect her
from the things
you could protect yourself from.
She was silent a while.
You don't quite understand yet,
she said, and neither does she.
But say that for now, say that for now.
It's difficult working from this side,
you know: everything's backwards.
It's like trying to back up a U-Haul trailer.

But tell her -- and suddenly
she was fierce -- tell her I love her.
She backed away, as they do, without moving.
Not the messenger you would have chosen,
I know, I said, and we both laughed.
You take what you can get, she said,
and vanished.

Infusion of Red

Your scissors work their way around my ears,
munching my hair like lettuce: thin crunches
that, when the cold steel lays flat
to the temporal bone, sound exactly like
the crackling cartilage under my thumbs
when I work on a difficult shoulder.

You would think a cottonwood tree in Spring,
throwing down wisps of white and gray.
I sweep it up afterwards. Barely enough
to line a mouse's nest. My son's thick brown stuff
fills the dustpan: he could fit out
opulently
every bird and rodent in Portland. Or

you might think
of the frayed cuffs of a gray silk shirt
useless now for going out, but still
sweet enough to toy with absently
when the afternoon sun is vanishing
behind laid courses of cloud. Or --

listen, the truth is
no one's going to think of it all.
Get a shower, man. Wipe down your table.
Think of all you ever knew or dreamed
about working a guarded sacrum:
How with one hand on the ribs,
and one palm cradling the iliac crest,
you will gently, gently begin to rock
the whole frame. Casting off at last.

The same wind that takes
the cottonwood floss over the fence
and that builds Marpa's tower of cloud
to hide the sun, the same wind that
fills the sails of that bloody stubborn bark
easing slowly down the skids into the water:
the very same wind is carrying

in sly hidden packets of transparent air
the crimson, the scarlet, the ruby
screaming red into your blood.
Breathe deep. Be an old man: be a
wicked impossible infusion of red
into the pale world.


In response to this Morning Porch post.

Sometimes Nothing Happens

Sometimes life comes softly to rest
against the pilings, like gleaming
bronze leaf litter, nudging with
the spent wakes of outing boats,
the whole slough a teapot open to the sky
steeping last year's alder leaves.

Sometimes the herons pause, and
turn their slow reptilian heads,
actors with huge presence,
about to roll out their lines:
but they think better of it,
and take one deliberate step instead.

Sometimes the sky breaks into
the banners of angelic armies,
frayed by centuries of jealousy,
where Lucifer and Gabriel have stood
with gloves upraised for twice ten thousand years
that they will never dare throw down.

Montana

Little Bighorn, Bitterroot, Helena, the sticks:
The vicious-minded pony who threw you again and again,
The horses that stood on your chest, the father
who rifled your store of best friends for his wives.
Big sky,
maybe, but not enough room. Time to pack up and go.

Between the deltoid and the pecs
of the Continental Divide
Is a ranch where you and your friends spent the summer
in a teepee, pretending to be the blowsy barmaid
on Gunsmoke, not quite clear maybe
on what that was code for. Pouring drinks
for thirsty men seemed like it might be fun.

Time to pack up and go.
From here, everything flows to Gulf, everything
turns muddy and dirty at last. So you struggle up
and over the shoulder, and look at the wide country
where everything flows clean to the Columbia,
to the Oregon Country, the green trees and the gentle rain.

It was all long ago: the Divide has sunk beneath
the horizon, and Hood stands as far east
as any of us will go. My dearest wanderer
between the mountains and the sea, it marks you,
it makes me reach for the doorpost, it calls me
in dream and memory, that tilt of the world,
that opening of the sky, that taste of
the bitter root of things,
that sudden extraordinary sweetness.

When We Meet

There are so many things I don't know.
I don't know if, when we meet, it will be
within the bounds of decorum
to scoop you against my chest and hold you
for the space of seven heartbeats.

I don't even really know
if the joy will hold that long,
if the leaves' quick gesturings,
refracted through a foreign window
and brought back in a buck-basket
(dumped out on a muddy bank,
to the mirth of all beholders)
will mean then what they mean now.

I don't know how to call back
that wandering truant to the nest,
and I don't know if I should.
But I know that if I press my palms together,
and open them slowly, light flares up, like
a stray drop of butter burning on the stove.

Natural History

The rain, a thick boxer who never goes down,
sucks air for another round. The dirty gray sky

is a tarp tied down on a pickup load
of stained mattresses and plastic toys: the scraps

may flutter but nothing's coming loose. Maybe
there's work in Oregon. Maybe not.

A thrash in the river, like a snag but moving
slowly into shore, something huge

but invisible: a sea lion, or a sturgeon
striking at a school of -- something, that

spatters the water like black coins. Time
was we would gone down to the water

hoping to see wonders. Today we hunch
our shoulders and back off to the spine of the levee:

anything that hunts small helpless running things
is no friend of ours.


In response, not very obviously, to this Morning Porch post

A Stab At It

I don't want to be a poet, as it's reckoned.
Don't want interviews. Don't want “A Life,”
prim or dirty. My life is just a life.
I don't want to drone, and be the spill
that yet more flies cluster to, flies of
“am I good enough?” or “will they want me now?”

(You'll never be good enough, they'll never want you.
Say “screw them!” and get on.)

Only, when the fog snags in the doug firs
over across the river there, like the veil
of an exasperated bride, shrugged off
and dragged across the caterer's table, catching on
the prickly knobs of condiment containers --

No, start again. When the silvered fog threads
through the clotted awkward limbs of douglas firs,
and radio towers lift their slender necks to heaven,
their single crimson eyes gazing right at God's --

No, not quite it. When that white gauze coils,
spotted with bright dots of blood, and climbs
the West Hills to the tune of rain that never stops,
to the sough of wind that never steadies --

Well, closer. But you see, I like to take a stab it it.
That's all.

Glasswork

It shouldn't take long to disassemble.
The temporal bone, where time lives;
the ethmoid, of its self-same kind;
the occiput,
with its handy knob for hanging hats --

a simple screwdriver, wielded well,
will do the job. A tap or two, and the parietals
should come in half like walnut shells,
and all the thoughts dash frantic round the room,
like dogs after weeks of rain
let out into the yard.

My frontal bone,with its eye-ridge
(don't tell me the proto-Germans
never tried it out with Neanderthals)
should pop open
like the hatchback of a Honda. And my jaw,
should any Hebrew hero lack for arms,
is stashed there like a rifle in its rack.

And finally, having scooped
the pulpy stuff of cleverness away,
you'll come to the almond
amygdala, gleaming, and inlaid
with rage and desire like parquetry
or gold enameling, and hidden under that,
only glasswork made by tender hands:
fragile bowls of sky or midnight blue.