Guitar
Posted 11:49 AM, Aug 26, 2008 |

Warm skulls
and spidering fingers
linger over the six-string,
nails pluck rosewood notes
like pulling chicken feathers,
each one singular and connected
to the roadmapped flesh of melody.
Attention To Detail
Posted 11:20 PM, Feb 10, 2008 |

I could never determine
what was important and what wasn’t.
Last week, I received mail
from a long-lost friend and spent
the first hour studying the stamp,
an intricate etching
of a biplane over the coast of Normandy,
and accidentally spilled coffee
on the letter, the thin onionskin pages
soaked and unreadable.

I’ve spent most of my life
studying insignificant details,
the path of an ant across the floor,
the sound a quarter makes in a parking meter.
My mind is a museum of minutiae,
an encyclopedia of everything you might have missed.
My wife says I should be a detective,
but I’m content with collecting the strange details
of poetry.
The Emptiness of Morning
Posted 10:40 PM, Jan 26, 2008 |

Where would you go
in the middle of the night,
black all around us,
my body hibernating,
the sheets in thick, slippery knots?

Where did you go
while I slept and dreamt,
the sound of rain like insects on aluminum,
the sound of my slow breathing,
a long sigh’s breathy exhale?

You are elsewhere -
The imprint of your head in the pillow
is a wide, pearish crater
with a single hair like a tectonic fracture
down the middle.

The smell of your shower, like post-rain,
is all that remains;
I pull the sheet away
and discover it was being held aloft
by a memory which has lost its shape.
close, but not quite
Posted 11:10 PM, Jan 8, 2008 |

i snip words and lines and stanzas
like suzette clips hair at the salon,
shears in hand, snipping like clicking,
the remnants blown across the room
in a jumble of font.

there’s no way i could reassemble them,
all these broken phrases;
sometimes i come up with something
better than before,
sometimes something
disturbing,
but mostly nonsense,
mostly garbage,
mostly waste.

i’ve swept all the trash
into this bag here,
and when i look inside
i remember my old ant farm,
clear plastic, white sand,
a green farm scene above land,
and all the ants scurrying around,
their thoraxes like joined
punctuation, like
some new punctuation mark
that hasn’t been invented yet
but is intended to mean
“i tried, but this isn’t
quite what i meant.”
Unauthorized Biography
Posted 12:01 AM, Dec 20, 2007 |

you took my simple suggestion
for a coroner’s report
without seeing the body.
i would think a future
lawyer would demand
the production of the corpse,
but the only thing you demanded
was a production,
a spectacle,
a monologue i was never invited to
(although i would have declined,
given the option).

the reviews of your two-act
came in, no bylines,
just why why why lines,
and it wasn’t until much later
i realized you’d written
your own reviews,
as if you’d written
your own unauthorized biography.
Word Houses
Posted 10:39 PM, Dec 17, 2007 |

we all have built word houses
pieced together from
resignation letters,
love notes, and
humorous write-in candidates

our houses are different shapes:
some have peaked roofs
with chimneys jutting awkwardly
like misplaced apostrophes;
some are round geodesic dome houses
in the shape of a typewritten O,
not quite perfectly round and
not quite supposed to be.

my house is made of millions of small rooms
covered with wallpaper from different decades
and off-white linoleum floors
and pictures of family members
i’ve never met, but would like to
pretend that i have.

the room at the top of the steps
is filled with crumpled balls of paper,
old blueprints ready to roll out the door,
if only you’ll open it and let yourself in.
How I Cured Your Heart (an unfinished job)
Posted 7:05 PM, Dec 16, 2007 |

i started slowly, prodding around the edges,
my fingertips casting molds in the hard cardiac muscle.
i remembered when you made me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
on a canoe trip; you and i ended up in the same canoe by sly design.
the peanut butter, fresh in the jar, was smooth and firm,
the tip of the butter knife casting small whorls in its surface.

(Thanks to Kevin Fanning.)
(Tough To Say) When It All Went Wrong
Posted 2:51 PM, Dec 6, 2007 |

you open the refrigerator, stainless steel and white plastic,
and grab the milk, twist it open. the smell creeps out,
settling like a fog, slowly at first and then accumulating quickly.
you used the milk just last night, warmed a mug of it when you couldn’t sleep,
and sometime between then and now the milk turned,
began to curdle and sour, but it’s tough to say just when.
your tongue tries to taste last night’s milk, searching for the slightest
edge of sour, like tasting soap from a freshly-washed glass.
you approach the coming day with half your mind in your stomach,
waiting, like a new sailor trying to find his sea legs,
waiting for the queasiness to come.
Here and There
Posted 11:58 PM, Oct 24, 2007 |

1
that was a place i once was,
a topography of what might have been,
carved by a river in the shape
of a snake’s tongue lapping at soil.

that was a shape i once was,
all curls and thick glasses
and pale jowls the color
of snow under moon.

that was the color i once was,
the color of expectation,
rosy and warm, my hands
scrabbling for footholds.

2
it’s like jumping from the silver streak
of an airplane with a parachute, barely
there, and you can feel
the strings snap like thunderclaps
whizzing by your ears,
ringing like a telephone that doesn’t,
and you have to remember
what it might sound like;
the knock on a hollow door
like the beating of your heart
in your hollow chest.
Write What You Know
Posted 12:08 PM, Oct 21, 2007 |

I wrote a novel in which
the main character was really a thinly
disguised version of me: thin,
bookish, disproportionately large feet,
breath like the inside of a clam,
someone for whom obscenity
is like oxygen.

