Dog Lives

Slobbering, sullen and terribly tired,
the truth of it is, I can’t take this any more.
In the cool gray light of dawn, I hound
the backyard for lizards, squirrels, what have you,
catching hay and crab grass in my threadbare coat.

From any point on the lawn, I see them stalking me
from their branches, blue birds or yellow-bellied sapsuckers,
calm and focused and impossibly fast.
Sometimes, however, they fall from the trees
like leaves and cannot move.

Still, these infrequent delicacies do not satisfy me.
I tramp, long-faced and floppy-eared, back to my basket
to wait. For what? The sun slowly rises,
casting warm light through the kitchen blinds,
sometimes stirring me from restless cat naps.

Afternoon begins to happen. The children
come first, carelessly slamming the doors
and running up the stairs. Next,
the parents come in and head for the couch.
I watch it all unfold, like a hawk,

but confined to the hard ground.
Life happens so slow, I’m glad we age quick.
At night though, the moon swims into the sky,
and something happens to me under the purple glow,
which is ancient and wild and sometimes a bit scary.

Degrees of Brown in Saginaw

You come here summers
on your mother’s whim.
The water tower is always
here to welcome you,
and the grass turns thin
like your uncle’s hair.
Across from the bait shop,
a redheaded waitress
with a bouffant
puts in an order of perch.
The people your mother
went to school with
won’t live here any more,
and her old house belongs
to the government now.
The playgrounds are empty,
so you take your cousin
for a push on the swing.
The few night strollers
smoke Newports.
The drivers always
get into Fords.
Your uncle still watches
the Lions every Sunday.
In Oakwood Cemetery,
where they buried Roethke,
no one visits him
much less knows his name.

Sleeping It Off in Tampa

May 14, 2009

In a hotel room across from Mons Venus,
we sprawled out on the beds, like laundry.
The mini-fridge buzzed, crammed
with clanking bottles of Bud we’d eventually drink.
Under the lamp, I glowed like a solitary angel
with the Bible in my lap. A book which I do not
begin to understand. We stared so long into
the bruised white ceiling, it seemed almost to move.
We couldn’t call it imprisonment exactly,
but the flickering of fluorescent lights
or the drip drop of the faucet in the bathroom
suggested captivity, if only of the mind.
Everything before represented a different life.
We talk hesitantly about his accident,
tried to work out the passing of our friend,
but the things that weren’t said suffocated
that hotel room. Like mustard gas.

Pumpkin

Your round face looks into mine—
rigid, burnt-orange, with a haunting grin
and hard eyes. Gutted out,
the hollowness of your mind resounds
in everything you do (or can’t do).
You’re plopped down, unable to move.
You’re left out in the cold, like a cat.
The darkness surrounds you, and still
you burn on the inside with a fuse.

Jack-O’-Lantern (revision)

Your face, rigid, burnt-orange, looks up at mine.
Gutted out, your mind makes a hollow tune.

You’ve been left out in the cold, like a cat,
Plopped down between the planter and the mat.

At dusk, you yearn for the acidic smell of peat bogs
And the discordant croaking of tree frogs.

Children shuffle past you without looks or grins,
Adorned in knight’s armor or bloody aprons.

The darkness surrounds you.
And still you burn on the inside with a fuse.

Postcard from Key Biscayne

They met near the jetty twenty years ago.
Caught between the rocks and the swell,
There was nowhere left to go.
The lighthouse was there even then
With no one to guide home.
And the sea went on forever.

Abandoning their buckets,
The children scampered to the shore
To watch the manta rays float above
The water. “What is it?” they’d ask
and point and laugh.

Barreling through the sand,
The boys kicked up towels,
Hooked some seaweed
Between their wrinkled toes
And burst the bubbles that sizzled
In the mushy pocks of shoreline.

Barbeques flared under the green nylon tents,
swelling with the familiar weight of families.
When a Frisbee went up, it hung there,
Beyond the bounds of their understanding.
The boys danced salsa, the girls danced
Meringue, sometimes together.

Washed up on the beach, they looked
In the other’s eyes, continuous as the sea.
“What will this mean to them?”
they kept themselves from asking.
“Could our bones be nothing but seashells?”
If he put his ear to her collar bone, he could hear
The sea. He knew her secrets.

In the grey sky,
The sunset shimmered by comparison.
If nothing else, the seagulls would
Guide their eyes to the horizon again,
Like wire, even as the sea went on and on.

Veterans Day

I planned with such military precision,
you must have seen it coming.
From the towering steps of the colonnade,
where we kissed that first time,
we watched the mallard with her column
of ducklings bask in the noon sun.
The veterans filed through the tunnel,
toddling toward the community center,
adorned with hearts and badges and stars.
We felt so far off from that.
I would talk sometimes impulsively
of joining, flaunting my manliness,
but you would give me those eyes
and shrug it off impossibly.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day
of the eleventh month, I married, My Lord, you.
I still revel in that kind of repetition.

