Verses From A Marriage

OPPORTUNITY

Feb. 23, 2006


I obtain no permit from this
hour to parade the usual
shoes of portal seas.
My opportunity is stolen
from all the sleep I miss,
those dreams exchanged
for my verses soaked in wild
addlement foaming past
the knees, slowly walking
through a surf on one
much cares for, much less
sings from soup to nuts
to lees. What matter?
Can it really be called
an opportunity where there
is no cashing in? My wife
despairs her love of
crisp white linen ambience
will never find heat and
heart in the benumbed
besotted market of our time;
despairs so much she
dreams over and over
of ventures so wrought
in failure her life
appears a sum of leaden
naughts, each rising
wave of hope and joy
collapsing on the same
empty bitter shore.
What have I to say
to her from here, where
high futility is wedded
in the work, bittersweet
umbilicals of crash
and ebb emower
my daily ride across
and down the page
in salt-frothed frenzy,
every port and strand
a portal just a blue
embarcature, the next
place some augment
left me for good.
The difference perhaps
which allays my own
despair is that there
never was a plan to win
the pursestrings of a
public with such doggerel —
never was a buck to
be made from dross
cookery which unkilns its
gold aglaze in gildings
so glue and pure
I engage it oh so
happily and perhaps
most when forgotten
by the world, too rapt
in faux-candied seraphim
to craft and cart
the sweet-sticky mess
to market. What I do
here suffices exactly
where my wife grieves
so sadly, my seams
and stitches perfect
in a gauzy bed which
only adjuncts a
full maginitude’s bright
shores, my commerce
blue in sooth and saw,
each poem a doubloon
for skipping back
over the waves
three five seven pages
& then falling forever
from all sight.
Where I console
(and vex) the gods with
over-ambling feet, my
wife requires a different
touch; where I love
to grip a verb’s departing
asscheeks firm and
sure, she prefers my
fingers soft across her
soles. Her business is
about pragmatic ends
which all seem to be
failing miserably in
the light of mortgages
and retirement plans.
Oh smarter gods down
under, you who
root and altar at
the bottom of those
the heaped piles of
songs I drown in brine,
just what of Your
true gold can I
translate in words she
prefers that might proffer
some hope? I’m praying
here to waters that I
pray are fuller than
a poem’s incessant drone:
May angels opportune
her heart exactly where
she full welcome the world home.




MOON AND STORM

1995


On the night
you and I
went to bed
and far beyond
a swollen moon
whisked crazy
milk into
the purpled sky.
I drove through
it to find you,
craning my head
out the window
at every crazy angle.
Desperate to
breathe those
urgencies.
Praying for
the grace
of wild things.
Washing the
sun from my face.
Risking what little
I knew of love
to forget all that
for you.

And when
you turned
out the light
much later
that night,
the moon
took us
into its
silver orchard.


Later a storm
passed over,
pelting the roof
and streets.
A jolt of white
and thunder.
You unhooked
your bra
and leaned over
me in a cascade
of breasts
and hair.

Moon and storm
have joined us,
the tender lips
of the wildest kiss.

***


BREAKFAST BY
THE SEA

1996

The scene composes out of a
Sunday morning breakfast by the sea:
It is late February, and the ocean
Is a complicated mess
Of green swells and gray folds,
Coiffed with foam and spray.
The thick window mutes much
Of its noise, but still there’s
A steady undertow, a counterpoint
Of steady rain upon the window
Mixed in the surf’s bass rumble and suck.

The couple eat their breakfast
Languidly, taking time to lavish
Jelly on toast, nibble at eggs,
Sipping their coffee gazing at each other
Soft and relaxed and open, as lovers
Do after a long night of love,
Lulled now by the mash and
toil of the sea and the rain
which plays steadily on the window.

The lovers eat and sigh
And watch the sea in silence,
Holding hands across the table,
Infinitely slow to gather up
And leave this deep and dreamy
Bed their love unmakes
For the lives they must resume.



LOOKING FOR A HOUSE

1996


The cherished spring that surprised us
for lasting so long now passes
into muggy swelter and the ache for rain.

Last night we had coffee at a downtown
cafe making plans for our wedding
and then walked awhile, loving the fragrant dark.

We walked hoping we’d find our future home
waiting for us on every block. I watched
you consider each house in passing,

disdaining overwrought porches and fatass
colonial brick for the simple bungalow
and Spanish villa. We peered into the

lighted rooms to see how our lives might
work together. Where would my books go?
Is there room for the accumulations of two lives

and a cat? Eventually we came across
an empty house with a For Rent sign.
We leaned our faces up to darkened windows,

puzzled the gloom. There was something feline
in the way you assessed things, utterly focused
and yet relaxed, sprinting through the lay

of the place in your heart and then
turning away, eyes already looking for the
next possibility. Later that look relaxed

into the one that says you want to be with me,
a welcome in your gray eyes that makes
me ravenous. And so we tumbled into bed,

flesh on flesh our lavish candle, hard at work
on the broad foundations of our future freedom,
our distant dream, our eventual home.

VOWS IN THE CHAPEL

1996

I write these lines in the lodge
atop Blue Mountain, the morning
spread out beneath a heavy sky.
Fog creeps along the runnels
of ridges and valleys, the only
apparent motion at 6 a.m.

How cold it is for June,
temps this morning in the mid-40’s,
chilling deeper from the rain.
On roads I see from this height
I imagine slate-gray faces
behind the wheels of inconsolable
pickup trucks, the worry of the next buck
hanging like a pall above the region.

But for you and I, such weather
is a brisk revel and delight,
knowing how it will vanish utterly
when we step from the terminal at
Orlando International into
the muggy miasmas of home.

Yesterday afternoon we walked
through Columcille’s tale of stones
— Bell Tower, stone circle,
Sirius, Manannan, chamber,
finally entering the chapel.
We sat a while on a pew
of the dim cool of the afternoon,
hushed and ushered by stone.