My character did the same things
that I do: smoked cigars the circumference
of quarters, watched children’s television,
wore oversized sweatshirts with denim
shorts underneath, and puzzled
about his heritage, like trying to remember
dates from history. It’s in there somewhere,
I know, he knows.

Thirteen publishers later, the novel sold,
and I saw it in a bookstore once with the thick
black remainder mark from a felt-tip pen. It
wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

There were a lot of reasons it didn’t sell well -
I’m uninteresting, the plot was like a tree,
with branches and unresolved ends
and gnats and spiders gumming
up the works, but the biggest problem
was the reviews. One reviewer
said the main character didn’t seem
“realistic” or “plausible,” and I haven’t
picked up a pen since.
Sometime in the Future
Posted 9:33 AM, Apr 9, 2007 |

I caught myself for just a moment
in the department store mirror,
behind me a fleet of shoe boxes,
like barges ready to set sail.

I looked tired in that fleeting glance,
my hat low over my eyes,
a small growth of beard on my chin
like moss from an ancient tree.

I turned quickly away from myself
in the mirror; I was not the person
I imagined myself to be.

My clothes were uncoordinated,
my jaw was hanging slack like a hammock,
and I was walking in a tired daze.

Would I come back to the mirror,
in the long summer days, maybe,
when I had to buy shoes? When I did,
I decided, I would look better.

I would wear a smart suit with pinstripes
the color of white lightning. My shoes
would be sharp mirrors, shiny, and my
face would glow, would be radiant,
like a star passing through the aisle,
something people stop to watch, their
fingers pointing, children tugging
on parents’ arms.

That day would come soon
enough, and I would catch it
in the department store mirror
and save it for cloudy days when
the stars were invisible.
The cows look over the fence
Posted 11:45 AM, Apr 5, 2007 |

The cows look over the fence,
eyeing the tall glasses of milk
like they know something is up;
their puzzled looks say they
aren’t quite sure what it is.

The picnickers eat their sandwiches
and cannot tell the difference
between the sound of the cows
chewing cud and their own
bodies, flexing, and swallowing.

When they stand, they find
grass stains on their knees
and small pieces of dirt
between their toes
and under their toenails,
like paint scrapings
from a brown barn door.

They walk home, the wicker picnic
basket made of long grasses
like the ones they step, barefoot,
through. The cows moo quietly,
as if asking the picnickers
to stay a while longer,
just until the sun sets
and the cows fall asleep,
the heat from their bodies
steaming into the quickly cooling air.

The picnickers are like the cows in that they
are not sure what is part of them
and what is part of something else.
What This Poem Might Be
Posted 10:27 AM, Feb 26, 2007 |

At first glance, it looks as if a crowd of ants
has walked through a pool of ink,
dragging their insect feet across the paper.
They have flung droplets of ink
from their antennae like beads of sweat
from an August runner.

On second thought, it may be a map to a foreign land;
each dot is a castle, a leaning tower,
a strange city with white sand beaches
on every corner and streets of winding oceans.
One ornate, inky sprawl is the sultan’s garden,
a winding path surrounded
by plants with fingers for roots
and wings for leaves.

Maybe it’s an optical illusion,
a picture of an ancient explorer
plotting a path to an unexplored land.
Hold the page just right and cross your eyes
and you can breathe life into him.
He will speak to you in a language
you don’t know but can somehow understand.
He will speak truths from his world,
things that are true in your world,
things that will always be true,
and you will write down every word he says;
you will fill the page with scrapes and scribbles,
and then you will turn to the next page
in your book
and start all over again.
Ray
Posted 11:22 PM, Dec 28, 2006 |

(inspired by Hayden Carruth’s “Ray”)

How many people are dressed in
mid-afternoon pajamas, throwing darts,
thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk
and listening to Hayden’s poem
about reading Ray’s book? - that’s what I wondered.
Throwing darts, the flights hanging in the air
from fingertips to cork, the lead sinking
into the soft sponge of board. And how many
were thinking about Ray’s story “Fat,”
the first of Ray’s stories they read,
simply because it was the shortest,
and, after reading more and getting to know
Ray through his stories, the way most people did,
how many had since decided that was a reason
he would have appreciated? I can just imagine
him paging through his own stories and starting
with “Fat,” the same way I had,
and shaking his head and sighing
as if he had just come in from chopping down
a tree that would be used to make
the paper for his next book.
I can just imagine him looking up from “Fat,”
his eyes on my young features,
knowing he was writing
his last few pages, his heart pumping the last
gallons of furious blood in the cold fall
air, the feeling of the ax handle like a ghost
in his fingers, like an infant using his entire
hand to hold his mother’s finger,
and I reread that goddamn story
and it was still good.
Outlet
Posted 12:19 AM, Oct 25, 2006 |

st. mary’s river drains unnoticed
in the bath, the ice-covered basin;
filching pennies from the change
jar in the kitchen, the sue-bee honey bear.

the shoreline runs 2,726 miles
(including islands),
in a giant circle, roundness and life
and death wrapped up in cold sand,
jagged rocks, stony beachheads.

the retention of the beast, 191 years,
a human,
from womb
to grave
to womb
to grave,
slow turnover.
boats afloat, aground like beached
whales, running to the outlet,
ships sideways, like breached babies clutching
the watery fetus.

