THE WEDDING

There is a man here, present in subtraction,

in the whispers of airplane wreckage,

the coils of Alaskan frost—and in the spark

of his son’s sad eyes, who’s space is filled

with a painful chorus of your father

would be so proud.

Every Pride drives deeper, edging

those sad eyes somewhere else,

sealing flush the gap

that should be filled with the squint

of his eyes—the bounce of his laughter—

the pressed white shirt

ruined red with wine—

Pride steals the place of everything:

his crackling skin—his quiet musk—

the weight of his hand

warming my shoulder.     

THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT WATCHES FIELD HOCKEY

She loves the spittle and uneven grass of hockey on the mall the same way

she loves the curling clouds lapping around her neck, as the heat dips 

orange and crimson, and for a moment, she watches us:

how swampy our shirt-necks must feel and how boring it must be,

that we rarely think about the shadow lengthening across our field,

rifling passes to each other over the uneven grass. 

They only play in that spectacular sliver of evening, she says,

the moment that knows how it feels to look up at me, in a passing way,

and say: I've forgotten how beautiful living feels

and how incredible it is to sweat

under that shifting shadow, like the Egyptian must have,

forgetting how unique and monstrous

that pyramid was, as he took his stick in his hands and used it

to strike a round rock with all the precision

his eternal soul could muster.

THE DROWNING

             July 20, 2012

Something massive—the unbearable and impossible

of violence, random and ugly—big,

bigger than the hole in my chest—bigger than the stall

of my mind—bigger, even, than all the words. 

I am without recourse, without exit strategies, strategies

of any kind—my mind and body colliding

bursting for beauty or love or forget

like a man held deep under water.

This is drowning—struggling to empathize with a man eating

the face of another man—or with the bikers, gripping their handlebars,

glimpsing, riding on—or even with the boy two bowls stoned,

watching the youtube surveillance video in a cold apartment

he shares with his father, who will wake him one morning

to explain there was another shooting in Colorado, at the premier

of a superhero movie, and that twelve humans are dead

this instant for that reason, and his voice will tremble

not with those specifics but with everything that burdens—

the senseless, the horrific, the daunting, the inevitable—

the heavy and the unyielding.    

CARRYING THE TUNE

The moiled reed in my mouth, the untuned fuzz 

of your piano, out of breath and losing time,

I sacrifice notes, use my right hand to point our place

on the page. We had an audience, and they forgave us:

we weren’t performing for music, but you and I, mother,

never could admit ourselves to something like that. 

We stumbled “If I Were a Rich Man,” ended “Sunrise, Sunset”

in early evening, and I walked you out of confusion

into confusion, to the bedroom where you wished us

to go back and perform it perfect, but you had already

forgotten anything beyond the burden of awake.

*

I have a half-memory of walking my elementary school

linoleum dinge halls, half-lit as a dust-storm,

and Scott Stover, who’s great-grandfather, or great-

great grandfather had opened the first general store

in our town’s history.  He sat against the painted cinderblocks,

expelled from our class for some anonymous third-grade offense. 

I don’t remember why, or what reason, or if there was—

but I remember taking my hand and throwing his skull

against the wall, as a chimp would crack a coconut

against a rock.  He was concussed, although that word,

concussed, didn’t carry the same weight of brain juice

and spinal fluids then as it does now, after the double-

murder suicide of Chris Benoit, after Junior Seau ate

a bullet and his family allowed a posthumous study

of his brain, as if the scrambles of a shuddered mind

might be a direct correlation to whatever thoughts

consume a juggler in the months and minutes  

and fractions of minutes before he looks at his pins,

methodically rotating, ticking and spinning in the air,

before he closes his palms against his chest

and allows the cascade into earth, like lit matches

falling into the bowl of a toilet. You spoke to me about it,

never able to admit the action that was within my hands,

that your sweet son did look at him, and with some level

of awareness, though I have no memory of what this instant

could possibly have felt like, snap hard his head

against that wall.  You were the purity running through

my DNA.  There’s a weak metaphor somewhere

about your soul contrasted with your pancreas—

you gave everything to the spirit, and left nothing

for your body.  Sometimes I wake up from myself

wondering how I have these memories, the path

of destruction left in my landmonster wake:

I don’t remember why friends won’t speak to me,

how these street signs ended up in my bed, or if I enjoyed

the way his coconut head echoed down the hall.

*

I seize a narrow gap between the closing doors and the mob

packing the metro, fleeing the harsh excuse me of a woman, her words 

eviscerated by the seal of the subway doors, drifting into the chorus

of abandoned guilts, long forgotten missed notes.

I rise before my stop, and for a shuddering instant,

watch a thick middle-aged man, his bratwurst hand

on the shoulder of an old woman.  Her frail arm reaches

to tightly grip his mitt.  She trembles in the crowd.  

He taps her shoulder with his thumb—flickering, keeping time.

*

It’s been two years since I cut locks

off your cold head, since I twisted

the wedding band off your empty finger.

You hiya Will and I hiya Ma back, we walk

under elms and sycamores, listening

for the songs of cardinals and blue-jays,

watch herons glide away to the far shore.