My brother’s wedding now done,
we could now focus on our own:
we moved to the center stone and
placed a hand on the granite.
Feeling the cold of primal
nights in one hand, holding
the warmth of love in the other.

I vowed by all I truly believe
o love you deeper than rock
You vowed to hold me forever.

We kissed, now husband
and wife, blessed by the reaches
of this wide welcoming world.


NEED

1996

On Friday I climbed back in bed to wake you
as I always do, running my fingers gently
along your arms. You stirred but wouldn’t wake.
How I desired you, smelling your sweet sleep
and feeling your warm belly and breasts so close.
I grew hard and harder for you, a light in my
groin growing bright and urgent, like the lamp
of an onrushing train. But you still wouldn’t stir,
and since I know that first-light fucks
are a pleasure you give but do not treasure,
I fight myself and fight myself and finally relent.
Hurt and ruffled, unable to complain
in any reasonable way, I roll away, sigh in
the cooling air and rise to get ready for
work dogged by a shadowy detumescence.

Frustration was the undertow of my day,
mock-edges of an anger flaring around
recurring thoughts of your sleepy refusal.
So later when we got back together
for a Friday night out, I couldn’t hide
the monkish reserve I felt. What is it,
you asked, but I still couldn’t muster
the words. Instead I forged an animated
cloak, talking animatedly about the
usual rot at work and discussing details
about the purchase of our house.

Next day, waking with that hurtful fire
and trying to keep contact to a minimum,
you feel my mood but not the desire.
To you, it’s a question of cold feet —
are you sure you want to marry me?
Of course of course, I coo in your ear,
unable still to tell you about the
sullen bear stomping around inside.

We rose, ate breakfast, reviewed the house
inspection, made a list of further repairs.
I composed a letter to the realtor and then
headed back to my apartment to type it up.
Drinking beer, bad eros on the Playboy channel,
throwing out old bills, aged drafts of
unpublishable poems, other effluvia
of that loner’s life I no longer live.

Later that afternoon we went to see a movie
but the line was long and a storm was brewing,
so we came home to re-write the day
in bed. All that pent fury rose in me
and I could hardly refrain from devouring you,
kissing you all over like a predator,
attacking your desire till you come
in violent shudders. Then you want me
in you and so I release all the horses,
pumping in you overbright and whipped
with lust and anger and crippling need.
It just boils up and out of me and in
moments I’m splattering a hot rail
of sperm deep and deeper in you.

Afterward all the world is in love again,
the afternoon thundering and rainy,
the salad and shrimp and wine just right,
our discussion of what seems most
hurtful protected from hurt by the
huge billows of love now in us.

Men are so simple, women usually say,
and I say that’s so, when it comes to sex,
it threads us with an elegantly simple wire,
aching blue and pulsing fire,
dowsing for you with all I’m not.
Would you have it any other way?



FIRST DAY AT HOME

1996

The deed now signed, keys now in
our pockets, we now can say we
own this two-story Craftsman/
cracker farmhouse/Key Wester
house built in 1920, with
its tin roof and two decks,
and dark red walls.

The reality of our solid life together
now affirms itself through work
and love and more work, the
next six weeks a bustle of packing
up two separate lives, planning a yard sale,
re-painting the upstairs, getting everything
moved and unpacked and placed.
Then we get married.

Yesterday the task was Laying Sod,
or so we thought, a pallet of
sickly looking turf dropped off
in our back yard right after closing
and still sitting there on Saturday
when you, your mom and sister
sat on the deck dreaming of
all you could do in this place.

Thinking that we had better
put the sod in ourselves, no telling
if those jokers will ever show,
we rose from our cherished Sunday
languor to pack towels and pretzels and
and a boombox into my car
and drove out of the hot city,
stopping at Wal-Mart to purchase
a turf rake, hose, spray attachments,
gloves, a shower curtain and rod.

Beginnings. The heat was incredible,
mashing everything flat at noon.
But who notices these things at home?
The sod was in when we got there —
sickly-looking and in desperate
need of water. So I fumbled with
the hose feeling awkward and
terribly ill-informed about what
it means to own a home. Can you
water the lawn mid-day? Should we
fertilize? How will I ever get this right?

But marriage means forever willing
to learn, to making a house a home.
So as you roamed the rooms inside
lavishing upon empty spaces
the fullness of your heart,
I watered the grass in the middle of
the day, my life, a dream.
Loving the moment for its
pure simplicity of summer, water,
lover, spray, no hurry now
in any motion, just here,
getting the job done, whistling.


FIRST ANNIVERSARY


1997

A year has spun round the gold compass
of our rings: and in that circuit
we’ve set up house in a delightful then
difficult round of weeks, where
weekend ecstasies dissolve the workday
agonies release the next sweet weekend.

Sorry that so many hours in the pits have
darkened the tenor of things here
with jitters and bitters. The money disappears
too fast and we’re too often too exhausted
to smile. Yet we hear the clock ticking away
and know this has to change, or else.

We’re told that every marriage
must make it through its first year,
and as we end ours I pray for a
beachhead upon more paridisal beaches,
not a tropic fantasy but our own Cape Cod.
Sure, there’s always something,

the next hatchet falling from somewhere,
but maybe the foothold is found within,
us having grown more even-tempered
for having lived through difficulty
and learning to celebrate marriage
despite the daily cankers and leakage.

That’s why we wake slowly and take baths
on the weekend. Why you keep arranging
the bedroom and I search for new recipes.
Why we declare Sunday off-limits to worry
and doubt. Because when we do these things
love becomes all we ever prayed for

and we remember why we’re here in the
first place, why we wear these rings,
why we celebrate today the start of the next
round, the next page in our book
inking our pens from our shared heart.



BACK WITH THE TIGER

1997


It was a choice of danger
over mediocrity.
Eight years of AA
taught me how to
breathe free of vapors
but not how
to stop loving
their swoon.
Now one year
back in the
cage with the tiger.
Not knowing
what happens
next. Trouble
and delight
in carnal alteration.
The tiger’s purr
so infinitely close
to a red growl.



