bound with a wire.
No one else in the car had seen the dog.
I was driving too fast.
It was sitting in the middle of the road.
There was no chance for me to stop.
I’ve played it over in my mind more than once, and
there was no chance for me to stop.
ONE OF THE WIVES OF GOD
I know what distant sirens mean;
already they have
come and passed me for another.
I know dismantlement.
Up until the moment they come for you,
it is always for another.
Sister Mary Catherine
taught me that in catechism
Father held on Saturdays
for kids who couldn’t pay
for Catholic school,
so learned the rites
of beautiful suffering
from a missal,
and from Sister, sweet,
who was my
light of spirit and my Holy Ghost
and who,
in my unholy imaginings,
lifted me
above the ordinary
into condemnation.
In the pew I sat upright,
but didn’t hear the Father’s
words except their drone
beyond the indeterminate
boundaries of my stupor
for Sister Mary, not yet twenty,
her eyes
the still blue pond of all of my longing;
the way she
smiled down on me
a warmth that must have been the soul.
So I found ways to see her when I could,
pretending there was something
that I hadn’t understood, and once
in my swoon for her body
that I could somehow feel,
even through the habit’s shroud,
I wandered, drowsy,
into the house
where the wives of Jesus slept
and lived their secret lives,
and I saw her,
lit by a small lamp,
through a crack
in the wooden door.
THE UNKNOWNS
If only
they had told us
that it was all a metaphor,
I might have learned;
I might not have
troubled so long tonight
over equations
my daughter
had brought home from school; her mother
gone somewhere, and me
her only chance at the quantities.
When I ask her
if she thinks there are numbers
to measure loss,
or to measure grief,
she wonders out loud
what we would do with those sums,
once we had untangled them
from their drowsy abstractions.
Mr. Brown
was my teacher
of the sums in the sixth grade
and he saw the beautiful
figures in everything,
so he
grieved over my unlearning,
cudgeled me daffy
with his slide rule,
and took on as his fate
my crummy well-being.
I wanted to please him
so I cheated more than once,
although that was neither the new
nor the old math,
only a thing I had imagined
I invented.
I cheated, and I copied,
and I asked some girls
to do my work
so I could watch the grief
leave the face of Mr. Brown
when I showed him my solutions
that were mine only in abstraction,
only because I possessed them.
NOTHING ELSE SUTRA
We were sleeping among the topiary
in a foreign land
I had come to love
like my own mind.
We were street-smart and jiving
to the newest beats
up Broadway in Queens
where they finally made the sleeping beast
arise that was the people’s voice.
We were walking on water
in the harbor
where the ex-burning river
emptied itself,
making a crackling,
lonely sound
beyond the ore boats
drifting past us,
their tiny men on deck
nothing else.
TEACHING HANH THE BLUES
Some things come
simply for the sake of
goodness. A little
C, F, and G
with the left hand
and a C-minor
scale with the right
may take you
back to the ages
whose blood we are. Her
fingers are strong and she’s
eager to learn
how to play
in a way
she already
understands means
outside of herself. My
river,
I called her
first on the streets of Hanoi
when the city’s
lights had gone out
and I’d
lost our way back home
until she pulled me
shyly by my hand
to our dark room.
This is what I think about
to play it like I feel,
I tell her.
HOME
I didn’t know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields
yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over
into never.
I didn’t know
I would enter this music
that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me
as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,
or like a needful boy. End
lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.
PART TWO
INCIDENT AT EAGLE’S PEAK
All morning long in the rain,
I drove through the streets of my boyhood
past the falling-down houses,
with my friend from my boyhood
who is a man now, like me, or
who lives inside of a man’s body.
And after the rain stopped
we parked the car
at the edge of a woods
that had been our
secret place,
but where now
the county had constructed
an asphalt trail,
wound like a scar
through what had been our perfect world,
undisturbed by adults,
ordered peacefully by a code
that children had made up
through all the years of children.
We walked down the asphalt trail
no longer sure of our way
until it curved toward the river
and crossed an old path
still visible in the tangle of years,
and without speaking
we climbed under the fence
and followed the path to the river,
that’s called the Black River,
where we swam without our clothes
in the long summers of our spirit bodies,
and not out of nowhere exactly,
but more out of the river,
I heard my friend’s voice
rise up above the wind
and say that his life had come to nothing.
His sad
ness filled the air around us.
It rose up and moved the branches.
It floated along the river like a mist,
so I wanted to find a way
to tell him that he was wrong.
I wanted to make a story for him
that could be alive in the place
he had come to imagine was nothing,
but there was no use for words there,
and when he had finished
telling his long sadness,
he breathed deeply,
and he shook his head
no to the river,
or to the wind in the trees
that makes a sound like all of memory,
or to the life he felt strangled by.
In the distance that our eyes found together,
just at a bend in the river,
two great blue herons
lifted and then settled again,
like silk scarves
among the rocks in fast water.
I wanted to believe that the beauty
meant something to my friend
in a way that could
ease the sharp hurt of his knowing.
I wanted to believe
that he had not wasted his life,
that there was something
just in the living of it,
hard and with some
simple human grace
that had to make it matter,
but I didn’t know
if the moment meant anything at all,
and I had to stand very still
to try to gain my balance,
to find the rope of words that,
real or not,
binds us to the world
and blesses us
with that sense of being
we may imagine is a life.
