Over that tire sit the one called Chickadee
Known round the way to the steel-fist hickory
Dandelion neck and the thumbtack boots
Dirty pearl gloves and the brandywine suits
Married Lady Crow, she an ugly fine mess
Black as the folds in her crinoline dress
They sulk and she hiss and he drag on the smoke
Coiled like a whip from his turn with the yoke
Hunched like the river man water turned tame
Eyes like the holy man lost to the Name
Scratch in his shoe and a badge from the state
Chances out west and a body in the crate
Angel for his momma gone cotton at her death
Angel didn’t speak though he stumbled at her breath
And don’t he pass nights pickin’ zydeco-song
Purrin’ in the dark like the day ain’t long

There's an older brother on the hill
and the little one buried
given in spirit to red summer

Maybe the words came from a film
A blade needs dulling and there's hope
of melodrama in the downcast eyes

But it's beginning to rain
His leather glove drips clay water
and the family doesn't own a tv

My father adjusted the crooked metal
above ours, and I watched Fred Rogers
sing about the anger humming in my ears

When the static gave ground,
I dug fingernails into the piled rug
olive. drab. corrosive. All hail King Friday

On Sundays we drove past signs-
brown as tree trunks, words burnt orange
dividing the cragged Adirondacks

The older brother is past gratitude
for rain that hides his visions
and how they echo the clouds

In black our man makes heavy
purposed strides to the umber hilltop
You can only stall so long

(When 1990’s thief stole the
Oldsmobile Sedan, he made
some distance and surveyed
the back seat:
Props, puppets, a sweater.
Nobody but nobody
is immune when the pangs explode
like impossible starlight in a cave
Mr. Rogers found his car
returned the next morning)

What else is what remains
I can still see my father's profile
unshaven, and the truck's torn vinyl

My hand won't be balm to his shoulder
and it won't be light. It will be a promise
of time, gathered in the fading color.

To my dark-haired light-eyed L-train pixie with the sun in your mouth the pert flashing lashes and ingenue legs crossed delicately at the ankles- I’m sorry if I stare. It’s a problem ever since I came out wet and wide-eyed gaping at the helpful nurses with their white cleavage that never gave me the chance to cry and I can’t guarantee that in ten years I’ll be attenuated to the faint secondary lines tracing down your slim limbs or the little wrist I imagine encircling with lumbering convex thumb and index while you cradle The New Yorker and raise the toe of one sandaled heel to graze the outside of the worn khaki office pants in slow audacious circles implying a universe of stars and I whisper something in your small clean ear that gives rise to an impish grin spurring sly corners of your lips telegraphing teasing intentions and rolling me over like a train on the flat prairies where Indians hunting buffalo could only watch in fascination or pretend nonchalance at what was about to change them forever but I don’t pretend anything I’m too old for that twenty-five is past the point of feigned composure and I whisper something more that puckers the beginnings of your grin because it’s a little too risqué here in the underground even by your alarmingly liberal tastes and even in the throes a man should take hold of himself but I choose to believe you’re secretly pleased that I’m occasionally beyond such limits and won’t leave for wide-shouldered square-jawed rich-white heroes and think yes, something with an even keel might be worth trying on, something whose tongue wags less when it’s covetous and who might leave you of all people a little pleasantly uncertain because let’s confess, God put us together but gave you the ball and the court, made me something that must repeat a promise not to fall too deep, not to admit a mystic belief in extremes to anyone but myself in dark hours if you’ll only trust there’s some modicum of moderation latent in my chemicals made to regulate these awful salacious whims when they threaten to swamp the poor beach in tsunamis and jag-toothed sharks and with time recede to regular tides overlapping their bounds only once or twice in a blue moon but on balance free of that unreliable word that awful haunting hunting dog I’ve been escaping over months and years that word unreliable my little elfin charm and one day I’ll watch you sunlit silhouetted by our picture window and the whole house translucent transoms and open oriels and when you turn I’ll melt my face to the world’s most benign smile and consult my newspaper or gently correct a child spooning soggy messes onto the covered table playing the good mate like a method actor so forgive me today pixie love if I take the pink lobe of your sweet sugar ear between my teeth just to see the delicious O of your shocked red mouth and make tiny indents you can touch for a fading moment with the whorled tips of reproachful fine fingers.

Tail

.

