Buffalo surge over the plains at night like foam
At the edge of a wave. Nighthawks boom far above.
By dawn, the grass is scored from a thousand meteors.

St. Luke believed that true faith, like true healing,
Leaves a scar. The word is a cicatrix, torn into being,
The pain that knits itself into a shield against harm.

By now, Ishmael has grown tired of talk about archangels
And the whiteness of hell. Closing his eyes to the wind,
He dreams of a home far beyond the grieving waves.

To forget its past, the soul crosses Lethe before rebirth.
Each one of us was a prizefighter, barmaid, pope, and slave.
Come, take my hand, let’s cross this low stretch of river.

Whales don’t lament the vast latitudes they travel.
Their songs are no more about sorrow than bliss,
But are maps leading the singers across a dark trench.

It’s never clear if we’re going on a journey or into exile.
If there’s an end, it’s hidden as a wound beneath a scar.
If there’s an end, it’s endless as the plains we cross.




The Candied Body of Felix Gonzales-Torres

He left every ounce of his flesh in candy for us to eat,
Left the weight of his lover, gobbled by AIDS, the weight
Of the two of them huddled and crying on a couch.

How strange that beauty comes to the sorrowful
When they most need it, when it least avails them.
He draped strings of muted lights from a ceiling,

Called them Leaves of Grass. He understood Whitman
Better than whole universities of scholars
And sleeps chest to chest with him on a bed of stars.

He stacked black-and-white posters of clouds,
Wanting us to take one for ourselves,
Like peeling back the museum roof to expose

The endless possibilities of the heavens.
He worked with nothing you couldn’t buy at Rite-Aid.
Cheap, disposable gifts the dying give the dying.

Candy melts to nothingness, humming tungsten breaks,
The poster is lost in an attic of cardboard boxes,
And over the world’s body the clouds go, nevertheless.

                            For Jonathan VanDyke

Floating books tapped my hip like a dog’s nose the night
father spat on the library and the whole thing flooded.
I would have drowned. I would have sunk like a flashlight
left wandering in the water but brother yanked my hand

before the surge's lips sucked me in. No use convincing
the water: something larger than Louisiana, larger than
Belle Chasse, larger than the row of churches left wincing
after the first surge, larger than the life-vests in my hand

that father gave me, told me not to lose and that I was stupid
when I had lost them, refused to look at me, talk to me,
wouldn’t even spit on me. Even when I begged, pleaded
for that bullet tasting just as sweet as fresh wildflower honey.

Then came his hand. And anyone who survived it knows
it was God I dangled under, his skinny-kid elbows.




Heart Ghazal

A whitetail deer stared, eyes weighting the heart
the night a truck swerved, fear striating the heart.

First brush with death: the freight truck crash;
God showed me his way of negating the heart.

Just nine years old when the doctors diagnosed my
Father’s rheumatic fever, a sore throat fating the heart.

Some folks wash their hands clean where they drink.
They shake water white, ripples reverberating the heart.

I jogged down the dusty path, body desperate to fly,
but fell gasping. My chest pounded, gating the heart.

They pounded on his chest in the waiting room
where he collapsed, gloved fists berating the heart.

When they called my mother, she knew he was gone.
But the doctor dangled slightest chance, baiting the heart.

I have come home on a train coursing tracks
old wood and iron, each horn blare translating the heart.

Just two lines Geoffrey, just two lines. Get them out,
they’re doing nothing, but—write it!—medicating the heart.

When I think nothing
will bring back the green
rush of spring in my chest,
I think of the African thumb
pianos in the French Market,
little note cool and full
as a drop of water, peeling slow
down the back of my neck, and if

that note were the last drop
of water I’d ever taste, and therefore
not enough to save me,

I would stick out my tongue,
I would drink it all the same.




