a wood bee buzzes in front
of your face and you flail
across your back stoop
breaking your wife’s clay
flower pots and bird feeders
and tchotchkes from your trips
to Asheville North Carolina
where everyone bites
their tongue and dips their toes
in artisan patchouli oil
and you knock a candle over
as you swipe at the bee
and a dry potted fern
catches fire and starts speaking
to you in riddles about
partisan politics and the smoke
is just thick enough to blind you
so that you step hard
into the wooden post that once
held your pergola, if only
you’d finished the job,
stupid bastard, one foot at a time.
from a hand-made sign
seen on a tattered recliner
left by the side of a street
I work
I can work
I am free
(almost)
I see
my friends
like me
go to work
It irks me
to see
those scenes
I see
me
in that chair
older
skin raw
at the arms
and footrest
I see
no rest
for me
I see
urgency
for me
I need
to invent
a new me
I’ve stood at the edges of canyons
At the bases of mountains
Toes pointed at the rivers edge
Eyes fixed on the ridge
My memory stores paintings
Of the moments I’ve kneeled before God
Wind whipping in the valley
Birdsong filling my mortal body
A hymnal
Pledging witness
To my human condition
you carried on your shoulders
a lifetime of experience,
of unexpected joy and
unspeakable pain
ten children and a
tobacco farm,
kept out of trouble
because of you
you were up before
the sun,
caring for the animals,
preparing equipment
while we slept, deeply,
caught up in dreams
that had little to do
with bringing
the tobacco in
your wife,
my mother,
would make breakfast,
waking us with
our noses
you often came in
as we were finishing,
a cooling plate of
food waiting for you
on the countertop
you would
sip coffee,
take a few bites,
then head back out
most of us
would stumble outside
over the next hour or so,
though some of the girls
would stay inside,
on pretense of helping
mother clean up
the boys would, eventually,
start helping with
minor chores until,
at lunch, we would all
stop and pray
and eat and you
would assign to each of us
some bit of work for the day
teaching us,
without words,
that you, as
the bringer
of all we had, were
also setting an example,
preparing us to be
bringers
of our own
—a soft shoe whistle
lapped over the bathroom
walls,
the powdery paws of a cat,
slack traces of nameless Pinocchio pacing
the balding switchbacks lolled from a straightening
rem state,
what burled blocks piqued proud
of the cat’s tongue tickling
fleas into taciturn
roadside attractions, much
like driftwood
clumped in a buckling
dam
that the dry-washing river
massages or bloodlets
into this mock-up of
Hadji Ali, who’d
gargled the verdigris
scum of a wishing well
into disjointed
music— scattershot puce and
mint-to-be shreds of
Pennies from Heaven, perchance.
A mechanical bank
worked down from a rock
with a cat-tongued thong throbbed,
star-cinched grip of a golem
the dippers had churned
from a trilobite fossil
interred in a sleep-rocked spall of slate;
a mechanical bank
relenting—letting the
loll of a coin assuage its
bones,
its tidldibab
bird bones
buckling
graceful
as guts of a
chuckling
cuckoo clock,
to churn
of what frail wish flipped clumsily;
what gruff brush strokes lapped ‘long the velveteen
neck of a catling, eyes licked verdigris green
as abandoned pennies peer up amongst
roiling wellsprings; what lush talcum
so softly alit upon
dander pricked
in the ken
of a velvet Elvis,
in dream; to churn
of which seam-ripped rivet such purring
or whistling summoned from seemingly nothing
more hard and fast than the pass of phantasmal
hands,
which urge our driftwood Pinocchio, Dance—
She would have been swayed
by that love song you played
on the guitar you made
out of reclaimed barn wood
oblivious to your confessions
of infidelities and aggressions
all the sugar-spun indiscretions
deafened by your beauty
bathed in your drama
wrapped herself in your trauma
charged your red flags like a Brahma
then crafted them into a ball gown
She
was me
before
no more
I became immune to those topaz eyes
velvety voice and muscular thighs
knowing too well you’d be my demise
if I lingered on your potential
noted: obsessed with his mother
has children with three other
and simply cannot discover
a job worthy of his unique genius
loved you at my leisure
accepted four nights of pleasure
then buried them like treasure
and released you to the night
I write the best poems
Know all the best poets
The MIT poets
All very intelligent
Especially me
Covfefe
Sharks and batteries
Change weather with marker
Drink bleach
Windmills bad
Tyrants good
Covfefe