Snorkle

Dream #12: Indiana

In all the city’s open rooms
where we’d begged
and fought for scraps
the lights reached
a degree of brightness
unfriendly to older eyes

And so I left my girl
and you left yours
to play it straight for a change

My old car, the proven
rusted-gold jalopy
appeared on the outskirts
amid climbing graffiti and darker smoke
that made us glad to drive
west, beneath the big sky

Billowing magnet clouds drew us
past the midwest. We stopped
only once, to rescue a dog-
a staggering starving collie-
before the wide roads and gravid plains
of open earth absolved our speed

His panting head scouted the land
from the broken rear window
and when the last of the gasoline
sputtered to fumes, we found
the perfect spot- a clear rocky stream
and a path to white-veined mountains

Who knew I could build a home
or that you, in functional
plaid dresses, could smile from the
windswept cedar porch and ring
a bell or wring the heavy soil
from my lone pair of jeans?

On all the full-moon nights
we swam naked in the creek
made love on the dry bed
and forgot the hard mornings
of hard faces with stunned desires.
In that place, nothing fades

Our amber-eyed daughter
addressed the hum of the world
with bubbling white laughter
and we named the dog Indiana
for the state of heat and dust
where he'd lain in a pile of bones

What beauty: no more to claim the day,
startled on gray sidewalks,
when thick smiles erupt too sudden
to pretend a strange notion
surging with calm assurance
to the women we clutch

Or my rusted car, sold for scrap
and nameless Indiana
watching an empty road

Miscell, eh, nee?

*The hospital auditor from Kansas bought a special travel purse to protect her from New York's pickpockets during the 3-week sojourn. She used to live in Texas, and just bought her first sailboat. There are places to sail in Kansas; good ones, with strong wind current. She uses Clinton Lake, near Lawrence, water made from a dam.


*Outside Grand Central this morning I found a moleskine notebook splayed on the ground near a rusted trash can. It looked ole and weathered, and, noticing nobody nearby who seemed to be searching, and with time to spare before work, I picked it up and began reading. It was three-quarters full with journal entries by a nameless male someone. I carried it to the Tudor City, found a park bench, and began to read.

The first few pages detailed the minutiae of the man's life- mild complaints about money and women- without delving too far into specifics. The jottings belonged to a sane, somewhat pedantic, typical human, full of self-interest and immersion in his sphere. Uninteresting, for the most part, and I almost returned it to its nook before noticing an entry longer than the others.

It contained a breathless account of how the man encountered a God on 42nd street one morning, near Grand Central, and how it swooped down from a light pole where it had been hunched, waiting. The God was Coyote, of the southwest Indian tribes, a lithe, virile creature who approached with a smile. He wrote in hurried prose that it surprised him to learn the Native Americans were right, among all mythologies and belief systems, if Coyote was being honest moments later when he claimed himself as the one true creator of Earth.

After brief discussion (during which time the passerby floated east and west as if in a dream, unaware of the God and man paused in their midst) Coyote told the man he could be granted one wish. While I read, the maddening question of why the author had been chosen above all others lingered like an itch, but went unanswered, unscratched. He never even seemed to wonder himself.

Without thinking, the man made his wish, for he'd been dreaming it a long time: that for 365 days, ever year, in every corner of the world, each day would ensue with the same exact weather. No changing of seasons; just cool mornings, sunny afternoons reaching eighty degrees, and balmy, breezy evenings, with overnight temperatures never dipping below 55 fahrenheit. Coyote honored the wish and disappeared.

Time went on, and though the climate change was initially viewed as a fun anomaly, in almost no time the awful consequences became apparent. Without seasonal patterns, the agricultural economy collapsed, food shortages spread worldwide, famine ensued, the ice caps began to melt, disease spread with flooding, massive starvation killed millions, warfare erupted in all corners of the globe, and the man with the journal fell into a deep depression. He knew he had to atone, somehow, but could think of no other way than setting off on a journey, searching for Coyote, begging for a reversal.

So he went, and it was days of wandering through ravaged land, always going north, surviving at long odds by sheer, strange luck, before he found himself in a small clearing amid a pine forest, and there Coyote alit from the boughs of a tall tree and met him again. The man begged for a restoration in time to stave off the world's apocalyptic meltdown. Coyote smiled and told him he'd do better, that he'd be willing to reverse time to the day of their first meeting, and have life go on as before, as though there'd been no interruption.

The man thanked him and cried, rejoicing in shouts, carrying on, jubilant, until he noticed Coyote's mocking stillness and understood that the saving grace came with conditions. He waited. Coyote spoke. One must be a martyr for his mistake, a lost saint for the cause. Despairing, the man sunk to his knees. Coyote's grin disappeared, and he stared in the man's eyes and showed him in flickering gray images the extent of the suffering he'd wrought. The man accepted.

"Can I have one more day? To stay in the forest and say goodbye?" he asked.

Coyote laughed. "No."