1,332 feet deep, water pressure crushing
hulls. my ancestors, standing end to end,
foot to head, might hold a stone
above the wave-ripped surface in the deep.
strange fish swivel in one-student schools,
beady eyes glowing like long-lost
relatives, aunts who pinch your cheek
and uncles who clap you on the shoulder,
beer between their whiskers and tobacco
in the duck-webbing between their fingers.

a circle tour runs the highways,
minnesota,
ontario,
michigan,
wisconsin,
guiding travelers like wayward children
curious about christmas.
“where is santa?”
“north pole,” parental terseness, a mystery on thin ice.
“why?”
“because.”
that age-old reasoning, why-because-why-because-
the-lake-said-so, and nobody
argues with the lake, especially
not 3-foot-tall children, easily
swept up in its foaming arms.
Suitable
Posted 12:25 AM, Sep 27, 2006 |

in an effort to write
something suitable for children, i remembered
trying to paddle a rowboat home
on lake superior. in the curving cradle of aluminum
lay an early girlfriend, too drunk to realize she’d
passed out in an unseaworthy ship. i climbed in next
to her, the alcohol on my breath stronger
than the smell of fried smelt that hung
over the point of land i now found
myself trying to escape. her head turned and she moaned
as i pulled an oar out from beneath her, the wood
against metal like an alarm bell in the calm,
lapping waves against the metal boat. the folly
of rowing the two of us home - i lived
near the airport, at the end of a long driveway
over the hill without sight of water - missed me
in my alcoholic swagger. i didn’t even know where
she lived - if you asked me then, i didn’t even know
her first name. but i put the oar in and pushed off,
the curved end pressing into the sand like a hand
into peanut butter, rocks like peanuts, my mouth
thick with the taste of it all. i half-heartedly paddled
a few strokes until the waves took over. i let the oar
slip from my hand and drift next to us, and when i woke up
it was to the sound of wood against metal, the oar
a stinging alarm clock in my head, hungover.
the footprints of my girlfriend crested the dune
of sand, mixed among the grasses in the afternoon.
the tourists watched me play detective, following each
footprint until i reached the parking lot where
she may as well have learned to swim
through the wide sea of asphalt. i saw her
the next monday at school, standing near her locker,
her hair perfectly pushed and pulled like a wave
frozen in place, but was too embarrassed to ever speak
to her again, and too afraid to set foot in a body
of water, my body having decreed it unsuitable,
until this evening, when i realized
that i couldn’t remember her name and didn’t need to,
both at the same time.
On the Author Finding His Book, Used
Posted 12:29 AM, Jul 4, 2006 |

he has stopped looking for his book
in stores that sell only new books. inevitably,
there is an alphabet gap where his name
should be; he has been deleted from the rolls.

now he slides his finger along creaky, used
spines, cocking his head as he
inches closer. on the frequent
occasions when he finds a copy, he notes in his
graph-paper ledger the date, the condition,
and the price, all in a cryptic shorthand
so even his wife cannot decipher his declination.

he has notations for everything: copies marked
with academic marginscrawl;
copies with torn pages, dog-eared
pages, missing pages; copies soaked with coffee,
cranberry juice, milk, and once, unmistakably, urine.
his ledger is a cacophony of symbols and letters,
a language written in all directions at once.

he found, once, seven copies of his book
on a single shelf in bemidji. each one
stood in a police lineup and stared sullenly at him.
each one waited to be picked up, examined, and
replaced.

he retired his ledger on the day
he found for sale an autographed copy
in very good condition, for $2.25.
he bought and burned it, page by page,
by the light of his cigarette. the smoke
was black with ink, the ashflakes accumulating
on his turtleneck sweater, snowing him
in for the long northern winter ahead.
Sportscenter
Posted 11:57 PM, Jun 29, 2006 |

stuart scott talks to me
in the hotels i visit. i leave
sportscenter on all night, cable
television casting its replays
and highlights over and over;
after seeing them for weeks and weeks,
they all start to look the same.

sportscenter is always the same –
nothing else is, city after city.
even the time is different, hotel after hotel,
pittsburgh to kansas city to boulder, colorado.
even the paintings above the bed, the ones
everyone says are the same, aren’t. can you see
that the dog in the hotel room in couer d’alene
is running after the pheasant, but
the dog in the hotel room in lexington
is dragging its carcass back to you,
your gun still smoking in the corner of the frame?

i curl up in my hotel bed, take off my glasses,
but leave the television on, setting the sleep timer
for slightly longer than i’ll be awake. i listen to
linda cohn talk about the new york yankees
and i drift off. when i wake up,
the television is charcoal gray,
the color of a drawn curtain in a darkened
theater, the traveling show all packed up
and gone on ahead to the next town.
Prolific
Posted 10:11 PM, Jun 25, 2006 |

a day during which i write two lines is like
james marshall uncovering a spangle in the water,
a spanish chispa, a speck of an idea in the early
morning mill shadows. marshall and i bend together
over the heating earth, our fingers tracing the vein
of the river, feeling for the pulse of more
coming downstream. the small nuggets move
slowly, tumbling awkwardly like the first wheels,
the ancient movers rolling deliberately,
turning the earth beneath them.

marshall and i each find a piece on the first day,
one shard in the shape of a tooth,
and we mail it eastward where the news
of our good ideas spreads in the street,
the whispered opinions, in light of the evidence
at hand, advising all the young men to go west.
On Attending an Auction of Props for Your Favorite TV Show
Posted 8:44 AM, May 31, 2006 |

In the first lot was Angela’s wedding veil,
complete with the wine stain shaped
like an Eastern European country.
Seeing the veil on the white,
featureless mannequin head was like
seeing your first grade teacher at the supermarket.

Items lined up next to the auctioneer,
his voice that of a television commercial narrator
reading disclaimers. The last six seasons of your
favorite TV show replayed on random,
like catching the occasional rerun on cable,
out of order, leaving you to try to remember
if Stephen was Terry’s best friend before or after
they sent Jordan to the hospital by firing a potato
gun at her car.

