Volumes

you bring me books
the way I offer flowers to the ones I love
and I know I'm on your mind
when you begin to read
for me.

or if not, at least you speculate -
you ask what might compel, and unlike daisies,
your choices always last the years.
Good or lousy, humor and nuance,
your choices gift me thus;
I need not choose.

Mistrusting God and day's end,
and the folding back of cold sheets,
and the smell of secret fear,
still, I rely upon your taste.

When I am dead and gone, a shelf of works
left in your name, will be as much my life preserved
as pictures in a family album,

as much a key to Scripture
as the double helix.

Our children, years from now, will wonder
shrug, and turn the page.

ten thousand to one

there are
ten thousand imperfections
and just one life

there are in fact as many
as snowflakes on the hill, beneath the skids;
as the soft cells in a freckle,
as the birds above.

but still just one.

I have drawn my breath
against the headwind
of prevailing loves, to ponder
more, and more,
and every imperfection cedes to Now. I reach
for the searching root of you
and choose;
to pull you into me, to watch
our bodies twine, to find
a cradle big enough.

ten thousand imperfections,
and this our consolation:
to loose the cords of longing,
be undone
and loved again,
again, again,
before tomorrow.

sore and sorry for my crimes,
still I am just one life.

St. Lucy's Hour

At night, the bus stop on the Broadway bridge
is only itself, but more so -
December sixteen, eighteen hundred hours:

the gritty glare of lamps that barely
penetrate the dim,
the cold air, the bare-headed shock of it,
the sudden sharp beams and the wheels
of the traffic,
the lateness of the day.

You tell me you're having trouble with your eyes.
You can't see where you're going, and there's pain -
you're laying awake in the dark.

Advent.

Looking back as I always do
to where I've been, across the tracks --
past the mill,
the school and the working class houses --
I search for our steeple,
the church where we meet, and
it's gone.

It's gone,
and worse --

Eighteen hundred hours. To my right,
an old woman, waiting;
to my left, three boys, teenagers
drunk and rapping, they're waiting --
and you, I'm glad you can't see this:
the veil is the color of lead, and the sky,
and the snow with exhaust from the cars.
A pall,
a caul,
a shadow of doubt or premonition.

You stayed home today, the darkest of days,
and groaned beneath the weight of it,
nine months and three; anniversary.
The beams of the roof, the life of the womb,
the wait.

la quinta blessing

you are between pages,
crisp, anonymous sheets
without stain or imprint,
hotel-clean, as if no word,
no gesture, had ever come
before you.

in this room, amongst the pillows
and the pools of tungsten light,
you can more clearly smell the weight
of what you bring in with you.

whatever you eat there,
the fruits appearing at the door as if
by Providence, the Garden
is hushed -- sin falls like an apple,
a drop of wine on the tongue;
the earth rebounds a single drum
beat, the heel of your hand
on the mattress.

you are between blank pages
in a book, a calendar of days erased.
ease your hands into the black
depths of your luggage, and bring forth
whatever you thought you'd need:

your pride, your hopes, your shame;
pictures of your kids, clean socks,
shaving kit, memories of other rooms.

write into these leaves
your uncertainty.
let your love-making pass unjudged.
sleep deeply,
as if you had invented
the method.

untitled

I'm coming down with something;
tis the season.

there's a small stain on my kid's t-shirt,
a spot of blood that escaped the paper napkin
in the dentist's chair. they sedate him,
because he fights --
the fleshwounds of childhood seem
to him
wholly unnecessary.
at six,
knows his choice is taken from him
against his will.

"Your dental tools destroyed my mightiness,"
he cries, accusing,
to his kind-eyed doctor.
"This was NOT a good idea,"
sobbing angrily.

My bones ache. My tongue hurts,
where I bit into the flesh
struggling to pull him from the cab.
The dark tear and its pain
seem to have spread,
to my elbows, wrists,
my heart.

This is the betrayal of parenthood:
the pain you cause from duty.
And sifting through your words to your child
at the end of the day,
looking for any harm inflicted
in your negligence.

I prayed that any pain in him would
come to me instead.
Prayed for any fever, any throb or
fear. Begged God to spare him
from the common cold.

But my actions still endanger him.

I am flesh too, and weak
and angry at the God who still
keeps mum
on certain subjects.

