What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use
All these great barns out here in the outskirts,
black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.
They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.
You say they look like arks after the sea’s
dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,
and I think of that walk in the valley where
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,
its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name
though we knew they were really just clouds—
disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.
Many-Faced Poem
It comes up
as thunderhead
ready to break
roiling dark &
comes up as
sunflower or
cornstalk budding
kernels of light
or comes up
earthy & sweet
as soil turned
by backhoe or
perhaps as dog
nosing its way
hard between us
at the hushed crack
& flash of storm
clearing its throat
for the first
fearsome word.
If You’re Tired Then Go Take a Nap
I never liked bridges or cops & there
are more of both of them in the suburbs,
lording over possibilities like stumbles
do stairs. Down the blue & white set next
to the small gym after first period, shoelace
caught under a new bully’s foot. He would
have gotten stole on in Carriage House, but
not by me. Gots to chill or it’ll get worse:
in blue Jams & pushed off summer’s slick
ledge, long fall into the private pool broken
into three distinct verses: the flail & giggling
girls, the sun-stroked lifeguard’s exclamation,
& the red-handed water’s backslap rising up,
splitting into two, more chlorinated skies.
’N’em
They said to say goodnight
And not goodbye, unplugged
The TV when it rained. They hid
Money in mattresses
So to sleep on decision.
Some of their children
Were not their children. Some
Of their parents had no birthdates.
They could sweat a cold out
Of you. They’d wake without
An alarm telling them to.
Even the short ones reached
Certain shelves. Even the skinny
Cooked animals too quick
To catch. And I don’t care
How ugly one of them arrived,
That one got married
To somebody fine. They fed
Families with change and wiped
Their kitchens clean.
Then another century came.
People like me forgot their names.
Valentine
I’ve slept but this has happened
yet—when the windows are dressed
in red, and the engines go by with
the keening of love birds—the last day
before the parade—everything colored
like the fifth seat from the top
of a runaway ferris wheel.
I woke in fits and starts,
blustering wind in the morning
and everything placid at night.
Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner
My grandma always told me if life gives you lemons
throw ’em away. And so, we loosen. Shuffle off sore tendons.
Mondays. Insults catcalled out Chevy windows.
Clinking whiskey glasses, we wipe away sweat and old flames.
All I ever found in the gravel was the paper body,
what the garter snake shed. Take off that old suit, tonight.
Even as your good arm shudders to the mat, like the moon
meeting the mouth of the Shenandoah. Take off that old suit.
In new skin, come back again and again. Own this acreage,
this new ground ripping under rolled sleeves.