Just for a moment, you thought you saw
Sam Elliot leaning against the door in the back,
placing a bid for the eyepatch he donned
after getting a plate thrown at him
by Marion. In your first glance,
his left cheek still seemed bruised and his eye,
milky and opaque, seemed like an alien.
In your second glance, Sam Elliot
had vanished, and you could never
quite tell when you saw him on talk shows in later years,
his right side always facing the camera, existing half
in your television and half in the back of the auction
room, itself like a television set opened and its contents
spilled across the room, odd and disorganized.
Recitation
Posted 11:10 AM, Mar 10, 2006 |

you seem to think
you can always say the right thing
in the moments after you’ve made
me cry. my father
writes alimony checks
without looking away from
sitcoms. my uncle does community
service as if it were his real
job, a smile marked on his face
like ghost images on a television,
residue of static imprints.
when you think
you are saying the right thing,
i can see in your eyes that you
are imagining a spelling bee,
a trivia contest,
the rote recitation of well-written lines.
Over My Shoulder
Posted 10:28 AM, Mar 10, 2006 |

you are reading over my shoulder,
watching this poem develop.
the pen quivers as if i
am developing a polaroid,
urging it to a crisp finish.
your eyes follow my hand
as the pen moves faster, as
the polaroid develops
into a series of photographs,
leaving gaps for you. you read
as if filming a street scene.
in the breaking light, a shiny
taxi speeds past a woman
who is exiting a shoe store,
a red scarf wrapped loosely
around her neck. the scarf reminds her
of an inelastic sock, drooping
into a ragged ellipse, a pool of fabric
around her ankle like moonlight
collecting in standing water.
a man leans against the wall,
his hat upturned in his hand. as
he coughs, the woman
drops change
into his hat. he finishes
coughing and puts his hat on.
you, reader, director,
can see that he didn’t know
there was silver and copper in his hat,
and you zoom in, framing the scene
of the man taking off his hat again. his face:
he eyes the change, smiles, and tucks
the coins into his pocket,
and makes his way down
the sidewalk. his face is the joy
of a quiet man
being approached
on the street to co-star
in a motion picture
of a young woman reading
a poem over my shoulder.
The Accordion is a Flower
Posted 9:51 PM, Feb 27, 2006 |

my day is an accordion,
stretching out longer
than you’d think possible,
starting with a sigh,
the downbeat of my first waking breath
cueing the first measure of morning.

between the accordion’s folds
lie my pair of lost
car keys, the photograph of my niece
wearing a hula skirt in the middle
of winter, the slow white shuffle
of snowfall. the instrument
shakes the sleeping flakes off
its keys and keeps me awake.

the accordion is a flower that blooms
at noon and then slowly rolls
back into itself, its petals like
tongues stretching for an afternoon
to lap at the strong sun and pull
the taste of yellow back to their owner, food
to occupy the dreamscapes of flowers
through the quiet, windless evening.
3 Wishes About Crickets
Posted 12:30 AM, Feb 24, 2006 |

i wish that we were crickets
and could jump the length
of football fields, our sharp,
bony little toes pressing into the turf
and launching us skyward,
you first,
me following close behind.

i wish that i could catch a cricket
and hold it in my hand and feel
its tiny bursts of breath like gentle
pinpricks against my palm.
i would turn it over and look at its
underbelly, the color of soap,
and run my finger the length
of its smooth green skin,
and look at how lean and graceful it is,
a rubber band wrapped inside
in a violin, waiting to turn
out a thousand quiet scales
inside my heart.

i wish that we were crickets
and i would play the six-string
guitar of your hair with the swell
of my ribs and we would whistle
ourselves to sleep.
A Personal History with the Washington Redskins
Posted 7:01 PM, Jan 14, 2006 |

i have so few memories of you,
washington redskins; you were not on television
the new year’s day on which i accidentally
got drunk on champagne and had to hide
among the hanging sleeves
of the coat closet, my tongue fizzing for hours.

today you are the team to make things interesting,
the washington generals, perennial, hapless,
the tackling dummies and second-string,
there to fill out the field.

you are the team i would pick
last if i were choosing sides in a flag
football game.

my most striking memory of you,
washington redskins, if forced to recall one,
is the time my third-grade teacher told
the class not to use the word “redskin”
when talking about professional football.

i have never looked
back at you, but i am sure
you are behind me.
Travel Times
Posted 11:12 AM, Dec 14, 2005 |

the travel times aren’t as bad
as i’d imagined, the snow not
as thick as forecasted. it’s taking
me less time to get to where i’m going.
i’ve become better
at folding maps, matching
concave and convex creases like
puzzle pieces. my sense of direction
is better; my nose can smell magnetic
north. i can see a little further ahead.
i think the snow is letting up.
Monday Morning
Posted 9:50 AM, Nov 14, 2005 |

it smelled like funnel cakes
in my cubicle this morning.
between typing pockmarks,
i thought i heard a calliope,
buried somewhere in the gray
maze, over by the exercise room,
which would be the perfect
place to hide it.
in the cafeteria, the chairs
slowly circled the round
tables, employees quietly spinning,
glazed looks in their eyes,
cotton candy stuck to their fingertips,
toner smudged on their cheeks.
On Buying a Weight Bench
Posted 10:02 AM, Nov 7, 2005 |

there is a circle of weight
benches and barbells.
i stepped into the circle last week,
classified ads and internet auctions,
and bought myself some plastic
and steel. pretty soon, i’ll
sell it off, my arms not a whole
lot bigger than they were,
my chest still narrow, my
determination set down like coming
in third in a marathon for which
i hadn’t really practiced.