The Magic Words

I want someone
far older than I am
to call me to his bedside
at the hazy edges of spring,

to sit me down in an old
porch chair, my hands folded,
precise as origami cranes
in my lap, to tell me

a story filled with mud,
bad liquor, tiny rooms,
rough forest, bugs stinging
his back, roots twisting

his ankles, the lack
of someone’s face
blanking his mind
of everything, even sleep,

heat turning his skin
from soft human skin
to a raw hide of stink,
drops of blood so tiny

at a knife’s rough cut
on his wrist it seemed even
his body could not give
him enough of anything—

and then, something happens
to make it the now,
tidy room, soft sheets,
paintings bright on walls,

clock ticking neat
as my throat gulping water
after a long cry, a bad dream.
I don’t care what form

the story takes, nor if
what he wanted
matches what I miss.
I only want someone

who longed for something
to grab the bare skin
of my arm in his hand,
and, eyes bright as dimes,

tell me, Listen.
Let me tell you
about the day
everything changed.

It is lunch time. Beside the road
lies a carcass of what was once a dog.
On the corner a man sells roses.
Below the overpass there are men
fishing in the Chattahoochee.

In this river dead bodies
have been found. Behind picnic tables
teenagers lose their virginity. Broken
glass beneath soft banks.

In the middle of a song
I hear him say I am indifferent.
I remember when we were younger
tubing down the river.
I didn’t wear makeup that day.
Somewhere there is a picture.




Sea Gypsies

You said you spent 5 minutes of your life
today looking for a staple remover.
Something to do with your job.
You edit, and sometimes
there is a need to pull things

apart. There are mountains
between us, and then a river.
The land swells with seeds
that fall from your pockets,
sewing the distance with deep
breaths, an entire city
in your smile.

I tell you about the Mokens,
gypsies of the Andaman Sea.
How they knew to flee the tsunami
before the first wave tore trees
from their roots, husbands from wives.
When the sky turns to salt, sometimes
there is a thirst. In their language

there is no word for want,
only an understanding
of give and take. You said
I took away your need
and you want

to share water with me.
The ground presses its pregnant
belly against my feet. I am
distracted by squirrels
in the trees. Wind.
When.

She waited, driftwood body stung by wasp,
her folded hand like a knife. She was irritable, too
lifeless to wait any longer. The radio rattled and she
remembered her stroke in the stream. She turned like a top,
in, and then once out, she was bright as golden hair. The
trees bristled in the open air. She looked back, the orange
of her dress like an unpredictable peach. Her thumbs held to
her shoulders; it was twelve o’clock. She worried about
something other than her hands. They had helped her,
she knew, in the brassiest and smallest way. The breeze died
down around her smooth head.




Motet: Five Voices

It’s not for you
to recognize as you wander up
the path, a fury of bees
making its way into your shirt collar.

If what you already know
is remembered, in an instant,
is fixed on the brain, then you will
take instructions: Play now the violin, wand on string.

Note how the counting of time
and the door of the hand give you reason
to keep going. How in the birth of these
voices the slow breath keeps breathing.

The fire around the bend holds its heat.

When, over the hill, a tree trunk takes
a dog-head shape visible, your legs stop
before you do. You think you have folded up
on your bed, but you have gone out, into the shadows.

Each brown egg, a breakfast orb flecked with shit and straw.
On Sunday mornings Uncle Tommy appeared with an ax,
Hanging loosely at his side. The gregarious hens hid
When they heard his door slam two cabins down.

One hen each week startled by conjunction of ax and block.
Bloody heads rotted in the wire grass, the eyes gone by noon.
In Rob’s dreams poultry still careens, small brown storms,
Through his front yard swept clean by his young mama.

When the woman’s husband took sick
the dog showed up in her backyard.
It gulped old butter beans dumped
in the field at the corner of the fence.

Visitors filled the house but the beagle
shied from touch. She got biscuits, ham,
slept in the ditch across the road. A bowl
was filled with water, weighted with a rock.

Dry dog food was sprinkled in the grass.
When the woman walked to the mailbox
she listened for the claw-tick on the road,
felt that living thing’s breath at her heels.

2.

