HISTORY ISLAND

None of us go there anymore.

It’s a defunct resort

town in winter. The rust-colored sea’s thick waves roll over

sideways, slowly. The boardwalk collapsed

and was hacked into fist-sized chunks—to sell

as pieces of The True Boardwalk, reliquarilly.

The Old Hotel, after the termites ate their fill,

became (and turned the same color as) the potbelly

of dirt on a grave. Still pink, the pink

of a pint of blood in five gallons of water,

the cotton candy wagon’s cotton candy maker spins

not a skein, not an airy thread.

That man with eight-foot stiff-kneed legs is gone, his hat now

a blacked-out lighthouse

at the end of the stubby shorebreak.

A whole generation, or two, came here

in the years between the wars.

It was as if certain things never happened.

The whole island is an under-lit room.

You’re in it, now, we’re all in it now,

and an eight-foot bucksaw

leans, more than a little bowed, cocked, taut

against a wall.

The Amon Line Poetry Award MISHA AND THE GRAVE

Dug out the deep hole

with rock bars and shovels

along the shade tree path

while the herd was in lower

fields, and left the rifle in the truck

because people believed

horses know intentions,

and the ancient Paso Fino,

too sick for the molasses

we dripped on grain and in water,

came and stood over the grave

when it was still morning,

waited there past lunch,

like a blinking statue,

never swatting a fly,

never pawing the fill dirt

mounded above the hole

we had left open to sun

in case that warmth

touched him when he fell.

SEASIDE

I.

 

Summer is a day. The terns swirl

on the wind, letting it toss them

this way and that, then

dive—their bodies arrow

into the shallow waves.

 

 

II.

 

A pair of urns on the mantle

twined with a Japanese floral pattern,

a delicate pink petal—

 

 

III.

 

Each day I listen through closed eyes

to the waves lick the beach,

the sun kaleidoscoping bright shapes

inside my lids. One daughter fills a bucket

with periwinkles, then

empties it into the surf.

One daughter kicks on a towel in the shade

of an enormous umbrella,

dazzled at the movement of the air.

My grandmother came here

fifty-two more summers

after her daughters died. Even now

in the leaning garage

stand their small bicycles.

 

 

IV.

 

This wind. These pressed flowers

falling out of the old hardbound

Robinson Crusoe, Just So Stories—

their weightless drift to table.

This day. This hour. The mossy shingles

by the outdoor shower. This light.

Summer is a day. In my grandmother’s last year,

my mother asked me to take the paper

and wipe as she held the frail woman

above the toilet bowl. Her body had reduced

to sinew, slack. Her cotton pants billowed

around her knees. Her long hair fell

in a thousand wisps around her face,

too fine to be held in the braids the children

still each morning wound around her head.

I had never been asked to minister.

I had hardly touched her in years.

OF SWEAT AND DISTANCE

When I can feel the heat’s weight, I stay sweating as if

this will prove that I work, if not cutting steel

or pushing a cart of hot dogs down the sidewalk

or a broom through an empty elementary school,

 

then at least at being alive. My first choice for cool

is the breeze, and if a trek’s ahead—let’s say

forty furlongs—I choose my own engine,

cooled by beads of brine on my skin and the wind

 

singing in my face while I pedal past traffic.

So far I’ve not been pickled by saline crystals

that barely glint in noontime light.

When I stumble into my neighbors buying fileted trout

 

or a cup of coffee, I avoid the handshake,

apologize through and for my dew,

answer any questions. I lean toward the polite,

though as a body might, I’d prefer a comrade to wrap

 

in the wave of an embrace, an ally to mist with a sea

fighting free of its holding ocean. I believe

that breed of people exists, just a bit rough.

When I meet one, I might see my life as a series of tides, receding

 

now, but rising in the future that will become past.

My sweat will leave a dark patch of moisture, the kind

that allows fallow ground to grow fecund and full without

a mind for tainted or grime, so lush you can’t see the filth.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem AUBADE

They must have been so gentle, the deer—

for me to sleep like that, through the garden’s

ruin. Sometime in the night, maybe,

or just after dawn. The softness of them

bearing the teeth & hooves, the timidness

hiding the improbable hunger. So able to tear

& crush, so able to wreck, each neat row yielding

under unimagined heaviness. And now once more

it’s morning: light still weightless, sky

flat blue, and the moon, the night’s diminished

revenant, abandoned there—hanging

over it all like a question never answered. How

I could be one thing so long and then suddenly

not. What walked so softly through me.

STORY THAT BEGINS AND ENDS WITH BURNING

Help, as usual, arrived too late. In jugs slung across

          the backs of cows, the water sloshed and spit itself out,

the daughter tugging and hustling the animals

          flameward up the hill. By the time she reached it,

the house lay in charring heaps, the trees

        hissing like blown-out wicks. The daughter knew

she should’ve burnt too

          and spent the soot-stained afternoon

watching herself in a reckoning blaze—

          bound up in the curtains, her fingers fretting hot cloth,

holding a melting plastic pail

          twisted like a wrung bird’s neck,

chaining herself up in the dim attic.