i’ll sell the bar and kilograms
to an aspiring college student
who has just enough room beneath
his pulp fiction poster to better
himself fifteen minutes a day
for a week or two. he’ll do reps
and sweat out all his will and drive
in under four hours, just like i did,
and the equipment will orbit the twin
cities like man-made space
telescopes whose pictures
never quite come into focus.
The Sportswriter
Posted 12:04 AM, Oct 24, 2005 |

i lay there, my eyes closed after
noticing my copy of richard ford’s
the sportswriter is 10 years old. i tell you
this means i must have bought it when
i was in high school, but that doesn’t make
any sense, because when i was in high school,
i had no interest in divorced men
or redemption.

my uncle was divorced five times,
each pronouncement delivered to me
from my father with the hard pock
of a rubber racquetball coming back
at me off the far wall. the inside sphere
of rubber-tinged air squashed momentarily
but quickly returned to a perfect o of oxygen.
when my father spoke, i barely noticed, and knew
my uncle would try again.

when i tell you this, you turn on your side
and look at my profile as i look at the picture
of richard ford on the back cover. he looks
like my uncle, vaguely, and you say
maybe i was more interested in redemption
than i thought, or than i thought
was acceptable for a high schooler.
you kiss my cheek lightly, more a passing
of warm air across the edges of my beard
than a kiss, and turn off your bedside lamp
with a barely-audible click. i fall asleep shortly
after, and when i wake in the morning, i find
my bookmark on the floor beside
the bed and my copy of the sportswriter
is back on the bookshelf, filed away,
thought you swear you aren’t responsible.
Intersection
Posted 11:05 AM, Oct 18, 2005 |

I
i already knew
that two objects couldn’t occupy
the same place at the same time,
but i felt it when
our fullsize van tried
to share space and time with a ford fiesta.

the rear of the car turned into crumpled
construction paper, blue smeared with a silver
streak.

i can see the face
of the father’s daughter through
the cracked glass, a bead of blood
like an icicle on the end of her nose,
cold and red and far away, the car
spiraling around an asphalt center.

II
the pastor’s wife looked back at us,
all of us sitting forward, peering
through the windshield, and told us
to put our seatbelts on.

we all buckled, steel clicking into place,
and time seemed to flow backwards
for those few moments; time seemed to make
no sense, like pulling a parachute
ripcord while lying facedown on the ground.

when the police arrived, i could see the face
of the pastor’s wife in the rear view mirror. her
eyes were dim and narrow one moment,
wide like polished buttons the next. her fifties’
hairstyle, the lies sitting behind her straight,
white teeth reminded me of the housewife
in the smithsonian’s history of television exhibit,
eyeing walter cronkite lustily while serving
pot roast.

III
the intersection of things, the way two
things fit together, the sound
they make, the cold juxtaposition, the black
and white, all foreground for a moment,
the next all background, pushing forward.

the steam from the engine was lost in the fog.
The Narrow End of Things
Posted 11:14 AM, Oct 3, 2005 |

i can see the narrow end of things,
a tunnel funneling to a single
point, an inevitable ending.

the water runs downhill,
dripping from the cool underside
of the mountain that was made
in the past but sits, brooding
and melancholy gray, in the center
of my eye.

trying to change anything
is like pushing water uphill,
trying to keep the tide from my feet
with a cup made from my bare hands.

the best thing to do is put the balsawood
boat of my heart in the current,
and watch it float, maybe
fly downstream, its paper sail
a white flag of surrender under
the cold earth of my history.
Set Yourself on Fire
Posted 3:24 PM, Sep 28, 2005 |

the last time i set myself
on fire was in the middle
of a rainstorm that arrived
halfway through december.

it was only half an accident,
dragging the lit end of the cigarette
along the paper-thin, frayed hem
of my jacket.

the smoke settled in my beard
like fog in ferns deep in the forest.
it looked like my beard was steaming,
casting itself up, evaporating into the cold dome
of the night.

you pointed at me, your mouth an open
circle of alarm, and for a moment,
i thought my beard was on fire, but
i didn’t smell the same smell, the burning
hair, that i smelled when my father
set himself on fire, all aerosol and polyester mess.

the flame curled its tongues, pink from neon,
around the hem of my jacket. i stood
there, surrounded by the cylinder of heat,
a pillar of warmth smoking and crackling
against the sound of motorcycles churning
their own exhaust into the night.
Curling
Posted 10:46 AM, Sep 28, 2005 |

it only occurred to me last week
that you still had my old apartment
key, tucked somewhere safe. it
makes no difference – i moved
out just as the wallpaper
in the bathroom started peeling. but,
the curl of the plaid paper turned
the room into the inside
of a giant rose, all large, curved
petals, smelling faintly of perfume.
the kitchen wallpaper started to peel
too, and as i shut the door the last time,
the whorls of the unglued paper
looked like fingerprints
on the tarnished brass
of my long-lost apartment key.
I Forget the Year
Posted 11:31 PM, Sep 25, 2005 |

we do not want to remember
about each other
the things we each want to forget
about ourselves.

you forget the year i spent drinking,
the warm white oak of the bar
reflecting the wan white blur
of my face, the corners of my drooping
smile.

i forget the year you spent sleeping
with the man wearing the worsted suit,
his horn-rimmed glasses broken
on the sidewalk, my teeth chattering
in the cold winter, a single drop of my
knuckle’s blood like a period in the
snow.

