STATE OF SORRY

My mother and I drive to the Blue Ridge mountains
listening to Bruce Springsteen and the fruit stand
in the flash rain becomes the last thing you said to me,

its red soggy arteries. I turn the song up, oh, thunder
road, oh, thunder road until I cannot feel myself turn
away from you shouting along with big helium eyes

last summer in the karaoke light. I look out at the range,
turning the furnace in my brain away from sorrow
level flames. They’re always blue, says my mother

and it’s true, they’re beautiful—these massive hills.
On a hike, she reads the brochure of George Vanderbilt’s
life—how he came here on doctor’s orders, fell in love

with the landscape and died soon after he built his
empire. All his focus on health didn’t help him
in the end, Mom explains and a passerby tells us

how silence cured her, expanding from her ears into
the lake. I hear a piercing when I hesitate so I apologize
for the noise we do not have in common. After you

died, my mother said depression and I hear myself
count the letters in goodbye—their shrinking. I want
to tell you how I’m filled with defunct rage, a gutted

socket people flick their sorry matches out in. I want
to tell you thunder gives me a false sense of shape
but I am stuck in a state of windless need. Give me

your most electric morning, brand me warm like
the cold Biltmore horses. Give me your silence
but don’t let me keep it. Show a little faith,

there’s magic in the night. I dream of setting fire
to the barn where goats lay sleeping. Not one
wakes for me to tell him, hey, it’s alright.

 

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem THEORY WHEN A WESTERN LIGHT GOES OUT

Tonight, the wind plucks leaves from their branches.
A coroner, it drops

the near-dead
in front of my door. I rise to the porch, gather the halfway

bodies. Pressed between dictionary pages, their veins
leave brown stains

like blood.
Little souls stamped between faucet and fog, dead and dreaming,

alive and alone. I hang their imprints on the wall.
As a girl, I played

a silver harmonica
that I swore would sound without a mouth to it,

a wind made by those mouths locked in meadows,
their teeth gone.

Once, I saw a stag
set to be buried in a coffin, satin-lined. His antlers sleeked,

his muscles glistened slick with embalming fluid.
Even then I thought

how strong—
the animal poised to leap in a different life.

In a different life, the invisible would not just be visible
but more beautiful.

Every past
wrong, undone: the stag not dead, but awake

in a green meadow; a hole in the ceiling not for a leak
but for rain,

warm rain,
to clean the interior; my father, not buried

but sleeping
the peaceful sleep of a body in love with the earth.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award PYGMALION

Your hands dig me
Out of my tomb of ivory,
Carve the mark of my eyes,
Open so the whites are white and
Guileless, onlooking, sand down
The apple of my hips, chisel
The dips of my back, every stroke by
Calloused hands, those yellowed
And aching hands, those coarse and
Clawing, cloying hands that wrench
Me into unmovingness. I’m made
More perfect by the cold, skin
Unknown to blemish but by the
Weathering of your running hands,
The wearing of your knobby hands
Only a man’s gaze to awaken me
To praise the pure expanse of
My impassive beauty, to linger
On the sheen of my jaw and my
Roman-column neck, earthly-globen
Breasts, the way I gleam under summer
Sun or by cavernous torchlight.
How your eyes frighten me, lingering
And you finger every mountain,
Every cavity, wish me awake, fervently
Pray I would take to your breath
Step down from the dais and down
To your feet, plead Aphrodite make
Me soften and melt at your body
But if heat came to me, it would come
First to my legs, like fire, and burn
All at once, and I would roil and churn,
And I would run, I would run, I would run.

BRAYER

From four fields down this morning, the Walkers’ mule
is braying as if he’s had enough, as if he’ll kick off
the human arms bringing his burden, as if he’ll have
no more of those days he works straight through.

Here is a flower. And here is an imperial moth.
Here is a kitten playing with a tennis ball. Here
is the shooter taken without incident. And here
is a child. Here is a congressman calling for prayer.

There goes the Walkers’ mule again, unbowing his head,
stretching his muscled neck, and letting out a bray
like a peal of trumpet and kettledrum as if he could make,
by breath or will, yesterday’s burden dissolve today.

ORION

This evening’s worn on. It’s late
by the time Orion peeks from the alley
(after the bar, the band, the brawl,
the last call). He rises, he peers around,
he steps out further, he cinches his belt.
He stands proud. He swears,
                                   every so often moved
by a well-worn notch or two, this
is the one belt he’s always worn—
forget his full belly bulging above—
since the days, seems just eons ago,
when he was young, a sparkle in your eye.

INVENTORY

        —garage

The wooden workbench,
scattered with half-finished
projects. The saw and drill,
the red tool chest,
its internal mechanism
allowing only one drawer
to open at a time. The
pneumatic jack, its long,
white handle. The cabinets,
bought from an online posting,
hung and painted gun-gray.
The carburetor, sitting on a table,
the spring that makes it work.
The bin with empty cans,
the overflowing ashtray,
measures of the time
he’s logged here.
The gas-powered heater,
its flame, the soft blue glow.
The overturned metal-bottom
boat. The mouse nest,
the baby mice, their wriggled
mass. The smoke-stained
posters, the boxes and boxes.
The vice clamps, the free weights,
the picture of the two of us,
tacked to the wall. His feet,
sticking out from beneath the car.
The draining oil. The mind
that knows the problem,
how to fix it. The delivery,
picking the right tool
from the box,
carrying it across the cold
cement floor. Its destination.
My father’s anticipating hand.

 

ORACLE

You will stand at the edge of the river, pouring out
every memory of your father—his virtues and shortcomings.

A lion will be watching from the other bank, shaking ice
from its mane. Like a child, you will sense the mystery of your own

body, living and somehow new. Having done this, you will see
the cup in your hand, hear a voice calling someone’s name.

 

ALL THE TELEPHONES

At the beginning of an affair
there is always one person saying
Red rover, red rover,

let me come over while the other
person sways to the side and
kicks a rock. I’m the pirate.

If I were greedy, I’d take all
your percocet. I have been here
before minus the stripes

and your country’s four-digit code.
All calls end in similar ways.
Time to sleep, time to eat

time to put down your voice now.

 

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SOME SUNLIGHT

Loneliness prances by like an invisible bull
where I loll at the overgrown rodeo.
You would’ve loved it.
I dribbled orange juice all over the bleachers.
I peed in the weeds.
I sat there for hours and hours with a giant book
I didn’t read.
A gate rattled against itself in the distance.
Existence, existence.
“Incalculable Loss,” says the Times.
The warmth of some sunlight on my back.
The pizzicato footsteps of a quail in the grass.

 

Pleasure Hotel

Smoke rose from the pleasure hotel. Smoke rose in the face of the pleasure hotel—in the moonless face of
a rose, smoke rose like pleasure burning. In the burning hotel pleasure rose like smoke, though moonless
we pleasured, we rose, we burning, the hotel moonless though we rose—yet less than burning—we rose
burning full of pleasure in the moonless hotel. We pleasured, moonless, we burning-faced moonless, we
face-to-face in the moonless pleasure hotel of smoke, yes, we rose and rose in the face of burning, and like
any burning, like any pleasure, any face in the hotel, in the moonless night—we rose.