The last entry of the journal was written in the morning, as he rode the train to work. Time had been restored, and the man knew something would happen to him when he emerged, when his steps fell upon the same spot where the God had first been met. His writing didn't betray as much fear as I expected, but then again it was only writing, and probably couldn't reflect his true state of mind.

I decided not to keep the notebook, but throwing it out seemed uselessly destructive, and so I buried it beneath a pile of mulch in the Tudor Gardens. Whether it's found again, and what the new holder might choose to do with the knowledge...I leave all that to chance.


*Sylvia Plath - all I can think about.

Laugh it up

Poems from crazy people with bad pasts, Installment 1:

MOTHER WAS A PEPSI PERSON
FATHER LIKED HIS                 COKE
                
                MOTHER LIKED TO HUG HER BABY
FATHER LIKED TO                        CHOKE

MOTHER PRAYED FOR QUIET NIGHTS
WHILE FATHER SPENT HER DOLLARS

              INSECTS SEEK THE PORCH'S
                                 LIGHT

WHILE
    HUMANS
         SEEK
             A
              COLLAR

Brian

I met Brian one week ago today at the Wisteria Pergola in Central Park, close to dusk. Under the trellis, I inhaled the odor of the drooping racemes and tried to put a name on the memory it roused. The exercise veered between light curiosity and impending panic; was it a chance incident in youth, superfluous and easily forgotten, or something more crucial that fate had stirred from obscurity, needed to complete the shifting puzzle? But the harder I try to unearth an insistent memory, over-saturating in the clues, flailing in the muddy water, the more resistent it becomes, annealing, only to step from the shadows much later in the off moment of revelation. As the nebulous past stayed on the periphery, shrouded, Brian emerged in a thin, orange jacket, faded blue jeans, and heavy black boots. His shaggy, almost curly gray hair hung to his shoulders, and a light fuzz of the same color covered his face. "That's wisteria?" "Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what the smell reminds me of." He let gravity take his legs pitter-patter down the slight slope, and pulled up with his hands on his hips, his eyes on the pendulous flowers. Shorter than me, he had yellowish teeth and a shrewd expression. "Pretty," he said. "You don't happen to know what that tree is, do you?" I asked, pointing ten yards to the west where a short, spreading, gnarled tree grew wild on a fenced hill, its muscled branches moving oddly downward as they twisted at random, acute angles. "No idea," he said, squinting his eyes. "Where you from?" "Upstate New York." "Where upstate?" "You ever heard of Lake Placid?" "I've been to Lake Placid." "Yeah? I'm from a town ten minutes away." "Saranac?" "Saranac Lake, yeah." "Calm up there." "Yeah, it's beautiful." "I wouldn't call it beautiful. Just serene." "What were you doing up there?" Brian had been in the north country to paint flag poles. In the 70s, with no money and no prospects, he'd answered a newspaper ad advertising dangerous work. Since then he'd been all over the country, attached by harness to the long, silver projections, freshening them with a new coat, burnishing America's chipped, flaking image. It wasn't great money, he said, but it allowed him to travel. He'd grown up in the city. "You miss it up there?" he asked. "Not too much. It's nice to go back, but boring if you stay." "The city's great," he said. "Didn't used to be safe around here." He pointed to a black bicycle a few feet away, apparently his. "Used to have to carry a snub-nose .32." "Why?" He leaned in close, confidential. "N*****s," he said, nodding once. He said that the poor white population, all the ones who would fight back, had left by the mid-70s, leaving only middle-class people who wouldn't stick up for themselves. They were terrorized by homeless or drugged-up blacks, which is why he needed the pistol. I asked if he'd ever had to use it. "Took it out once or twice, never fired." He went on to tell me the country was screwed if Obama got elected president, because blacks had huge egos. I steered the conversation to his travels. He'd been to every state but Alaska and Hawaii. He asked about my goals in the city, and I told him about writing. He said there was no money in short stories anymore because all but a few of the literary magazines had gone out of business, and that I should take a Wall Street job for the security. "Or even write for all these advertisers," he said, gesturing at the high-rises to the west. "At least you're still in the practice of writing. Neil Simon did that shit for years before he became a playwright." I told him he was probably on the mark, and I'd think about it. "You married?" he asked next. I said no. "Find a virgin," he advised. "These girls, out there... they've had twenty dicks, you think they're going to be satisfied with just yours?" "Virgins are hard to find these days," I said. "No they aren't. Just go steal one from the churches." Brian had a hacking cough, and when we finally introduced ourselves by name, his hand was clammy with sweat or fever. I told him I had to get going, and my right palm burned with the compulsive need to be washed. "Before you take off," he said, "let me give you my poem for New York." He cleared his throat and looked away, watching the foot traffic by the marble fountain. I don't remember most of the poem, but it was fast, descriptive, rhyming verse, enumerating New York's various landmarks and extolling its rough-and-tumble qualities. Near the end, he referenced the city's eight million children, of all colors, from all places, who "all answer to the same name..." Before the reveal, he paused dramatically, coughed again, and trotted out his best New Yorker bark: "Eh!" I didn't believe he wrote the poem himself, but searches since haven't produced anything, so it's possible. At the time, I laughed at the punch line, obligated and somewhat appreciative of the effort, and waited until I'd hit 71st and Central Park West before cleaning up.