The teenage girl down the street
lingers near a boy, his polished car
parked quickly, in the wrong direction.
He leans forward, thrums the steering wheel,

door flung into her parents’ light-heaped yard.
Music floats between them. The muffled bass
kicks. She bends one arm, holds an elbow
from behind her back. He’s inches from the curb.

Birds peck through the grass near the house.
He’s one step from her lean arms, tanned legs.
Her toes curl the rough curb while her soles
—creamy—flash like halves of the moon.

3.

They’re gone now, the old couple. Him,
Parkinson’s. Her, a fallen bladder, a split knee.
The neighbor took up mowing. He weeded
around the stoop and the silent white urns.

The geraniums went stemmy, stained
red wherever petals fell. In the newspaper
there’s a picture—a woman who disappeared
thirty years ago. Her eyes will always be green.

When the weathered birdhouse fell
it didn’t crack apart but lay on its side.
The neighbor lifted it, leaving a mark
where it had been like a wound undressed.

4.

Every year it was the smell of cedar.
The black cat, back arched in screech
on the picture-window. The pumpkin-man,
elbows pinned to the front door, hands limp.

Until October all the dark paper things
that opened into tissue pumpkins, or moons
lined the chest in my mother’s room. Once,
I returned a scarecrow, its body halved like wings,

and I saw my parents’ letters bundled with string.
I pinched one loose, slipped it under my shirt.
Then the red-jet airmail stamp, my mother’s name,
the empty pocket I found beneath an already cut seam.

pools at my ankles—socks full of mud. How
can I keep walking, talking, skinning a bagel,

sniffing the yeast? I dangle my head and arms
over the bed-cliff to warm them. My face is torn,

my hair looks dead. The small hot birds sound closer
than ever. I stop breathing, experimentally.

Just a habit, painless to break. The world
pulled in, the world pushed out, molecules

unchanged. Since my heart stopped, rot begins.
To move is to haul meat. A sour scent, blush

of green along the fat. Will I wither
snug along my bones or loosen, peel

away? Since my heart stopped, questions fester
like microscopic eggs. I never knew

that the fire in me could cool and still a walking,
talking engine would conduct the business

of my will. That I was less a working
body than a mind’s routine, a rhythm.

I took it in; it was a reflection.
A man in a corner took it in too.
The hat was similar to itself.

In each reflection, the reflection of a prior life.
History is miracle.
How do any of us survive it?

Pattern recognizes silhouette.
Silhouette recognizes pattern (breeze).
All these thoughts of sexuation.

Is that really a word? the man should ask.
The girl he loves is lost in it.
Do they come from the mirror function too?

II

In Paris the fires were raging.
In the magasins, in the car lots.
I pressed my body straightway.

I mean, I pressed my bodies straightway.
The profile their reproduction.
The profile’s where we insert it.

In utopia the children ate candy.
Now I’m content with myself.
It’s the kind of content that makes one board trains.

History memory theory.
I won’t sculpt it; it will not occur.
The silhouettes are ghosts and the people gone.

Dusk and the two of us again
on the porch swing, idling down
the day. The low sun burning out

but still with us, its full glow
like the lull between seasons
or the soft pearl of the oyster.

It is the moment when doves
light on dormant phone lines and boys
find love in fish nets and crab cages,

in the salty chorus of the wharf. We
can almost hear them, six blocks east,
the lobstermen bringing in the catch

and their daughters in braids telling secrets,
a cloister of curls and intentions, waiting
for fathers whose bones smell of fish

to carry them home. By habit
our arms touch as we listen to the cadence
of the first evening rain tapping to the west

near the cemetery and the eight-stool pub.
A girl coasts her bike down the street,
bells on her handlebars ringing. It is the hour

before women wash dishes
and men go out, before the gulls flock
toward Captain’s Calabash, the shore’s single light

for miles. And we give
with unthinned hearts, little knowing
how even if banked by the best words

and buoyed by honesty, love can fail.
Or maybe we do know
and unharbor ourselves anyway.