          And oh the savage heat of it all—

But let her rest now. Let her lie down in the ash

          and shut her eyes. Let her always wish the house

back to burning—when the portraits still held

          a familiar flaming hand or eye, when smoke rose

into the air like new blooms, when a door,

        smoldering but whole, was still there to be opened.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award FOUR MONTHS AFTER YOU GAVE ME THE GOOSE DOWN COAT

                                                  for Dad

When I pulled the pieces of pine needles
from the pockets of your coat, I pictured
you prebirth (my birth), bundled up in
Appalachia beside a small fire built for one,
two curls falling from beneath Grandpa’s wool hat,
a cigarette in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

Gently guiding the needles along the terrain of my hand,
I think about that hazy photograph: you standing,
straddling the peak of Backbone Mountain,
shirtless with your shorts around your ankles,
hairy bare ass and varsity thigh tan lines
splitting the horizon in half.

I reach deeper—my index finger dredging
the inseam of your down coat—remembering
watching you glide the bench plane along strips of cedar,
sipping beer out of silver cans, quickly dropping flies
into that mason jar we kept the black widow in
(the one we hid from Mom), cutting the heads off
the copperheads in the sandbox, taking out your own stitches,
building decks, building forts, building playgrounds, building.

I’m standing outside on a Friday night, pushing
these pine needles around my palm through sweat
from thought and glass, the smell of a cigarette ending.

Do you remember that time in Austin when it was ninety-
eight degrees after nightfall? The rooftop bar on Sixth Street?
When we staggered through the streets “on business”?
Do you remember the way the sidewalk enveloped the trees?
You tripped on a root and apologized. I was twenty-two
and wanted to hold your hand.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SERVING TIME

                                                    for J.

 

Think fairy fly, think

small wasp digging with her legs

 

through a water’s skin.

Think wings, think fringed

 

and beautiful. Think

of the thing done

 

by the boy that cannot be

undone. Think swim,

 

think down, think

of the paddles, which are really

 

wings, which are really

beautiful. And the thing done

 

by the boy that cannot be

undone. Think of the eggs

 

she is looking for—the eggs

of the water beetle into which

 

she will insert her own.

Think of the boy, think

 

of the thing done by the boy,

think of the boy undone

 

by rage, undone

by its rising, rage undoing

 

what he thought he knew

of his mind, to undo that

 

of another. Think of the thing

done to a boy that cannot be

 

undone. Think of the eggs

which are not her eggs

 

which will become her own.

Wings, fringed

 

and beautiful. Think of her

exiting, think of her

 

climbing a stem, waterweed

perhaps, without which

 

she would be unable

to lift her body

 

back into air. Think

of the boy, the beautiful boy.

 

Think of a thing done

that cannot be undone.

URSUS

Today I walked the road from end to end.

If you want to know, yes, I looked

 

for bears. My whole adult life I’ve looked.

Before sex, there was not a bear. And

 

so on. While I walked, planes came through

the valley, two together, antique, I think.

 

My thoughts went to air show.

Crop duster. Forest fire. First flight.

 

I don’t know where you are.

 

So now I’ll say I hated and loved the time

the young barista gave you your receipt

 

with her number on the back. I was

right there, like another customer,

 

a book bag. Just this morning,

the man up the road told me

 

a story: one evening he sat alone

in the yard with his book and sensed

 

in the quiet a presence—what he took

to be his wife sneaking up. He waited.

 

Finally he turned to see sleeping on the grass

behind his chair a large bear. I could

 

have wept. Tonight the roar coming on

is one plane, nothing in chase or warning

 

or relief, nothing but the late sun

and everything’s invitation to face it.

PATIENCE

Between the kiddy park the town closed for repairs after recent

flooding and the new three story senior center, there’s a piss

poor wooded area in the bow of a runoff creek where teenagers

go at night to drink and smoke but during the day is always

empty. I can walk my dog off leash there and when he shits

I never have to clean it up. It’s hardly woods at all so much

as tall bushes, weeds, and a few dead trees swallowed up in

dead or dying vines, some thick as the trunks they’ve twisted

up and strangled, a stranded understory shrinking into itself

while the town goes on subdividing all around it in a meiosis

of cement, blacktop, concrete, steel, and glass. One time, I got

there early before rush hour. Sunlight passing level through a

prism of leaves broke into variegated greens I had no name

for. The air, it seemed, had come alive with green gradations

and degrees, a green kaleidoscope the sun had summoned, that

quivered with a chilly symbolism I could feel but not decipher. 

At my feet, across the emerald moss shell of a log disintegrated

nearly into dirt, a single ant was clambering into and out of

melded bands of darker and lighter green, over tufts of moss,

which when I looked closer I could see were woven of paler

tufts, and those tufts too of even paler and shorter ones, none

of which so much as bent under the ant as it went where it was

going, where it would get to, no matter what, as if it were the

ant articulation of the green shades moving over it as it moved

down the crumbling log into the weeds among the crushed

and rusted beer cans, shreds of cellophane, and dog shit. Little

hoplite genius of a place of unfathomable patience with all

time to accomplish what its tiny ant heart, if it had a heart, was

beating for.