you forget the year i spent as a catholic,
my knees creaking before bed, the annoying
reverence i paid to red wine, the clacking
of rosary beads. i’m not kidding – that really happened.

i forget the year – most of a year – you spent pregnant,
your belly swelling like an otherworldly thing,
then suddenly empty like a pail, filled with rainwater,
kicked over by a wild horse,
clattering against a wooden stable wall.

we forget the years we spent together,
the cold winter creeping in through the window,
the simple traces of the curves of each other,
the slow mortar growth of age.
The Spaces Between
Posted 9:03 AM, Jul 29, 2005 |

the spaces between the broken plates
and glasses is the shape of a guitar,
the strings curling out from the pegs
like your hair, wild in the morning,
or strung out
from pulling.

the hole in the wall from the day after
your birthday last year is in the shape
of an adam west
cartoon pow!, crack!,
as i look at it with my mask pulled low
and snug around my open mouth.

the doorknob hangs loose,
the latch dangles, the whole thing
a brassy christmas ornament,
the quiet pull of an unwrapped
present that turns out to be
a crystal hummingbird
that shattered during shipping.

the halls of the house are the empty
veins of our body, the blood drained
and cooled and hardened like candle
wax, the holes unsuccessfully
sutured by golden rings smelling
of soap.
The Politics of Things
Posted 9:25 AM, Jun 24, 2005 |

I
the complicated politics of things
mean i have to take your leopard-
print steering wheel cover
as payment for the time you playfully
kicked my shin but ended up making
me bleed. there’s still a scar
there, and for that i’m taking your
copy of bob dylan’s time out of mind,
even though it stutters on track seven.

the time you told me i had small hands simply
means i have to take your first edition
of the great gatsby and throw it in the harbor
so nobody can enjoy it.

and the time you said you couldn’t see me,
but you ended up going out on a blind
date with one of my loose-lipped coworkers
means i get to take the yellow dress you wore
to your cousin’s wedding and wash it with
the brand new red bedsheets i bought.

II
interpersonal relationships
should be easier.
as it is, though, i’m imposing
a tariff on first impressions
and an embargo on second, third,
and further ones. there will be a maintenance
fee on phone conversations, billed by
the syllable, with surcharges for contractions,
exclamations, and obscenity charges
for curse words. you’re not
invited to the summit
on the removal of accusatory questions,
but you know we’ll all be talking about you
while we bathe in spas and summer
on the french riviera, all champagne and mud.
Mulligan
Posted 11:44 AM, Jun 21, 2005 |

i tried to tell myself not to bike
in the middle of the road, but my half-self
only looked blankly at me before getting
clipped by the station wagon and flying face-
first into the pavement, leaving behind
parts of my skin on the yellow line,
a pollock of paint and flesh and asphalt.
i rode on, looking back at my opaque, crumpled
self, and got home ten minutes before curfew.

i listened as my mother yelled
in the other room before i turned the light
on, the long cuts on my face like a prisoner’s
marks on the wall. in a memory only half mine,
i could see my mother mentally counting
the days until i was no longer thirteen.

three hours later, my face stitched like a scarecrow,
i laid in my bed and nestled into my split self,
wishing i could have listened.
Untitled (Sound)
Posted 3:09 PM, Jun 16, 2005 |

this is the unfocused sizzle, the difficulty
of sticking to the middle of the road,
the frictionless asphalt pushing me side
to side, my sweat, the salt of my brow
along for the ride, saline lines in the creases
of my skin, like leftover marks of high tide,
a sign of how deep the water is where we are.
this life is a beach-gripped highway, founded
on sand and ungentle land, the ocean polishing
dusty grains into diamonds flush with the glisten
of a bead of sweat on the tangent of my eye.
(Hips)
Posted 1:38 PM, Jun 13, 2005 |

your hips are a parenthetical
statement speaking to me, that extra
turn of phrase, that cream-colored
irony, that twist of the knife.

your hips are typeset in two
halves, set together by what
lies in the space between, all
quiet words laced with meaning
like a poisoned drink with a slight
tinge of almonds.

your hips are offset by the question
mark of the muscles in your back
and the complicated curve of your shoulder.

your body is a printer’s nightmare,
an amalgam of inky smudges and arcane
punctuation. i lay awake, setting type
against a pale ceiling, making ligatures
of your name.
This is My Heart
Posted 2:45 PM, Jun 2, 2005 |

when i woke this morning,
i couldn’t feel the slow thrum of blood
turning through my heart. a finger flat
on my wrist came up empty. my body
was a mannequin, a marionette. i put
my hand on my chest and ran up four
flights of stairs. sweat pearled on my forehead.
but still.
nothing.

there is now a cavity in my chest,
a room sealed by solid walls all around,
the air slowly musting, dust settling
on the walls. a slow breath
is a whirlwind here.

this is my heart, stuffed
in a jar on a shelf that smells
of formaldehyde and jack pine.
sealed in glass to the right is a gosling,
to the left a rabbit, both pale
yellow, my stark red heart
the deep color of a stop light in the dark.
The Same Way
Posted 12:18 PM, May 31, 2005 |

you are sitting there, taking
it on faith that you have sat there
before, like assuming
you have laid next to me because
of the indent of the down
pillow. you still hold your fork
the same way, the way
i jokingly described once as being
“like a savage cannibal,”
to which you were not amused, much
as you aren’t when i repeated it just now.

you still build the same,
stone after stone, placing each one
the same way, time after time. the mortar
is thick and musty and squeezes like peanut
butter between two pieces of stale bread.

