Poetry

Most poetry is sitting in plain sight—

a cigarette on the lips of a line cook, 

skateboarders rattling on the bricks as they glide past Seattle Central,

shepherds’ purse and kale growing in the sidewalk seams

In spite of this abundance 

my eyes turned milky,

cataracts shielding me from the beauty of the world:

a nursing mother bent over her baby hidden by a blanket,

sticky beer rings on an amber table,

driver of bus #358, ever treating drunks with dignity 

now even the most poetic image doesn’t stir me

I’m a dead man sleepwalking through the living

I want and take and have and want again

ears stopped against the cries of the hurting

But I ran through fields with burrs on my hem

Slept with my arms cradling mastiffs

Saw the glowing algae by moonlight

Swam naked

Was robbed, drunk, robbed again

Possessed of an urgent question 

and a delicate flower of pain 

all that was a long time ago, I remember,

when I used to memorize Eliot and Keats…

but don’t worry too much about any of this

 

I’ll just reach for my phone 

one more time

before I fall asleep

I locked the door

I locked the door against the stupidity of my children

Their needs and grimaces

Their whines

Why can I not lie in peace with a locked door?

Why do they arouse in me anger frustration pity longing to protect

anxious to provide ideas for how to solve for x

But I am supposed to be napping impervious

With the door locked

and they have not yet begun to throw their bodies against it as they sometimes do

More so i prayed for them loved longed yearned them into being and now ha 

ha its not that i don’t want them—never that—

but if they could pause on wanting only me…

and let me rest,

and let me rest 

Learning the truth

You find

it hard

learning the truth 

about me

damn though

you find it hard

learning the truth

Gaza

Don't act surprised

to see violets scream out

from the bombed rubble:

pain is where hope hides.

I am swimming into a new year

I am swimming into a new year

and the old years pull back

like salty waves

that I inhale

like tugging ropes like

all my old hopes and

it will be hard not to go under 

even though I tell myself 

I am better now 

than when I was fifteen

and twenty three and thirty four

even thirty four but

I am swimming into a new year

and please let what I love love me

let what gets carried to sea forget me

and please self please forgive me

my little raincloud and i

my anger is my best friend

but s/he's been gone lately, hence tears

my little daughter storm of storms this morning screamed

mom you don't know how I feel

of course i told her the truth: 

feelings don't matter much at all

while the tinnitus alarm rang false! false!

and Christ's tomb beckoned, gaping open

maybe all along my little raincloud and i

only want/ed attention

maybe i can spoon feed her nourishment

steer us by elbow around the sin

our trouble is the death in the way

of that birth, a hard and bitter agony

the white cloths, the emptiness

and nothing nothing? to fill it up

behold my predilection

staring into the middle space beneath the hygienist's hand

too tired to care if plaque water will make my neck smell bad

my sunglasses are motocross or construction

the right shape but shit production

Dr. Stinch seems down

so am I b/c I need a thousand-dollar crown

goddamn the sag and the wear

these softening lines, this fading hair

was i a god to me?

where was i gonna get to?

everything i wanted is here with me

behold, my predilection

Near the Fraser

 two-something miles from home to town

I walked all winter to keep from drowning

gravel, no margin, golf course, frozen pond

I held my breath to see the beaver and her dam

and the gash of the creek, awash with sound

the meadow a tawny fireman's sheet

split by the creek like pages on a spine

held smooth and flat between the arms of trees,

a rookery crowding the tallest of their crowns

from a river of crows that ran eye to horizon

What can I do, now that I'm gone

from that place of silence and cold

Is there still a dead branch inside my body

where the bark is bleached to white

where the arms reach out in a fierce, sharp pose

and the hard trunk arches up?

Does a train still scream through a blanket of fog 

to deliver longing and dreams

does its whistle still blow over snow and ice

to fill up the carnal night?

Or do I only have dishes and toilets and screens

and the lonely landscaped block

is there still a table—a wilderness feast—

here, in married life?