Half-asleep on my arm,
my boy, my only child --
give me all your pain, and yet
with love,
there's always more to come.

Dean Asleep

Here is my friend:
slack, soul turned inward
betrayed by blood
and he is now apart from the world
in a cocoon of grace, the white sheets,
and the strange cold key of machines
their pumps and whirs, the pulse
of birdsong bleating
he's losing weight spendthrift,
can hardly afford it
he is on the tracks, facing down the years
facing down another lifetime
before his wife, his child,
his ordination
facing down the past of desserts, cigars
and coffee,
of hard liquor and bad drugs,
of a tough Norwegian father,
and the years of wanting.

I can see him asleep, even though
the door to his room is closed.

He has staff; he'd be gratified.
Code Blue twice,
and they give him a girl with a sequined
sweater, and a laptop,
on a desk with wheels. She watches only,
she's in Continuity.
As a theater man he'd understand.
Her job is to watch.

I sing and sing.
I hold his hand, and though God
is his co-pilot, I only know standards.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.

I kiss his hands, which I've never done,
would never do.
I love him and love him, and hope
he will wake.

spirograph

the moon sets again
and again, a spirograph pattern centripetal spin
pushed along by my hand on my landscape
horizon, black on blue, and the sinking disk
goes down, goes down again, goes down
each moon phase a face of some one
that I love, and these loves
these orbiting satellites pulled to my breast,
my gravity, pulled into ovals and circles
repeatedly, overlapping paths, a design,
some grand design, the lines that shift and shift
minutely as the weeks and years,
as I spin at my molten core, keeping them
always in view, the ones sometimes cold and
distant, the ones that veer close to me catching
my breath, my heart pounds,
and the small moon of my child, here in my out-
stretched palm, always circling --

I am turning my back on myself forever,
knowing they can only be this close, or that,
but my face needs their light, I only can see
by that light, by their faces turned to me.

Lover, turn to me -
husband, turn to me -
friend, and friend, and friend --

child, who will only look over his shoulder
who sometimes suddenly rises before me,
full faced expectant, I am the plain,
I am the flat river before him, reflecting,
and he is the sun, the center,
the only thing that really matters
anymore.

change

pray the roof stays up.
pray for rain.

i used to hang work in a gallery,
two thousand funky square feet in a hundred
year old building, second floor -
Athens, Georgia.

sometimes, if the weather was heavy
as it often was, the water
ran down the walls from upstairs
where a broken skylight
admitted pigeons at night -
streaming behind the wires that
held the frames of pictures,
wetting the floorboards.

I'd lay in bed, listening to the rain,
and pray (to the God I didn't yet believe in)
that we wouldn't be sued
for destruction of property
by some starving artist.

now i'm with the church.

I still work under a leaky roof,
petition a sky that won't cooperate,
and lay awake -
listening for rain.

* * * * *

resurrection (through the wringer)

a seamless tunic, gambled for and lost
before that, a towel around the waist

a purple robe, a torn curtain (rent asunder)
two bloodied linens, and before that
a folded dinner napkin

endless loads of laundry gathered, stinking
hauled in heavy baskets down the stairs, down
staggering into darkness, into rank despair
gathered, sorted, waiting there

pressed upon the backs of folded flesh
rows and rows of them in pews, fresh scrubbed

or stiffly into creased and thin-stretched worn
by a hungry child, served not or serves himself

what came out, what whiteness blinding
sewn whole as cloth was first conceived, no seam
no binding, no warp or weft except what time
allowed; if you met Christ on the road
what was he wearing?

here in the basement, I brood among the piles
I search the scent of life's decay, for the hope
no bleach could hold, and I listen to the drum
of the dryer as it rolls

I imagine the flapping of a woman's garment
as she runs, through the moist morning of
my Midwestern spring,
as she runs as stumbling children will downhill
her mind a blank, clean bandage or a flag
a white flag, my surrendered reason

he is not here
he is risen

magic 8 ball

I cannot hold you;
Not even the idea of you belongs to me -

separated by a ruler's length of conscience
that spans a lifetime.