our apartment is cold and bare, the slow
flame of the fireplace in the north wall
pushing heat into the room like watercolors
seeping across a blank page. your shoes rest
on the welcome mat, burnished brown
and silver, the dull colors of yesterday’s memory.
Cupid’s Parade
Posted 10:28 PM, May 19, 2005 |

when i was sixteen and you were seventeen,
we went to cupid’s parade, a bevy of exes
walking on the beach, a trail
of footprints sunk in the wake of high-
heeled shoes, flip-flops, keds, adidas.
you and i watched the sand around
each print shaping, turning into buildings,
small apartments, parents’ cars. this one,
this one here, an alarm clock; this woman
left behind a miniature ocean, a replica
of the one we’re standing beside.
we kept walking, trying to keep up
with cupid’s parade, the last in a long
line of people trailing around an outcropping,
the waves slowly eating our history
like glaciers scraping the roofs of our mouths.
13 Things Seen in a Recent Trip to Chicago
Posted 12:59 PM, May 17, 2005 |

the low-slung canvas chair
the turning ferris wheel embraced by train tracks
the bicycle chained to a wooden fence
the three men, two guitars and one microphone, in grant park
the three boys, sweatshirts two sizes too large, ears crimson with cold
the long stairway, the last steps covered with sand,
    the movement of a windswept beach
the long slope of your face like a pause in a flipbook
the way she holds the umbrella so it only covers her,
    my eyes squinting in the sun
the bust of tecumseh, headdress back and eyes forward,
    varnished by oily fingertips
the man peeling potatoes for a st. patrick’s day parade,
    the skins piling at his feet
the shadow of a baseball forgotten in a sandbox, the cool ellipse of sand
the wooden bones of two marionettes embracing on a small, plastic sofa
the cold loneliness of a rock outcropping in a frozen lake michigan
Revisionist History
Posted 9:50 AM, May 16, 2005 |

i never got in that fight with you over
who was the best left-handed pitcher
of all time; i just went back and deleted
your candidate. i took his hall
of fame plaque and we’ve been using
it as a trivet since we got back together.

come to think of it, we never left one another,
mostly because i never got into that automobile
accident with your mother, all crunching
upholstery and dismissive looks.
she still speaks to us, although
she speaks to me only on holidays,
something i’m reticent to change.

and also, i never moved in with your best
friend’s older sister for that summer during
which we now never broke up,
that hot, sweaty summer,
and, like i said, even if i had moved
in with her, we never slept together.

i never asked you to marry me the next winter,
or, on second thought, i did, although
you said yes this time. i tried,
but i still couldn’t remove the resigned
look in your gray eyes.
Insides
Posted 4:11 PM, May 13, 2005 |

i am my own unfunny universe,
all tourniquets and tarnished brass
inside. i am the marbled warble
of a muted trumpet, sad and wheezy,
out of breath from calling.

my long, spiral arms are turned
inside out, my body turning
like a centrifuge separating
sperm and eggs, putting me
back into my original shipping boxes.
my insides are breaking
into small pieces
and stuffing themselves into gaps
like filling in air pockets
in a christmas package. my body
is put into compartments
so i won’t sink at the first
sound of thunder
rolling on top of the cold
of the breathing moon,
with the first raindrop that hits
my abandoned planet.
The Last of Sleep
Posted 8:33 AM, Apr 26, 2005 |

last night, i pressed all the sleep
out of my body, squeezing
away the last of it like a stack
of anvils on a fleshy orange,
leaving only the rind, dry
and narrow.
I Am a Pirate Artist
Posted 12:24 PM, Apr 25, 2005 |

you were the best artist i ever saw,
sitting in the bow, masts extending
from your paper, almost casting shadows
across the page. i watched your hand
slide in loops and mark straight
lines in swift cuts. i tried to copy
your hand, sitting next to you, a splinter
through my breeches, when you looked
me in the eye with your one eye,
the patch hanging like an eclipsed moon,
and everything became clear.

the next day, at sunup, i crawled from my cabin
and sat next to you, curled paper collecting
sea mist on my lap. i smiled and you winked,
or blinked, at me, and i winked back and reached
into my pocket. i pulled out an eye patch,
the black loop of string dangling
like an oval frame through which i could
watch your wizened face.

i have never been a better artist
than the times when i wear a patch.
i see everything in two dimensions,
my depth perception collapsed into a black
ball the size of a period. now i just
write what i see, like a perfect speller
taking transcription.

sometimes, when i’m having trouble sleeping
in the rolling cabin, i draw without
an eye patch, everything coming
out crooked and bent and wrong,
and i know that those drawings are my heart,
spilled onto the page in thin, wavy lines
of black blood.
Oranges
Posted 10:23 PM, Apr 24, 2005 |

I
the first time we met, i noticed your
shampoo had the faint smell of oranges.
the first thing i thought of was laying
in freshly-cut grass in an orchard, a gentle
rain starting to fall, the drops rolling along
the pebbled orange peels like crystal
comets racing around the sun.

II
the last time i saw you, you spilled your
beer on me, using an awkward hug
as an excuse. my leather jacked smelled like hops
for the rest of the night. when i picked
it up from the cleaner, he held out an orange
rind he found in the pocket, shriveled
like my grandmother’s skin.
Ghost Story
Posted 10:27 AM, Apr 14, 2005 |

i broke my arm in sixth grade
and the teacher sneered as she hunched
over me, her nose scrunched at the lime
green smell of sulfur slipping from the inside
of my hollowing bone.

when i was in ninth grade i walked
through the stage curtain in the hardwood
gymnasium. the hanging velvet tickled
my liver and my blood passed through
like water through a screen. it was after school, so
nobody noticed, nobody
but me, nobody at all.

the summer after i graduated, i swung
my feet out of bed, the sun casting
a pale diamond on the floor. my feet
melted through the carpet, cold at first,
then warm. the inside of my house
was a great lake into which i slid.

now i walk between rooms, sitting across
from my parents eating cereal and reading
the paper. my mouth moves and my mother
stands to close the window, complaining
of a slight, icy breeze.
Quiet Calculus
Posted 9:42 AM, Apr 12, 2005 |

I
the molecules of my body
are deposited across chairs and clothes
and wound bedsheets. i have left
an indelible imprint where i live,
leaving pieces of my heel, a sliver
of fingertip along the wall,
an atomic smudge beneath the lightswitch.