Everything From That Point On

I.
All day the gulls dove, cries unsynchronized,
throats clinching every note as tightly as their bills

pincered quivering fish. The morning wind, spiked
with salt, stung our eyes as the sun slashed its light

across the numb horizon. I guess this is mine now, you said,
by default, drumming your chewed fingernails

with a hollow ruc-a-tuc, ruc-a-tuc on the bumper
of your father’s truck, our reflection skewed in its dents.

And everything from that point on was slow motion:
the rest of the day spreading between us without words,

sunbathers coming and going, building their castles
until the tide slithered in to crush the towers in its grip.

Then the cooler air, clouds wisping thin, the last
of the fishermen reeling in, and the loon on one leg

letting the pink wings of sunset molest her feather by feather.

II.
Alone, under the cold fist of the moon and backed by hazy winks
of distant hotel lights, you slogged in calf-deep, the waves

gutting the ocean floor, sloshing its dregs against
you. From the shore I memorized

each splintered shell, each man-of-war, each muscle
you didn’t flinch. Without ceremony, you slung the urn

out past the breakers, its lid tipping, dark tail of ashes
trailing. As you returned, the chill of the night

trembling through you, the smell of the brine in your hair,
I knew this would be the end for us. Your green eyes were pale,

scaled of their usual laughter. You swung from your loss,
gills straining. I loved you most in that moment, knowing

even as I slipped my arm up the back of your shirt, hooking us
together, that you were about to cut me loose to spare me

the tightening of the line, the bruise of sudden air.




Solitaire

He has learned to love the loneliness of night,

The possible hauntings, faraway sirens, the silver
Of the sky. He used to follow all the advice: hot baths, warm milk,

Soft jazz, no caffeine. He tried sleeping with socks and without,
In silk or cotton sheets. He even took pills, which made him feel
Upon waking, as if he’d slept through a play’s second act.

He would rather let the rare half-hour naps come when they will:
After a midnight plate of celery sticks and peanut butter, perhaps,
Or in the middle of a cricket serenade
Accompanied by dogs barking across their fences.

He’s never tired, but he can’t help feeling left out,
As if he’s the punch line to night’s only joke, as if the dreams
He could be having are piling up like unclaimed luggage.
By four a.m. even his west coast friends are asleep, but he
Turns his clocks to the wall, ritualizes boredom.

He dances in the empty street, swings upside-down from the trees.
He rescued a kitten, named her Lady, likes to watch her sleep
On his windowsill or curled up purring in his popcorn bowl.
He croons Elvis into the handle of his garden spade
While standing on his coffee table, dressed in tails. He juggles,
Stitches, makes categorized alphabetized lists of the movies he’s seen,

Books he’s read, each pet he’s owned from Amadeus to Zephyr.
But mostly he plays solitaire. Decks of cards, stacked in multiples of five,
Rise like towers of miniature cities in the corners of his apartment.
His goal: to collect enough to play with a new deck
Every night for the rest of his life, however many that may be.
He tries to welcome them, to imagine them being dealt out:
New stars turning over beside each fat ace of a moon.

What no one understands is you were supposed to die
seven years ago. You went into surgery and came back
not quite right. The pressure multiplies like fruit flies in a dirty,
too hot kitchen. You can’t even core an apple without slicing
your finger. You always insert your house key backwards first.
Your socks slip off, and your shoes slice into your feet.
Wastewater and evangelism bloat on your tongue. You smile too widely,
your eyes a little too big. What was once disarming is now loaded
and pointed at you. Each drive is your last one. Every shadow lunges.
Mountains are too close to the edge. What everyone thinks
is awkwardness, you know is just the scalpel slipping closer.




Corrections to the Published Text

The author wrote that the woman wore green.
I clearly remember the blue cashmere I had on that day.
I had worn a black skirt with a blue pinstripe and a coordinating sweater.
He said the blue matched my eyes.

The rain blocked the light, he wrote.
The sun had already set.

