live from one place and call it done
or live from one place and change 

it is inevitable  we hold fast only to feel torn away
yet if we’d simply listened  and held with tissued grasp what we thought we could not lose
the colors of life would erupt  bloom  flow  breach  and break through
into the darkened corners of our world

Oh, why didn’t you have a switchblade 
to danger my young eyes with,
or do a stint in deep cover so the stories
would be better, so dark, so blue?

Years riding the rails, casting spells,
breaking hearts of small town slatterns
all up and down the line, a ledger of sons 
cursing your name every Father’s Day?

Be a one-hit wonder whose ear worm
gets licensed for a Tarantino film,
residuals that bury those lean years
of box cornbread and canned beans?

Just look at what I have to work with: 
Lay-Z-Boy recliner with cat-clawed back, 
sneakers greened from having mowed the lawn, 
snoring, ice conspiring to water down your drink,

slobbery dreams in which you’re not you,
hardly the stuff of poetry: it’ll have to do.

Left at the altar
You question love   ache answers            

My classmate Michael
would chide when I said
I was going home (to visit
my parents): “This is your home.”
He meant the brothers.  

Over the years I’ve tried
to agree but now I have two
homes: This cloister full of
frescoes and flowers, ancient
house of studies where stern
Luke Wadding’s eyes follow me,
questioning—  

and the place by the mountains
I hope to see tonight under stars–

but then more:
the old yard in the pueblo
where Charles and I
sat smoking cigars;
or the Disneyland in DC
where the Holy Land replicas
beckon me still,
and Simon and I laugh at his joke
about FDR and Eleanor;
or the church they shuttered yesterday
in the city of my birth, across
from Dad’s store where I donned
the small apron on Saturdays
and swept the sawdust
by the meat counter—  

oh we have so many homes,
and no homes here.
Thus faith in
grace that leads me home.

Nothing happens in heaven—
a promised kingdom
that will come
to any spirit
so disposed and poor
in search relaxed for blessing.

The dubious blessing
of earthbound sorts of heaven
indeed are stitched up and poor—
for no such restless kingdom
my spirit
hungers in pain to come.

So, some come
not straining for blessing—
drinking slow the spirit
from the vines in heaven.
But not men like me in that kingdom.
Every draught is poured for the poor.

The poor 
come
to this kingdom-
rich, her valleys full of blessing
in quiet heaven
where no demon can disturb spirit.

My fractured and prideful spirit!
Ill poured and far poor
makes his arrival in heaven—
hungry and insatiable— and come
the hour of rest—the oil of blessing
is waste in the stream of my kingdom.

 So, where is this Blessed Kingdom,
where rest and sweet pause flood spirit?
That holds back its blessing,
brands me hapless poor,
hopeless inhabitant, fledgling to come—
wading in and awaiting heaven?

By Grace, heaven—what is a kingdom?
Come, come sweet repose—play with my spirit,
though I am not the poor that drink blessing.

I’m flipped upside-down

She envisions the contenders scattered                     
along some ragged starting line a mile long.  
Who knows when her body parts heard On Your Mark
or when the gun cracked Go?                     
Birth?  Or some mysterious cellular
shift in her fifties, drift in her sixties?  

She imagines each having left
its starting gate  –  overworked pancreas, scarred
liver and kidneys, narrowed blood vessels
and shrinking synapses –
progressing in steady pace til they converge
at the vanishing point:   Poof!
And here she springs her hands open,
fingers spread in surrender.               

“You are doing this for love.”

Do you remember
          She says
one time, in the dining room?
I was eight, no,
maybe nine.
I’m not sure, She
was gone, I think.
Must have been
already. Then I was ten.
          You blink.
Anyway, we were there,
all of us, and Mom.
She held my hand.
She asked me about Him,
about if, about Sundays.
You were there, I think.
She asked about a feeling.
          She chews at the side of her nail.
I mean, I swear it happened.
But I don’t think Dad was there.
I don’t know if he knows, god.
It wasn’t bad, mostly I remember the tv.
It was always tv, in the leather recliner.
I didn’t. I didn’t ever have a feeling. The-
You remember, surely?
          You think of guest bedrooms,
          of the middle of the night,
          of fingers on waistbands.
No.
          Of long winding drives
          in backseats,
          of green eyes on baby blue.
I don’t know anything
at all.