The space you left grows, sucking into itself

hikes, and weddings, and anniversaries

draped in your shadow, song lyrics ablaze like tinder

when they’re sang: a lil water came

now we’re floatin’ on errythang.

*

The moiled reed in my mouth, the untuned fuzz 

of your piano, out of breath and losing time,

I sacrifice notes, use my right hand to point our place

on the page. We had an audience, and I wish we hadn’t—

that our last duet could’ve been without the pressure

of performance, that it could have had the focused inertia

of rehearsal, you taking the time to help me play

the notes right—that it could’ve been a hike, us improvising

thick trunks of harmony, wind bursting in melody,

sound, a golden forest rising towards the sun.

SAXOPHONE

Tethered to my French rust tenor, old as music, I sat inside woodshed washed melodies, withdrawal Harlem harmonies, my lips and fingers reverberating Dexter till I played drunk, Trane till I split rage, Sonny till I stood on the bridge and knew pain’s lonely breeze.  I watered that inherited pain in a terrarium garden, whisky heavy, till it sounded almost like jazz belonged to me. 

My fingers learned to race the spines of mountains, my lips learned to dip and heave thick timber trunks, my ears memorized the architecture of Birdland and Watts.  I sang their heroine solos at the tips of suburban cul-de-sacs, threw their tormented arpeggios at the glass doors of closed strip-malls, locked myself inside their craft as if it was my own.

I abandoned it.  Shut the horn away in my closet.  The borrowed pain sat empty in my hands, untrained and awful.  My tongue slurped gin and fluttered nonsense. My fingers ran scales up the spines of women who couldn’t love me. “What are you doing?” they’d ask.  “Practicing,” I’d say. 

Mother’s cancer body ceiling collapsing, boyhood walls melting around me, I was a child shivering naked on a lonely stage. When she died, my father slipped, “your mother’s gone” and I couldn’t find tears, instead, my mouthpiece, and unchained Harlem and Watts and Dex and Trane and Sonny and burst rehearsed pain, shuddering the Rocky Mountains, the levies exploding, blasting dust out the bell.

BASHO AND THE DEATH OF HIS MASTER, YOSHITADA

I.

Summer rides innocent as a kingfisher skimming water, breeze shimmering.

The countryside teems, luminescent against the still night.

The moon is pastoral.  The moon is everything.

Under cicada shells

sweet fireflies swim breathless

forgetting to dream

II. 

Autumn is kerosene’s slow burn, dusk anticipating snow. 

Yoshitada thins.  We toss light verses to dusk, ornaments

waiting against a magnolia tapestry.

Pear tastes bittersweet

unaware of the season

music understands

III.

Winter has nothing to do with anything.  It’s the brittle

beards of samurai drinking themselves lonely into night.

The monk sits calm--a dead carp suspended in ice.

Yoshitada my friend

hair dimmed to the scalp

lonely as bonfire

IV.

Spring snow sifts blossom petals, a Koan slips into the wind.

The moon looms, lantern of another universe.

The water is warming without you. 

Left for wandering

robin eggs rest in their nest

burdening the branch

UNISEX RESTROOM IN THE COLFAX 7-11

The plastic placard labeled Employees must wash hands before returning to work 

stares at me as if it invented passive aggression amidst the fresh rank, feral

combustion, the kamikaze rainbow of browns on a canvas of bleach.  I am Clint Hill

frantically climbing the trunk of a Lincoln Continental stretch limousine. 

Maybe his sphincter felt the crack first, for his brain to catch up he had to abandon 

his digestive fail-safes.  Or he fancied his asshole a fire-hose, relishing the moment

of singular inertia.  He’s a sadist, finding comfort in his fecal closet, praying

his heart to stop, so he can rest, locked here forever.  He hates me, my excesses,

my employment, my splendor of dying retired in a luxurious tomb, buried

alongside a PERA account held from my checks.  He’s a student of revolution,

finding the seams of civilization for which to wedge his silent protest, degrading

the pillars of the free world, till they crumble around his pantless legs.  

He's Serrano, seeking grace through the profane, chasing the perfect timbre

of piss in a jar, to make sunlight soar.  Or maybe he's Pollock, just going for a shit,

the plainness of vinyl walls calling to him

with a sadness, quiet and infinite.  

INNINGS

In a time they called 1983,

a man called himself Michael, a woman

called herself Cathy, and they invented

partitions of activity

called innings. 

They stacked nine, composing a game

called baseball.  They grew a town

called Baltimore, and created birds,

called Orioles.  They named

Baltimore’s baseball team

after the birds.

They invented apartments 

fabricated air-conditioning units

for walls, so they could stay cool

while the Orioles sweltered

in Baltimore. 

They sprouted other towns

with names like St. Louis,

Toronto, created more birds,

so the Orioles could compete

while they watched, cool

from air-conditioning.

When they grew tired of watching Orioles

in Baltimore, and the air became too cold,

the man called Michael, and the woman

called Cathy, took the seventh inning 

and split it in two, inventing

a time to stretch, together

in their apartment.

Nearby, in a place

they called Arlington,

across a river

they called Potomac,

thousands of mushrooms

popped from the soil,

spaced in perfectly measured

columns and rows.