13 Reasons FOR YOU TO SHINE ON YOUR BIRTHDAY:

1997

Things look better when you’re looking up.

You will never starve in this house.

Because you know without a doubt what you want to do.

Because there’s always something else to paint white.

Because you smell so good it makes me horny. All the time.

Because there’s plenty of sweetness ahead.

Because whenever yer body’s feelin’ beat,
You know yer hubby will rub your feet.

New and exciting places to eat.

Shakin’ it, bakin’ it, makin’ it.

Because there are so many old tunes to liven up the future.

Because it’s getting simpler.

Because the world needs you,

Because I do too.


SWEETENING FATE

1998

We move about these days
both freighted and fragile
with what we know
we must become
despite the toll of hours
crimped by jobs and the
weary burden of so many bills.
A sweetness burdens us
to challenge sour fate,
something pale and nascent
as the orange groves which
today unfurl their sweet lacery
above the cooling pools
of early evening, a harvest
of blossoms too lavish
to delay or deny.
Look: it's Wednesday, love,
your day to arrange the
sun just so on the table.
As these words must
also bring it back from
the sorry set of two lives
unlived and set it
coursing through
the morning gauze
of our weekending bed.

No one else can do this for us.
If fate is a form of hunger,
then we must prepare our feast
or starve in the belled
shadow of cornucopiea.
Too many lives descend
so casually here.
Let's not become
a relic reef that haunts the shore,
a teeming castle gone to
idle bone beneath the shifting
sea. Instead let's find new life
in the world of whatever happens next.
Let us praise the blossoms
and surrender gratefully
to our work and love.





STORM FAR AWAY AT DUSK

1998


When it is almost night,
I step outside
to turn the sprinkler off,
pretending to hear
tiny cries of gratitude
from the lawn, which
looks rough and wet enough
for another hot day.
Summer thrums and hisses
lively in the air,
its wild juice singing
low in the approaching dark.

Across the street
looking south a huge
thundercloud rises
from dark horizon to
milky heaven, its
upper balconies a
silver, billowy blue.
Inside the storm
an amazing brew
of photons work
the billows with
studious flashes,
sudden trills, long arcs
of strobe disturbing
all lobes of the storm.
An occasionally soft rumble
strays this way to whisper
of far away trouble.

I call my you from
the dishes to join me,
and together we stand
in the front yard,

my arms round your waist,
silent and amazed,
the two of us taking
in the splendor
in fresh cold draughts,
engaged these few minutes
far from the world
we struggle through day after day,
children of a distant
mystery, that deeper delight.




JACK GILBERT AGAIN BYT THE SEA

1999

Reading Jack Gilbert
again by the sea,
this time at Longboat Key
on holiday with my wife.
We lay in the shade of
a blue umbrella, so dazed
with heat we can barely breathe.

The Gulf beach so white,
an sheet ironed by the sun.
Far from that stormy beach
on the Atlantic three years ago
where I tried to get well
in a raging surge.

Yet today as then I read
Jack Gilbert’s poems and find
the balm I need, his lines
washing me in waves
of indolent truth.

How I’ve searched for words
like his to say to water.

He looked down over
the sleepy Aegean
and saw an ocean inside
the making of his life.
So much must have seemed
the same: glitters spread
across the aching blue,
breezes clean and
supple as gauze.

In so few words he found
the exact sense of his
day at the ocean,
concealing how much
time and craft and courage
it takes to write on water.
Erasing all that is not heart
from seascape and day.

Today his poems
remind me that
the sea is only a page
impatient to turn and the
sun a shield
against all the things
we learn or else.

Unscroll the heart
in the gull slowly
crossing the scree.
Breathe the gently
passing day like a prayer
or the memory of grace.
Now grasp the pen lightly
and curve words into surf.