What?

This morning on the subway, a small, tow-headed boy ran on at Montrose Avenue and took the seat next to mine. He leaned his Justice League backpack into my side, oblivious to the adult constraints on human proximity. His mother followed, carrying another, smaller child on her back- a blond little girl, maybe two years old, sticking out her lower lip and waving her tiny right hand in frantic circles.

The mother wore a short skirt and black stockings, and her straight brown hair looked unwashed. She was young, not over thirty-three, let's say, but had a slightly haggard morning face. Understandable, of course. She began telling her son about the longest train in the world, the Trans-Siberian Railroad. "It runs through Russia, all the way to Japan," she said. "No, not Japan....Korea."

The boy looked on, fascinated. "Does it take seventy days?"

"Probably not that many. Maybe ten or so," she said. "But it doesn't even stop at night."

That fact delighted the boy, who reached into his school backpack and took out a catalogue of Star Wars toys. I noticed then that he wore reddish pajama pants decorated with smudged strawberries and raspberries. Although I admired the mother, on first impression, for her liberal bearing and good humor amid the difficult undertaking, I couldn't forgive this transgression on her son's burgeoning social life. The little girl, now on her mother's lap, said "ba ba ba ba."

"How delightful!" said the mother, using a haughty movie voice. Her son, engrossed in the tiny pictures of Darth Vader and other heroes, ignored both. "Now I sound like Katherine Hepburn," the mother said to no one. I turned and gave a sympathetic smile, even though I don't think I've ever seen a Katherine Hepburn movie.

When the boy closed the catalogue, I tried to glance at the name on the address label, wondering if I could google the mother and read all about her life on a personal website. Her name was Judith, and the last name started with a V, but I couldn't get a clear look at the rest. I lost interest anyway. I put on headphones and tuned out. A few minutes later, the boy crooked his foot behind my leg, and I felt the intense discomfort that comes when a social taboo is on the verge of being violated. I ahem'ed with mild vigor, and the attractive girl standing in front of me laughed at the spectacle, but the mother or son didn't notice.

The decision to stop caring was easily made, and the regions of the brain dealing with matters analogous led me to the memory of how I sought physical contact with my father. It usually took the form of violence- the male comfort zone- crawling like a cat or super-spy along the top of the couch while dad watched the news. I'd poise above with a delirious grin, trying to contain my bursting giggles, dad unsuspecting or pretending at it when my springy weight fell straight down, landing on his wide shoulders to hang like a pet monkey, writhing in ecstatic laughter. My younger brothers all did the same.

It occurred to me that a certain willful ignorance about the lives of others isn't necessarily as arrogant as I once thought. I'd put pressure on myself to notice everything, take a piece of life from everyone. But it's not always meant to be. On the 4-train uptown, an older, round-faced woman with permed hair of the 80s variety, wearing a mid-length pleated black skirt with no stockings- a fact that awkwardly highlighted her bright, white skin and bruised kneecaps- leaned forward with an absent-minded expression that could be misinterpreted as dumb smugness.

Whoever she was, I didn't care, and couldn't. But there isn't anything to feel guilty about- she doesn't care about me either. Each spider's web can only catch so many flies. Others are meant to hit the sides, ricochet outward, breathe a sigh of relief at the close call, and be on their way. And still others are meant to soar miles above or below, unaware of your little web, bound for their own.

Another example: the RDS delivery man, a sullen, heavy, pasty-white man with a face like a fat, cynical child. He comes in every morning in his hunter-green uniform, bearing the packages in both arms like a miserable burden, and turns to give me an exasperated sigh. The short hairs on his head move slightly with the hallway's compressed air current, and he sulks off to the main entrance. "Fuck you," I mouth at him after he's turned away. Next door, I can hear him transferring the packages and asking for a signature. "You know the drill," he mumbles in his low, disaffected moan.

This man probably has a story. He may be an expert on model trains, or maybe he's a champion paintball player. But unless he goes crazy one morning and guns me down where I sit, our paths will only make this daily, superficial crossing.