Two years later, our anniversary has become
simply Veterans Day again,
a time to lament our irretrievable losses.

Food and Shoes

“You gotta have food and shoes.”
-Cormac McCarthy, Interview with Oprah

These boots have a thousand miles on them—
maybe two. I walked all the days and into the nights,
past that doughnut shop and May’s boutique,
the Denny’s on 23rd and Gander Mountain on 8th,
until everything turned into a great big stereotype
of the American southeast. Pickup trucks kicked up
dust as they rattled out of nowhere gas stations,
gun stores, liquor stores, pawnshops, biker bars.
I might have taken a train, but instead I walked
because it felt like the thing to do. I took off
with some money, the clothes on my back,
some food and these shoes, these boots on my feet.
When I got tired, I rested. In hour-by-hour motels,
mostly. When I was well-rested, I walked.
Not less than a few times, I depended on the good-
hearted nature of people for directions.
Everyone wants to point you in the right direction.
But I didn’t know where I was going exactly,
just that it was far, and that the journey could get lonely.
Sometimes, when loneliness met me on the road,
I would stop in the nearest diner for some eggs
and sit by a girl and chat with her, like some Hopper
painting I can’t say the name of right now.
The baseball game would come on the TV, or the news,
and I’d watch that. If the girl left, I’d go too.
Then one day, I made it to your doorstep.
It must have been October. You told me to take off
my boots, and you warmed me up a cup of chicken noodle soup.
I made it. Not without the food and those boots,
and a bit of kindness on the road. But you can’t forget
the food and the shoes. You got to have food and shoes.

Sunday Blues

After they’re gone, the Sunday blues set in.
Last week’s laundry chugs along inside the washing machine,
like a worn-out choo-choo train.

The Bears upset the Steelers in a tragic dumb show,
played out upon a fuzzy TV set.
Twisted and disused, beer cans drain on the carpet.

What is that smell? It must be the trash compactor
acting out again. If it’s not one thing,
it’s another, my father always says.

Even the world of books looks provincial,
ascending and descending on the shelf,
like mountains (but a lot more like hills).

Out the faintly shuttered window, night is disturbed
by a few passing headlights,
reflecting off a few sticker-ornamented stop signs—

what the punks and degenerates think of the city’s cause
to Keep Your Neighborhoods Clean. A burger wrapper
rolls through the grass, like tumbleweed.

What happens in the house across the street
when the lights go out is a mystery,
but it doesn’t stop me from looking out and wondering,

Does anyone wonder what happens in here?

Rain

Driving Main, I think about you
for the first time
in a long time.

The street lights blur in the night,
filtered through my near-sighted view,
but the rain

squats on the window panes,
clearly there, clearly white
or clearly blue?

I dry up, go numb,
turn on the radio
when you drop into view—

four months away.
What else to say or do?
I think back to your friends

dressed in the usual black
(but given away by their tennis shoes)
as the preacher chants

ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
like an African rain song.
Nobody moves out of the rain.

Your girlfriend’s white blouse
turns see-through.
But not, not you.

No Ars Poetica

On a Greyhound to Sarasota in the summer
to visit my default “best friend” (we all need
someone to call on), I flip through The Waste Land.
The bus rattles on, the cold air blows my eyes to tears,
the old broads in the front chat incessantly,
a retired mad-scientist in back expounds on string theory.

Looming just ahead: the Sunshine Skyway
(my favorite part on this all-too-familiar odyssey).
What unbridled fun! Time again to master
that Larkin-esque looking-through-the-window-onto-the-world
approach to poetry. This view yielded up an image once before—
of a “black-sailed boat directed at the sun.” Could it happen again?

I point my myopic poet-eyes at the storm-filled horizon,
with its clear Gulf water, which once sparkled,
“like fireworks in the harsh sunlight.” Nothing.
The sky flashes and the sea yearns,
as usual. All I get is the same old sense
of something dark and never-ending in nature
as the bus makes its quick descent.

Looking into the Storm (revision)

On a Greyhound to Sarasota in the summer
to visit my default best friend, I watch
the Sunshine Skyway loom ahead
like a colossal roller coaster, or something
about to be said. The bus rattles on
as if guided by steel and rough wooden tracks.

The old ladies in front clutch to their seats,
like handbags. A retired physicist
expounds on his ideas of string theory,
His expressions changing as the cold air
blows my eyes to tears.

Mustard-yellow suspension wires
stretch from the pillars like violin strings.
This horizon has in it a memory for me—
of a black-sailed boat parting the Gulf water,
which sparkled like fireworks in the harsh sunlight.
In today’s storm-dense horizon. Nothing.

The sky flashes and the rain pelts.
And I sense something dark and never-ending
in nature, which is also a memory I must keep.