A BENCH FOR JAMES

Yesterday—
July 23 2000—
my mom turned
73: She has
lived hard and
long & still
manages to
love sweetly &
openly, accepting
everyone I asked
into my life with
the same open arms
she used to
welcome me to
my beach of song:
Buster our
Himalayan
cat is a late
14 going
on 15,
miraculously
still with us
albeit dottier
& more
crotchety but
we’ll take that
gladly: And
James, you have
been dead for
18 months
now, 19 going
on 19 going
on 19:
Yesterday
my wife and I
attended
the dedication
of a bench
erected by
Compassionate
Friends for 10
dead children
in a quiet
corner of the
Maitland Art
Center: That
group a support
program for
grieving parents
which my wife’s
sister and husband
have found a way
to solace that
hole inside them
where you tumbled
off the wave
down into eternal
dark: The bench is
made of marble
& is inscribed
with the names
& years of
departed children
like you: You
are fourth on the
list amid 7
other boys &
2 girls—most
of your buddies
died about your age
—I guess much
the same way too—
Though some were
much younger
than you, bare
children: The
ceremony was
at 1 p.m. in
the middle of
a steamy hot
July day, clouds
building to the
west & the park
humming with
crickets &
birdchatter &
traffic nearby
on 17-92:
Plenty of trees
though offering
pools of shade to
which first my
wife & I & then
her parents repaired:
We all sat
down by the
shuffleboard court
waiting for
her sister & husband:
My father-in-law
& I on a bench talking
about Australia
& racism while
my wife and her
mother on the
next bench
chatted
embroidery &
sales: All of us
biding time for
this duty which
is so fresh and
raw to your
mother but has
the stain of far
too much use
for the rest of
us: Corrosive
when we would
much rather go
on about our
lives without you:
No offense, hardly
knew you, doubt
you care: Anyway,
two boys aged 3
or 4 ambled
past us down
the shuffleboard
lanes each carrying
a stick & we all
fell silent for a
moment, I’m sure
recalling when you
and your brother
Jacob bummed
around at that
age, empty of
all that has come
to wear hard
eventually in us:
Those kids’ faces
full of the same
eager startle
for the next
minute of the
day in this park
which is all part
of the game, just
play: Then Wade &
I resumed talking
about cruelties
humans visit
upon each other
— Aborigines shot
like hyenas in
Australia &
the bad treatment
of blacks here &
black on black
violence in
Rwanda &
the 30-plus
million cases
of AIDS across
Africa: We shook
our heads both
very happy to
be safe in this
moneyed suburb
at least from
that though never
from what took
you not so long
ago: Then it’s one
o’clock & we
amble back to
where a group has
gathered joined
now by my
wife’s sister and
husband looking old
but quieter in their
grief, the acid
washes of long tears
smoothing their
faces somehow, like
stones long in the
surf: We all hug
each other &
then stand with these
other folks none of
whom look at all
like each other:
Aging biker chick
with her mom: Prim
young mother in a
yellow dress with
her son: Many
couples in their
40s like my wife’
sister & husband
though none
looking much like
or even at each
other: Much older
couples (grand
parents?): A trio
of women talking
about their
lumpectomies:
A woman with
this animaged 3
year old dark
dark girl
—aborignine or
Indian Indian—
the two
ecstatically
webbed into
the other: A
middleaged man
with a younger
wife who holds
a baby—the
child probably
just slightly
younger than
some death
date on that
bench: All those
folks gathered
to honor a
marble bench in
a corner of a
park as a way
not to forget
what fell into
oblivion long
& longer ago:
A woman talked
about this bench
as the 3d or 4th
in a project,
3 in one park
& this the
first of 2
benches to go
into this park:
A man read from
the program
charter about
parents bonding
with their dearly
departed through
another’s grief
& finding a way
to walk on:
Several women
read poems to their
dead children: And
then the name of
each child was read
aloud & the
parents came
forward to place
a red or white
rose on the seat:
James I wanted
to tell you that
your parents were
strong & proud in
their tears when
your name was called:
They walked up
together & your
father lowered
a red rose to the
seat & your mother
laid another rose
she had brought
at the foot of the
bench: my wife’s
parents she &
I stood back
allowing our
hearts to break
again for love
of your parents
who love you so:
That’s the best
we could do for
them: For you
we just sighed &
softly scolded
you for your
carefree manner
of annihilation
which almost
dragged your parents
down with you:
Watching them
yesterday I think they
will not follow you
so soon: The big
tide of grief seems
mostly over—not
gone, perhaps not
ever, but the
killing brine
does not stain
their minutes
& hours so: At
least that’s what
I hope: As they
stood there by
your bench laying
a flower for you
I looked up over
them to see this
storm cloud rising
& rising &
rising, beautiful,
potent, terrifying,
awesome, and
I couldn’t read
all of its
portents: Whether
the sum of griefs
assembled there
or the caul of
what all these
deaths gestate
for the living
or the thrill
of that wave
which always called
you out farther
than you should
go or my own
past which I
survived so
barely & which
I have sung about
so passionately
praying for
transformation
or the strange fierce
fevers which attend
me anew boding
foul & fair:
I don’t know why
I’m hearing Cheap
Trick’s “I Will Be
The Flame” right
now, that late
8O’s hit which
came long after
my last band’s
rise & fall:
Oh it has such
a sweet longing
crescendo at the
chorus: Something
about “after the
fire has gone I will
be the flame”:
I don’t know
if this too long
& unpublishable
poem is about
me or about you,
a wake that has
served as my
awakening toward
a mysterious
door: "The myths
do not mitigate
the impact of
death with soothing
words; they present
it in its grimmest
reality” write Rees
& Rees in
Celtic Heritage:
“And yet, the
declamation of
such stories
at Samhain,
perhaps, and at
wakes for the
dead had its
proper function:
They elevated
death to the plane
of the tragic &
the heroic:”
I have fallen
now & then
to tell my story
as a fallen guitar
hero in the
mythic mode:
Orpheus in
search of lost
love & Arion
on the back
of a dolphin
jammin’ &
youthful Attis
dead of pretty
wounds & Oran
singing on from
below the watery
grave: When really
as you know
James how small
& mean & selfish
our time in the
surf proved to be:
Just me & my
penis on a blue
guitar yodeling
Who’s Next? at
the curving
curling waves:
And I older now
but no wiser
standing with your
family in a park
on a hot Sunday
afternoon on my
mother’s birthday
with the woman
I’ve pledged my
life to before a
stone bench which
bears only your
name beneath a
cloud still rising,
still threatening,
still so awesome,
flaming the
heavens with the
kind of promise
you rode off
in search of toward
the ocean where
the beach surely
sang your final
birthday song:
Yes after the
fire has passed
I will be the
flame in your name:

PARADISE, 1939

2000

Morning breaks after 7 a.m.,
the air through the windows
startlingly cool. He hugs
up closer from behind,
nestling her hips and breasts.
Her waking eyes soft
and blue, grateful for this day.
They drink coffee on the deck
wearing sweaters, their big
white cat on her lap purring
happily at it all.
The day stays clear
and warms sweetly.
They eat breakfast
and read the newspaper
and unscroll easily
into a day of pleasant labors,
scrubbing down chairs in the pale sun,
pulling weeds in the front yard.
None of the world can intrude here.
The day lofts just above the heart,
effervescent and wan.
He takes a nap naked on their bed
lavished by a fan and the sound
of breezes rinsing through trees.
She comes up to get the garage key
and stands by him for a moment,
saying nothing, her eyes grateful
yet sad for the world which will demand
its due the next day. He dozes
dreaming of women in heavy
fur coats with pockets he searches in vain.
The cats sleep on until dusk
where the weekend slows to a sigh.
Come morning the armies are advancing.