Every morning, I buy a cup of coffee
and while I wait, I shake the Magic 8 Ball.
Yes, it says. Absolutely. Every time.

stirred

"What good is cancer in April?" -- Lou Reed

unruly my bones
ring together stirred

on my clothes line
five or six sets of chimes blow
and a whirligig or two goes too
set in the earth by the garden
pinwheels and fans

unruly my bones

Jon was spared in the last round
of layoffs but says he felt the breeze
of the axe, as it passed him
by

Chris' MRI came back, clean

and my bones
ring together stirred unseen
like a baby moves in the belly
impatient with spring

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it,

but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

-- John 3:8

seashore

I wonder if Zen mind
is as good
as the seashore 15 minutes north of Jacksonville.

I'm talking about
the eternity of a horizon
and the waves of the womb.
The smells and sounds of sex and death that merge
into sand, that lose their name in the long stretch
of sand, of ocean basalt
and microscopic creatures hewn
unto the infinite, the atomies;
of God in everything.

When I am taken.

When I am taken up,
my mind will be like this -- emptied.
Devoid of person
and filled instead with the world
devoid of metaphor.

death certificate

The final disposition:
where we ceased to monitor your affairs
or rather, the government declares
its hands are washed of you.

The servant stands
his back to you, and one hand laves the other
in the white noise from the tap.
Later he undoes the cap of a pen,
kept warm near his heart; a line
of ink flows out,
embracing a name, it is done.

The cause of your death
was simply ceasing;
the beat beneath your breast
at first off-tempo, then
unbroken line. You stopped
moving forward into when, you ceased
at then. Arrested.

Or if you prefer,
your flesh was stilled, while life
flowed outward into light
like ink on paper, clean perpetual
and left behind the name.

Hear then, the sound of the pen
consigning your remains, the last resolve.
Into your hands, O Lord,
we commend all for whom we pray,
entrusting on this day to someone
far away,
this bag of bones

To journey on alone, and unremarked
wherefore the servant's hands are white
as snow; and on alone, undone
across the untracked landscape of
your final disposition.

the day after
one tipsy winter evening spent
making out in your car

I am crowded with disjunct sensations:

For instance, my back is killing me.
At my age, what I can do in the moment
limber, hungry,
leaves a bruise
(from the steering wheel, I figure)
And the tops of my thighs burn; and my left knee
from the emergency brake
which I ignored at the time.

a lingering sweetness,

to know you still could

do it, that way, you remembered --
without being asked.

Though it's been years. Like dreaming,
unfair, unavoidable. Or nearly.

in the suspension of belief
required
to justify betrayal.

You are left then,
the unfulfilled requests of
days now gone. And this
alone, this emptiness of history
would be sufficient unto shame...

the bruise, and the sweetness,
tell me I'm alive,
that some man somewhere can


balanced, alive alive-o
undone, unbound and unselfconscious
on his outstretched palm
fingers curled upward, inward,
while I thank my maker.

lost at sea

separated by a ruler's length of conscience
the repelling force of magnets face to face
a gap alive with light, and minute signals,
alive with atomies condensed in finite space

and when you're far away, temptation fills the void
the narrative unwinding, raveled skeins of days
brush harmlessly and fray and snap across the oars
shipped leaden to the bow, borne back by endless waves

the airy threads will still do up the mast
true north is only Heaven, compass-cracked
and love is only salt, is light and salt together
along the beam of motes that binds us, back to back

standing by part 2

consider the attention to orbit
and trajectory:
in any finite space, two people
in their patterns interact,
and pass through their clocks of days
like the mailman,
appearing on the doorstep, on the same page
always;
we circle and spin, towards and away
sometimes so carefully that I suppose
you'd call it
dancing.
Routine is intimacy.
If I look up or look away, it's just
my cue, the bell
of your attention or neglect.
Tempting though
to lean in once, skipping
off your atmosphere,
to watch the sparks.

standing by

sometimes, when you smile at me in a crowd
I pretend not to see you.
it's the dumbest thing. but I want you
all to myself, in those instants; so badly in fact
that I'd rather you didn't touch me at all.

when you smile in a way that's new to me,
I check the impulse to reach for it, hands outstretched --
to warm myself before you hungrily.

so shamefully familiar are your noises,
your expressions, that it's best
to turn away once in a while, to let you be.
no one really wants to be studied so closely.
x-rayed by love, anticipated,
surmised.

if i ignore you when you walk into the room,
please don't take it to heart;
all down the length of me I'm listening.

i'm standing by.