Our kiss at the door was as brief as the mist that preceded the rain (that wasn’t there).
Maybe this emphasizes his longing. Adds a Casablanca sacrifice to the story.
We both know, however, that we had sex on the sofa, and the condom broke.
The next morning I had to call the doctor when he had already left me for work.

She never loved me.
Check the source again.

She said, “awful.”
No, it was “fulfilled.”

One year, someone made their liquor in lead pipes
and everyone’s face stopped working on one side.
Winters, after we cut the leaf, we let the dogs sleep
in the smokehouse to keep the rats away.
The hickory smoldered and smelled how I thought
the church organ clunked and roiled
when my father came back from the war.

Some pot of soup beans,
some coffee drunk from a saucer.
From town, the first creek bed.
Before Eisenhower built the big roads,
and one place was poor as another.

Carbon thick on the globe glass,
reading the family records, the list of sires
and sons, Jesse through Jesus, in the back of our only book,
onion paper over the prints of the shepherd telling
soldiers stories. We looked for the eggs the hen hid
at the woods’ edge. Kash used the mules to skid the logs down
for the second house, cut cedar shakes with an adz
and sent us to the springhouse to get him his whiskey
when the blade laid open his leg.




To the Displeased Husband

After jacking off in Houston, I think of you—
your gasoline rage, the heart you tax and tax,
the steady roar of the bomber’s talk you wipe
your wife’s mouth with, Ellen whom I almost
might have loved that night you’ll never let go,
wondering if the way she arches her legs around
you, if how she trembles and pulls away, if how
it was today, after walking in the rain, is yours.
And I don’t know how the dead man feels, parked,
while the driver of the hearse takes an hour
to stop and see his girl, if two people inside
rubbing against each other would bother him,
rude as the world can be, the ghost derricks
near Galveston pumping the last old ferns away.

I’ve seen rage bankrupt Fridays, lifers blocked
and baffled for so long like a duct at the openings.
I’ve hosed down the shop floor with the others,
dried it with squeegees like it was an infield.

I’ve seen the hyperactive single parent
with one dead eye and two small kids squirt the hose
at the contemplative sixty-year-old man
about to retire after thirty two years.

For once payback outruns restraint.
This old man with a long fuse and shaved head
that glistened with beads of sweat picked up the hose,
grabbed the jerk by the belt loops and let the spray gun
do all the talking and the water misunderstood,
welts rising below the waist, the jerk’s ass burning.

The screams did not speak of horseplay. This was primal.

It’s happened before and will happen again,
the old guy backing up like a champion prizefighter,
the young one, who delivered the mail to Town Hall
every day at 9 am, who’d been passed over time and again
for better jobs, charging hard, a little protest
for the forklifts and oil pans,
the entire block and tackle of the physical plant.

Now the other man now smiled sheepishly,
backing up, as if to say “whoa there, big guy,”
his steel-toe’s faint tracks starring the cement
with each birth mark of toe and heel,
and then he backpedaled and fear overturned the smile
he thought to shine with. It’s happened before
and will happen again, though I wasn’t going
to be here to see it, the boss man shouting,
both men trying to laugh off their shaking hands,
not these so much, but a studied silence, a silence that equals,
such as after the town’s Christmas trees were mulched
behind Dead Man’s Park, the woods-edge knee-high in mulch,
everybody looking down, those two and us.




Missing the Chicory

Nothing you’d stop for and bend down and lift
out of the dead grass and roadside trash,
these weedy stalks that rise out of the cracks
in curbs and bear these dullish purple blooms,
such a plain looking flower, such a bore,
every single one of them going nowhere,
blue sailors bungled by my first summer
in Michigan, the cracked windshield, the rusted floorboard,
a mile or two of fence line to trim, and all day
to cut down your wand-like stalks with my weed whack.
The nicknames alone can’t save us from obscurity.
It’s the backside that put the spell on, such delicate markings
like fetal ribs the ultrasound can’t capture,
or these contrails not stopping as they disappear
to parse the rhythms of lost and then found.