SOME LOVER

2000

you know for someone who
professes to be such a romantic
you aren’t much of a lover
she said in one of the angry
exchanges of late when departure
seemed inevitable I like little
gifts that say you’re thinking of me
I like men who are animated
and go at things with gusto
who know when to rip my
bra off and take me Hell you
don’t even talk much when
we’re having sex or eating dinner
I have to fill in those gaps
you don’t seem to want love
much at all so passive so wishy washy
not much a man at all

And I thought how true
looking back over years of this
resenting her lack of passion for me
and wild for the trills and purrs
of secret places I hid from her
being a lover inside love is
the blind spot of eros to gallop
inside the curl of the wave
inside the house of the one
woman you have sworn to love
for the rest of your life well now
we’re trying at least and she is
begging me to take her yearning
it seems for me inside her
and I feel this big wind fresh
with sea salt slapping and washing
over me I want to yell Hell Yes
not here on the page but right at her
on her in her with her etc cetera
but it’s daunting bewildering too
to stand right in the middle of the life
and the wife you love and draw blanks
to feel so silent and passive I hope
therapy will help me take possession
of this love and ride it fiercely inside this life
for now I keep praying and swinging
at every pitch trying to see all the
moist shadows in her trying to learn
the language of love inside love
but I’m like Violet our cat who can’t
stand to be hauled up on the bed
unless she’s in her box when she
is lifted up in that box and set down
she lets me pet and pet and pet her
and she just purrs away will let
me look at her through a hole
in the box just inches from her face
and she stares so openly and pure
but only when there’s a box between us
that’s me gotta have a page between
us filled with words in order
to exult in running so wordlessly in love
some lover


WHY DID I HAVE TO GO?

2000

So great was her need
for us to resume love
or maybe because
she know how much
was there to lose
that she said
she couldn’t remember
why we must
do this terrible hurtful
lonely thing
and so she begged
me to tell her
once more, and
honestly for once:
And when I told her
with more truth than
before she sighed
wearily and started
talking about bills
and selling the
house and divorce

We paused at
the door as I walked
out with an armload
of clothes held
still there a few seconds
as if that moment
would change it all

But I drove
home with clothes
computer & books
packed around me
I thought of stopping
at some bar for
beer & schnapps
but I was just
too weary for all that

& just headed on
back to my mother’s
to bed down early
like I always did
with her and curled
into the space she
once dreamed her
future with mine

I whispered
to the wounded
silence “everything’s
OK” and for the
life of me I
couldn’t remember
a single reason
why I must be here

and then I woke
up with all
my contradictions
intact & knew
what a great
favor I was
finally doing for her


martini song

2001

A cold clear vodka martini
widens a soft envelope
against walking or waking.

It suffices when the ex-wife
can hardly speak to you
and Republicans rule.

When no poem I write
blossoms, much less
bears any sugar in its fruit.

Another one, bartender,
while I stand here as usual
not speaking or moving at all,

a blonde pillar in black
bereft of all but this
cold fire, this one bed.

Who would want such a
poppy grown from nothing?
What compost would not

fail to turn over this half-moon,
twice-tomb? And yet bone music
drowses and dreams here,

song enough, when there’s
little else I would be about,
when there’s no other heat

in the room. Oh how
wickedly sweet this booze
on a night so bottomless.


wWORKING IN THE RAIN

June 2001


1

We spent the day in the back yard
about chores: you tried to paint a
chest of drawers while I moved
plants about the landscaping
& other odd yard chores. The day
had other plans, though, with the
first rain falling hard at 11 a.m. and
intermittent through the rest of
the afternoon. Still, it was good
to be outside working around this
house we love, working close to the rain.
It sheathes the June sun, falls
so musically over all, and
sweetly blesses what it rinses. While
it rained we sat on the porch with
our feet hanging out. Looking out
at the yard, you said, It’s days like this
when I realize how sad I’ve been. When
I realize how much I don’t want to lose this.
And I thought, me too, though I didn’t
say it then, because I have done so much
to force us to let this go. I want to
work my way back here if I can.
I have to go down into the labyrinth
and face myself first and figure
out how to return with all of me.
I have to pay an enormous debt.
I have to zip it up and change the tune.
Can I? Sitting with you in the rain
on that fine day, I wonder now
how I could do anything less and live.



2.

There was a blessing in that rain,
history washed clean and you
out in it, a child dancing with joy
at the center of her love, the
life you had returned to and gained
at last until I made you let go.
I was out there too, for a moment,
without a mask or bone of contention,
back to that garden at last,
freer than ever to live my own life
making these poems unnecessary
and moot. We didn’t get much work done
though we did linger a good while
in that rain, where everything is
simple and good and waits for us to return.


3.

Formidable challenge:
you and I sitting on the
back porch as it rains
looking at all we have
worked on and for
now spreading its arms
to the sky for that
benediction of storm.
Whatever grabbed me
that moment with wonder
ache and joy now
makes holding this pen
an excruciating task—
As if there was only one
poem more to write
and, failing to catch it well,
there was never a poem
worth writing. Love perhaps
is stronger than any lyric;
love certainly is more
brute and basic than any
verbal ruse I employ
against it. All of it washing
away in that rain when I
just wanted to be home and
back at work on what furthers
the two of us and this poem
merely a puddle after the storm
soaking fast into the ground.
I must write this poem
however I can and know
it could be the last
poem, the water of silence
that blesses as it falls.



COLLECTIBLES, 50 PERCENT OFF


August 2001


It’s a mercilessly hot Sunday
afternoon in downtown Sanford.
The sun lords over us like a
fat developer whose high broils
are pure whim—a careless ruin.
A few antique shops are open
today, welcoming us few shoppers
whose pace is less Shop Until You Drop
than Browse Til Ya Drowse.

Inside where it’s almost cold
—thank God!—I scan shelves
piled high with someone
else’s history, crap which,
at the right auction on the
right day, with the right wind
at our lucky sails and two
warring collectors upping the ante,
could sell for, well, more than
that 24-carat sun up there, yee-haw:

Antique lace and depression
glass, old toys, mason jars on quaint
kitchen hutches, boxes of sheet music,
portraits of someone else’s dead relatives
—like that sad severe woman hanging
near a window, her lower lip pinched
a parcel of parched Florida farmland
long sold off to developers.

