Our ghosts ripen within us
making us tender.
Looking behind,
the brown hills bruise
with distance.
Category: Small Ideas
Why I Want to Draw
A dispatch from the 60s.
My sight is fading fast.
Every few months I buy new, stronger reading glasses.
In you never miss the water until the well runs dry mode I now realize how
much I’ve lived in my head.
In my own stories.
Literally not seeing what’s in front of my nose.
I cling to this soft pencil
hoping it will focus what’s left of my light.
Some Little Ones
Branding
Used to be what men did to animals.
What owners did to slaves.
Now embraced by the Great Society.
Our new ideal.
To be branded.
Over Time
Our bodies begin to obey our pleasures
in middle age. Our laps open to receive our loves.
Our eyes dissolve the hard news into soft grey fur.
Even in sleep we weave up dreams
from the colored rags of our days
to soften our steps.
Road Trip
Stuck in Stuckeys with truckers starin’,
she’s on display in downtown Herrin.
The Forest
Certain African tribes believe there are gradations of death, ending with completely dead forever.
The forest sleeps, wake her up.
The forest sleeps and her children are afraid.
The forest sleeps too long.
The honey is scarce and hard in the hive.
The animals fly through the nets.
The leaves hiss like panthers as we walk loudly,
clapping and singing songs of no meat.
The forest is sleeping like death.
If we wake her she will feed us.
If we wake her the babies will grow fat.
If we wake her the leaves will cool the huts.
But she grows thin in sleep
and we grow white with dust.
We are her children under the moon.
We slap the bottoms of each others’ feet
to keep up our singing.
Before she is more dead.
Before she is completely dead forever.
Birds Drop
Birds drop each through a thin space
where stringy clouds catch
and unravel in their beaks.
Sunshine is cut and cooled with blue
and their lace bones inspire.
On earth we slog through a clabbered mist,
thick with clots of gnats and pollen,
and where your loosed breath
washes into my mouth.
Shearing Season
A fleece arrives in a black plastic bag
in a brown cardboard box
and unfolds in one piece
on the porch like a white buffalo rug.
The street is quiet at 10 a.m. and
she takes her time spreading the wool in the sun,
rustling out the dust.
The heat melts the lanolin.
Her arms glisten with it and smell of farm.
Soon she will make something of it.
But today
being in warm animal presence
is enough.
New England Heart
For an unseasonably warm day
February and the daffodils are nosing
through my midwestern lawn,
February rain bringing March flowers.
Leaving school the path is daylit and people
warble good byes, arms waving from open cars.
Bicycles are dusted; children lose their hats.
It’s all wrong.
My New England heart wants
to return to her own dark kitchen
where yellow light puddles
like warm tallow on the oil cloth;
wants to boil beans, soaked and swollen
to tenderness, until they slip
from their jackets,
smoke and shimmy.
Tiny Ideas
Little things I think about sometimes
Amber
It’s my story, too.
Old sap
surrounding something vague,
possibly precious.
Her Tattoo
- based on a true story
A hand’s span beneath her belly button
it read:
EAT ME
with an arrow for clarity.
By her ninth month
it was billboard big and blurred.
Folding back the clinic sheet
the intern saw it
above the baby’s crown.
Schism
How glad the fissiparous paramecium!
When she cracks she fashions full families
out of her fractures.
When she tears herself apart
she produces a happy proliferation
of her own point of view.
How sad for us
having risen above her,
to have pulled ourselves together
to stand so alone.
Irish is Dying
Irish is dying,
so Pat and I, roots deep in the peat,
are off to community college to save it.
We learn
there are consonants, slender and broad.
Slender as in si, pronounced she.
Broad, as in gaoth, pronounced gway.
Nouns are declining around us
and nothing is as it seems.
Teach looks easy, until it turns into tschalk.
Shibh, impossible to puzzle out,
turns out to be shiv, something I’m ready to use.
We learn
to say “Is anyone at all satisfied?”
and “He is happy, but she is not happy.”
both of which we commit to memory,
knowing they’ll be useful in Dublin or Belfast.
We learn
there are very few speakers of Irish left in Ireland
and none at all at community college.
Small Poems de Terre 