II
i hate my chemistry,
the long, lean lines
of chromosomes, the genetic
material stretching like ribbons
around family photos. it’s all curled
up inside, the genes for my upset
stomach tying themselves in quiet
knots, twisting around my finger
and reminding me not to forget
everything that happened before.

III
i have shed the last element
of my adolescence. my body
is a manmade compound, put
together by the thick cords
of marriage. the ropes are flimsy,
like those laying across a circus tent,
flat on the grass in the predawn morning,
yellowing the trampled lawn and wet with dew.

IV
the quiet calculus of chromosomes
pushes from the past; the science of change,
the mathematics of evolution.
i am the product of a thousand numbers,
each glowing briefly and then extinguished,
each ancestor a prayer candle that has long
since dripped into a smooth pool
of wax on the underside of my foot.
Airport Endings
Posted 2:27 PM, Feb 22, 2005 |

the long, vaulted ceilings, wireframed
with massive steel curved with slow fire,
play host to the quiet moment between
you and i, like two honeybees in a greenhouse.

put us in a time lapse photograph and we will be
focused, we will be a crisp silhouette, a human median
inside traffic patterns of pilots and rolling luggage,
running past us in blurred navy blue and floral patterns.

airplanes leave in wide, white swaths,
all fuselage and contrail, their paths narrowing
to a point the size of us, small but filled
with thousands of tiny, movable parts,
before disappearing into the blue meadow
of the sky.

we disappear, too, among the streamers
of people. our bodies fold into each other
and we curl together into the past, a moment
together that disappears like a burnished
penny sinking in the atlantic.
Wrestlers
Posted 9:06 AM, Feb 22, 2005 |

in the smoky haze in the back of the bar,
grayscale wrestlers emerge like ghosts
from a fog, their muscles hardened
like a pile of aged rubber bands.
they wear their hair cut close, their preserved
scalps showing through like empty spaces
on aged canvases. they are bent into
wrestling poses, their arms curled,
leaning forward to find an ancient
opponent to hurl to the fading mat.

the wrestlers recognize bar patrons, old athletes
who wear their football jerseys as nightshirts now.
the men stand and walk towards the back
of the bar, fitting loosely between
the wrestlers’ arms as if the gray ghosts
were plastic action figures, stiffly posed.
for a moment, flickers of recognition cross the wrestlers’
determined faces – they appear to smile, quickly,
before their mouths snap back to seriousness,
as if afraid of giving away their secrets.

i open the door to leave, turning backwards and pressing
against the cold glass with my spine. the men huddle
with the wrestlers, reminiscing with their still
faces. i step onto the sidewalk and a single gust
of iowa wind snaps into the bar with the sound
of a snug bedsheet and the ghosts blow away,
their outlines hanging briefly in the air like the ash
of an aged cigarette before they evaporate completely.
Afterstorm
Posted 9:36 PM, Feb 13, 2005 |

bicycling past the bowling alley,
i always looked at the white house
that sat next door, my eyes following the long driveway,
coming to rest on the house, staring
at me with its hands on its shingled hips.

my great-aunt lived in that house,
her husband killed in a hunting accident
the day my father turned seven. i imagine
my father upset that his birthday had been overtaken,
as if he had finished second in a spelling bee.

she sat for forty years in that house,
peering out from behind thick, canvas curtains
that only let in the moonlight.

she kept her hair pulled tightly around
her head, snug like gift wrap. i bet
she was beautiful, the sun warming her hair
as she pulled weeds from the gardens
that framed the base of the house. the sun made
her skin slowly darken as if she were turning
into the dirt in which her hands were buried, her sweat
smelling like the fifteen minutes
after a thunderstorm.
Thirteen
Posted 11:40 AM, Feb 8, 2005 |

the last twelve poems i’ve
written have been about sleeping
with a girl next to me, blankets
bundled around us, her body
a fireplace, smoldering.

we never have sex in my poems.
we just lay there; she’s always asleep
and i’m awake, sometimes reading,
sometimes staring at the wall behind her,
painted with shadows of her hair,
a jungle of silhouettes.

her skin is just a container for charcoal,
her armpits and the insides of her elbows
are awake with sweat. i look at her and watch
the heat rise like water running uphill.

when i wake up in the morning, she is always gone,
but the faint outline of her body
is on the bedsheet next to me, a freehand
drawing with a pen that has almost run out of ink.
Turning
Posted 9:26 PM, Feb 6, 2005 |

the ice in the glass of water
on the nightstand shifts slightly
at the same moment you drape your
sleeping arm over my chest.
your arm brushes the spine
of my book and the ice
creaks like a small glacier. i watch
the ice quietly revolve in the glass,
turning like the moon in the dark.

the off-white of my book’s paper
melts with the bare skin of your
arm. i put the book aside and turn
out the light. the ice settles and melts
and combines seamlessly with the cold
tap water as you turn and wrap
your arm comfortably around me.