I’m lost amid all this stuff.
You see, I’m just passing time
while my wife arranges linens
and lamps in her booth
in an antique mall down the street.
In times past when we drove
out on Saturdays searching
for fresh veins of cheap good stuff
along the back roads of Florida,
I trolled along til I was numbed at
the sheer volume of so much pricey
bad stuff. None of it I figured had
any place in what I then called home.

Now I try to read each cup and
cast-iron skillet as a clue to what might
lead me home, and I’m eager for any
message I can find. It’s still a language I
hardly fathom — a few things I know
to sift the haystack for like years
(Thirties or Forties) and types (tourist
memorabilia, ceramic burros from Mexico).
Stuff not distinctive for their market
value but simply just because my wife
loves that stuff. It’s hard to find.

Today I strike out and so walk slowly out.
The shopkeeper, a woman in her 50s
who’s commiserating with another woman
at the front counter, asks, Didn’t find
anything to take home with you?
Not today, I smile, gearing my voice
to sound like I would have if I did.

I know it’s a hard, unprofitable
business, something most people do
because they simply love the work
of finding and then dream of selling it well.
It’s sad to see so much of what’s out there
it just sit and sit on dusty shelves,
forgotten again on a more visible shelf.

Sure, it’s overpriced, and hardly fitting any
house: But here it is, resistant to so much
we also know, untranslatable in such
high heat, on a day when most people have
thronged to Target or Wal-Mart, where
faux stuff can be bought at sweatshop prices.

My wife plans to close her booth at the end
of next month, giving up on a 3-year
dream of making her own way on what
she really loves. I think of her standing
in her booth, arranging and rearranging
a pewter dish in front of a coffee table book,
hanging linens she’s bought as cheaply
as you can and so carefully cleaned
and ironed and labeled and brought now
to market. She does this as lovingly
as she created the house I don’t live
in any more. And so I take all of this

stuff—iota of eternity, ephermata of the
woman I love’s self-determination—
with a new and deadly seriousness.
We’ll find a way to move her goods,
even if it sells at 50 percent off. Although
she leaves the business I hope it’s just
for a little while. One half of paradise
is always better than an acre of what’s dead.



GOING HOME

2002

The jet eased down slowly
from the earth’s high porches,
entering Florida from a sea
which spread eastward
past the eye — the rim
of this hard paradise an inch
of sand ribboning north and south,
the thinmost skin we call birth.
Then the highrises for those
of us who seek to own
some slice of that immensity,
as if to suburb our navels.
And then green washes
as the plane lumbered down
across eastern Florida
toward Orlando, groves
and swamplands ironed flat
and hot by a high pressure dome
which turns May Day into
hot salsa beneath
a hotter god’s sole.
I tried to look for my house
in Mount Dora, too far below
to look quaint as it does
at ground level; imagined
my wife fixing up things for
her shop with the cat
catching in perfect poise
on the table, her blue eyes
content to see the staff at work.
But I couldn’t see my house,
nor worse, see myself there with them,
my past sins perhaps
not aired and forgiven
soon enough, or just too
too many to survive. — And
then I saw etched in
some sand a long shape
like a horse, a cloudlike
suggestion of the Uffington
brute carved into an
English chalk-hill and
tattooed into my arm.
— Why that horse
and not my home?
The plane lowered down
now just a mile from the strip,
soon to land, soon to dump
us travelers, grubbers and
lovers onto the heated ground.
I am going home to a
saddle which takes me
where I do not know,
to a life I should not
have survived, to do
the best I can with what
I have left — small words,
hard work, perhaps or
not with a wife — getting down
to what, for better or worse,
remains in the cup which is
always half-full. The plane
landed with a startling jolt,
then a roar, then a slowing hiss
as two lovers end their coil
with one last lingering kiss.




BACK HOME WITH THE LOCAL

2002


Back home with the local
in June’s thrush and throb.
The sky washed clean
with last night’s rain.
And all the vegetation lush,
shaggy with dew: A day
for sweaty chores
in the happy fields
of the Lord. God, it’s
great to be back home
where the hours each
have their purpose
and resonance and lift.
Where what I am
so neatly inscribes
into what I do,
like a lawn returning
to itself strip
after mown strip.





DALLAS AT DAWN

2003

All still dark. Flags in the courtyard
flapping hard on some cold prairie breeze,
a glittery belt of lights from the airport,
scattered neon signage on humps of hotels,
traffic on unknown highways limning
the washes of air and the steady
passage of jets up and down their
invisible corridors. It’s Dallas this time,
city of the now-dowdy Cowboys,
hub for American Airlines (sluggish
on the ropes after terrorists commandeered
two of their jets to hell), this city
a near chakra to Enron’s murderous fall:
And not—simply a city I do not know
but for my collective misgivings
and this hotel room like all suburbia
I do know, singular, comfortable,
and nameless with its big bed and TV
and anonymous business trappings.
Later today we’ll set up the display
and ready to publish our wares
to Texan editors. Lots of time between
to look out this window and it’s bleak,
commercial view, and think of home
so many miles away, filled with numens
you might appreciate—cat in the window,
wife happily at work at her loom,
a book in my lap, dinner I’m cooking
warming the house with smells of
roast pork and root vegetables—
All of what blossoms because of
this hard-purposed day. No light of day
yet in the window, but the wakened
I’m wakened well to matins in
love with a life and ready to ring the bell.
Let’s do this thing, have some fun
while we’re at it, and finally go home.