And then we were walking away,
in the rain that had started again.
We could still hear the water
rush over rocks
that had been big enough once
to lay our bodies out across
those years ago in the sun,
and the sound the water made for us
as we turned off the path for home
was like a promise
I remembered from before.
You can tear the life out of a man
with only a few wrong words.
You can break a man’s life down
as if it were nothing,
just by turning away.
PART THREE
TIME AFTER TIME
You may cradle my honey whimper
in your fresh bite.
You may shoo away the dogs
and hush the howling
in your brain,
but you may not forget
the boys we had been,
and how we
promised ourselves
to each other
in the timeless
green place by the river
that day the one boy,
who was you as the girl,
was called through a portal
to vistas troubled
ungreen by some voices
of the old kind,
and how the me,
who was the other boy,
turned away and then
turned back to find you,
my brother lover,
gone behind the time
after time gauzy veil
don’t tell me will lift;
don’t throw me a spar
or bring me the fresh cut
flowers of the dead.
ELEGY FOR MYSELF
When they said,
You with the stars in your eyes,
I didn’t know they were talking to me.
I thought it was just
voices I was hearing
in the slag heaps and
down the ethnic alleys
of stolen plums and black cherries
of late summer.
I thought it was something
wrong in my head
when someone died back then,
waiting for the flowers to blossom.
THE THING
(Part One)
I’ve stayed up nights
waiting for that
thing I could hear
pacing in the thicket
of cruel thorns
until the black sky
tells it that it’s time
to come and get me.
Few are as faithful as I am
in their waiting.
Sometimes,
I even imagine
I can see the thing
standing in the dim
streetlight wash
in the shape of one of the lost,
one of the unloved,
forced to wander the lonely dark.
I have waited up
all night so many times for him
that I have blurred the boundaries
of good sense,
and still the thing never comes;
it always never comes.
THE THING
(Part Two)
I was
waxing nostalgic, remembering
the days of Freud,
when we still had
hope that we could drive the bad cells
out with clever talk and good intentions,
all for a c-note an hour. We believed
we could fix a bad thing
inside of a man those days;
we hadn’t yet
run out of others to blame
for the mad blood we left in our wake
like a twisted offering
through the thousand years,
the pious self in us
curled up in fear
away from the unforgiving.
I was dozing and dreaming on the
rented veranda’s rented
sofa in the cross-fire troubled sun.
THE ROADS IN OUR BRAIN
I believe that most folks
hide inside of a private place
where it feels like
no one can see you,
where you can shape
a small center of a thing
around yourself,
and though it isn’t the real life,
we have rivers here
that run hard and cold in the spring
over limestone rocks
old as God.
I believe
that most folks
can at least imagine how it feels
to practice goodness,
if only inside of that
center that we shape around us
and imagine it’s a thing
others can see.
You could
hold yourself up
against the starry sky there
and not feel a thing.
FOR A, AT FOURTEEN
You think your life is hard right now; so cold
the world seems, without much understanding.
You hurt enough to let the hard words go.
I know enough to let them ride. The thing
you have inside of you I had inside
me too. It’s like you’re pulled by every heart,
by every weary, needful stranger’s eyes.
There isn’t time enough for me. The dark
won’t let me hold you, as I know I could.
We need at last a life without the grief
we’ve brought into the house. A life that would
allow us both our tenderness, our pain released,
the manliness for once at rest; at rest
those spirits lost, those spirits now are blessed.
MY AUTUMN LEAVES
I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.
I watch the woods for deer who never come.
I know the hes and shes in autumn
rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen
apples’ scent. I drive my car
this way to work
so I may let the crows in corn believe
it’s me their caws are meant to warn,
and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves
they know me too. They know the boy
who lives inside me still won’t go away.
The deer are ghosts who slip between the light
through trees, so you may only hear the snap
of branches in the thicket beyond hope.
I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.
THE BUDDHAS OF THE BAMIYAN VALLEY
I do not grieve the Buddhas
blown to pieces in Bamiyan.
It does not matter
that fifteen hundred years before,
people lived in caves
and carved the Buddhas
into the face
of the unimaginable mountain
with such exquisite care
it hurt to see.
I do not grieve for the Buddhas
blown to smithereens, pieces
smaller than your hand.
Someone thought that it would matter,
but if you blow the Buddha
into tiny pieces,
you blow nothing into pieces.
This is what they did not understand.
THAT TOWERING FEELING
I know a man
who believes he deserves to be loved
in this
loveless little village of a world.
Tonight, snow is general
all across this
new spring evening
as he tells me
on the phone
of this theory.
He is alone again
among his
money and his things.
Even those who
ruined him as a child
with their big hands and their
unspeakable preschool games
have crossed over.
We believed once
that the places
they had torn inside him,
like bat-wing
razor marks against the sky,
would grow back in the light.
THE NEW YEAR TWO THOUSAND
O holy snow,
the dogs have pissed upon you;
you are the snow
we have waited for so long.
Fast may the ice
stay far beyond our doorway,
light where we leave
and where we come.
God bless these dogs
who trot across our borders,
wild in the moon
under windows where we sleep.