POWERING UP

2004


Slowly the last of the
hurricane dispelled in a
quieting breeze, leaving
the day partly sunny
with a friendly breeze.
We got to work dissembling
all of the defenses we
had mounted against
the storm, undrilling sheets
of plywood from windows
and doors front and
back, moving the
adirondack chairs back
out from the upstairs
bedroom onto the
upper deck, hauling
out of the garage the
table and chairs that
goes on the lower deck.
And then we began
cutting up and hauling out
tree-trash fallen from the
oaks in back, creating
two great mounds of limb
and leaves on the
parkway by the street.
The air was rich with
the sound of chainsawas
and generators as our
lives resumed, loud in
our protest against the
powered-down silence
of the storm. And then,
midmorning as I carried
a shoulder load of limbs
toward the street, I heard
the air-handler whir back
on oh so faintly, and then
my wife was on the back
porch nearly shouting that
the power was back on.
And then it seemed that
the whole neighborhood
cheered in one voice
to find that juice returned
to sockets at our feet
and the whole living sprawl
of our current lives —
cooled by air conditioners,
inserted into the world
by cable news on TV,
food in the fridge keeping
cool until we deem it
time to cook it on stoves
nearby — And I realized
that it’s always the storms
power versus our own,
world against word,
dominions which share
bare minimums of the
holy politic which simply
is and accepts all. For
a short while that windy
world resumed primordial
time, taking us down
into a darkened mere. Then
our power crews rolled out
and began their work
of resetting breakers
and flipping the city’s
switch, making those waters
clear and then draining
the entire pond. Now I’m
back on the clock at 5:15
a.m., windows open
to a gentle breeze, drinking
brewed coffee, writing to
a bright light over my shoulder
& soon to go type these
lines in on the computer
& take my shower for
the coming work day. Outside
the dark drinks the
garden whole but cannot
force its way past the
screened window, lit
from this side. Our waters
are back to lapping
a narrow shore. Thank
God for that breeze,
but praise him for
returning us the key
to the door.



WHITE ON GREEN

2004

It is only when I’m home sick
lying gut-cramped in our bed
upstairs that I realize what
wild artistry you bring to
every surface of home: The
wan spring morning breezing
in cool through an opened
window across the room
and everything either white
or the palest green, white
linen walls and furniture
so balanced with plants
and jadeite glass that the
eye doesn’t even see the
whole perfection, but rather
floats in it as on a tide,
the ivy tumbling from
white iron planters, the
chairs and dressers
moved so many times
that the absolute correctness
of their placement contains
all the energy of a poem
revised down to three pure
words which you would
never say, and refuse
to call an art. “Just
another woman’s
gift for home,” you
might concede, though
such craft is the very
hearth I can’t ignite
in the cold demense of
my lake-bottom dives.
If a room could wash
a votive heart clean,
it’s here in the room
which you devised, the
one which you say
you can never get
quite right, what with
this sloping ceiling, crooked
walls and ill-placed a/c
vents. Orchids on either
nightstand wake the purity
with tiny violet blossoms,
like the eyes of our cat
half-lidded in her chair
in the closet, drowsing
down as I now do laying
in the bedroom you
composed in the upper
room of our life. The
poem you never wrote,
the art you swear
is simply banal, lulls
me beyond all I
would say to exactly
where I most desire
to be. Those three words?
You are here.


SHOPPING WITH
THE DEVIL

2004

My voyage to you
on tides of such
insufferable blue
are harrowed
by musics too
high and low,
a commedia of
pure roadshow fire.
Yesterday we
drove into the
maw of holiday
shopping hell,
the day cold
and breezy,
overbright hammers
walloping the migraine
in my skull, my wife
was immersed in
the fret of gifts,
staying overlong
in every store
trying to find gifts
too elusive for
the eye — an
elven mischief
making for harried
sore and worried
passage. And me,
all I wanted yesterday
was her in full
sail of her desire,
that most elusive
absence of our
remarrying, and
my petulance and
hurt grew to mad
me over that long
day’s peramble through
the stores. And
oh God what women
I saw throughout,
no doubt because I
am so stubborn in
my need for ocean
fire — women in
heels and coats
with ravaging
busts and bums
in their coastlines,
their eyes all like
my wife’s intent
on other shores
than I, other gods
than sexual desire.
The devil walked
next to me while
my wife shopped
more intently in
different regions
of those stores, my
eyes on books
and gadgets and
boobs in blowsy
blouses, my ears
washed in a brine
of sappy Yuletide
tunes. The devil
merried in my
misery, guffawing
low and shaking
his belled staff
each time my
eyes washed over
the next curved
shopper to look
some other way,
delighting in how
each tore through
me like a nail.
Well, I thought
midway through
that holllied wood,
two can play at
this, and so I looked
every where I
shopped, my eyes
faithful to what they
believe, even if
no mortal woman
ever would or
could want to.
Lingering at
beltracks and palming
those strips of
coracle hide, weaving
my way over and through
a curved and saucy
tide which was mine
to jolly roger in
the wild demense
of my salt reveries.
The devil smirked.
You burn with such
a futile fire, your
cross is my delight.
To which I retorted,
let’s remember who nails
who. Without these
sailing eyes you
have no hill of skulls.
Without this heart
there’s no fuel, no flint,
no flagellant abyss
to even name
your cap and bells.
I smiled and paddled
on through all those
stores seeing nothing
but the sea of my hopeless
blue desire, fanned
by all the siren waves
which ache the song
toward every shore
and give it such
old depth. And as my
wife and I drove
home in the hardening
cold dark, I loved
her distant distracted
heart for keeping
me on course
across this boneless main
where every whisper,
every moan, every
unzipped and coiled
deceit remains as free
& unrepentant as
it is requited,
underwearing what
you spread my
life to proclaim.



MARRIAGE

2005

The man you formed
of wave and wind
awoke one day
in a woman’s arms
far from land
and a lubber’s verbs,
fanned in sparkling
blue. Baptized a
third time in
the waters of
God, I was healed
of one divine
wound and
thus maddened in
the next, questing
years to never quite
find you again,
not in any way
I dreamed. Yet here
in this married home
I have learned
to love you best
as may a mortal
man of modest means,
my love a sum
almost adequate
for my actual wife
whose life and work
rests folded in her
sleep upstairs before
the next hard
day. My questing
has subtracted
her from the blue
main though heart
for her alone is my
vow, the two
worlds kept separate
as the out- and inner
bands of a gold
ring on my betrothing
finger. Two connubials
I shore and shire
and gender forth
with every fire a
man of my years
and truth can steal
and forge and
husband. Perhaps
the wrong quest
ends each time
I shout this book
and join my wife in
our bed of daily nails,
to work and work
some more then drowse
at the long day’s end,
scant inches from
where we started,
our principal
scant paid down,
the ache requited
just enough
to keep the distance
blue. Who’s to say
the rowing here
and the loving there
are not greater halves
of heart no man
may master, much
less ascertain,
though his life
is shaped that way,
a shore of infinite
hosannas and just a
sigh to hold it all,
kiss enough to
valve the darkness
and bless the mess
on day further down
the the starry fate
you minted in me
that morning long ago,
when love was startling
and pure and wild as
sea horses and their
undertowing hearses go.

BREAK THE TABLET
(HERE)

2005

Inky mere of ironed stillness,
you are the well I dip my tongue
into each too-early morning,
whetting my blue cantos on
your black Rosetta stone,
offering conduit through a dead
land’s loam to the Queen’s
bedroom in a drowned
city of fallen bone. She
offers me that world for
one warm kiss
but I am yet trothed
to the blossom of bright days,
my wife who rings like a
tide in the house we here
share with every blue augment
the dead miss so utterly
and uterally, like the
moon for its sea-birth, like
the sea for heaven’s wet
thighs, like heaven for
the starry brood who
took half of God for
this darkling, deeper ride.
Yesterday we celebrated
her birthday with gifts
from the cats (their photos
in a tritych, gift certificate
for prettygirl stuff, an
off-white glazed bowl)
and then by being most
at home together, attending
the details of roof repair
and the weekly wash, cycling
through the day with
stations together walking
down by the lake, talking
long over lunch on the back
porch (pitching to Blue
and Red a pocketful of treats),
looking over the Florida map
as she planned a four day
produce run with her sister
and then a simple supper
of poulet en pot. Summer
at full sail as I relaid
asphalt shingles on the garage
roof (fixing a pattern that I’d
goofed two weeks ago), the
upper and final ones so hot
in the sun I burnt my palms.
See? I lift them here to
cup the night’s black face
like alms or tokens of passage,
daily dues for dark gates,
the echoes of burn like
a shore the night loves to walk.
But also note the fingertip
which ended that day touching
my wife’s sleepy warm cheek
in that final moment settled
into bed before the last light
went out. Break off the tablet
(here), my cuneiform of
lifelong desire, with that moon
so lucent with love’s greatest
fires. There’s your altar,
dark queen, your well of
ever-blueblack song. Drink
from that throat
so deep and long
you leave day loves alone.






THE ACTUAL LIFE

2005

These filaments of wild whaling
dark glow hot against my actual life,
the one there’s never much to say
about. It just a faceless mere from
which I fish peculiars out. But then
there could be no poem of this hour
without that bed I rose from an hour
ago with its indistinct, merging sleep
of an aging man and woman in their
replenishing drift together far and wide.
How could I ever come to dream
without that shore of things too simple
and common that they rarely find
mention in the tale, my wife breathing
in slow rhythm, cat shifting at my
feet into a more complex repose, the
air conditioner blasting on awhile
later, drowning out faint sounds of
night beyond the windows. To dream
means to slip beneath all that, to loosen
surficial sense and be hauled down
gently by darker ones which subsume
then rouse the sleeping mind. Thus
I dreamed I was in auditorium filled with
literary types, some figure at the podium
the measure of all accomplishment
whose words I can’t remember here.
But I do recall the moments after when
familiar-seeming types came up to
shake the speaker’s hand (or mine?).
An older, well-dressed man with a neatly
clipped beard and a cultured voice
stepped up and asked him (or me)
what was the measure of success
in poetry — publication in the Sewanee
Review, a Pushcart Prize? The speaker
had that much authority to say for sure
and though I do not recall what he replied,
I woke at my misbegotten 3 a.m. with
the question loud in the Western
windows where a late moon burnt softly
in a gauze of cloud. Or was it the answer?
Just what especializes words? What
quarries out the finest gems? What
ferries saints of lasting hue? Not, I muse
today, any polish that a pen could gloss,
but rather the gold is in how much won’t
go on paper, all that plebian normal
married dayside habit which is the bigger
nail, the truer cross, the secret sacred
third rail thrall which freights gods
from tomb to womb. For nine years
now I’ve gotten up many hours before
my wife to roar and ramble here,
rummaging old skirts and churches
undersea, the one life shore to
its balder extremities, the other
a shore for all its maladies
and melodies, its infernal infidelities,
bounded by a safer sea. I ink my thrall
on paper but lay down with the wife
on sheets she irons purer than snow.
My garden muse at 4 a.m. is thus my
dreaming wife, the myth and mystery of
the sleeping life. So whatever dark
music is sweetest here, I must
remember to plow it back into her,
the mare of days I’m mated to.


HALLOWS OF SR-46

2002

Driving home tonight
I trespass my darker state.
I’m weary and migrained,
drained close to empty from
a hard day of job and school.
I just want to be home and next
to you, but first I must cross
this low and lonely night.
The road beyond my headlights
is crowded by dark dominions,
a starry sky leeching down
on blacker scrub. Out there on
some chewed rise a cow’s skull
serves as moon, coldly glazed
in sour star milk, sockets hauling
down the night in its black gaze.
Drive on, drive through.
Simply Red’s “Holding Back
The Years” on the radio,
ticking off the miles. I’m coming
home, my love, almost there;
a few more turns through
this black bear of a night.
Thank God for the rude
throttle of this homebound car.
And thank a greater God that you’re
waiting up for me in the alternate
ending to this night, waiting in a
bright house far enough from here
to make dark crossings dreadful
and all homecomings dear.