Halloween

Razor blades in apples.
That's what my mother
said to watch out for
when I was little.
Who wanted an apple, anyway?
But I wondered,
who was that guy,
putting those thin, double sided blades
with the keyhole between
inside a bright red apple?
You'd be surprised how much
children know at a young age.
I figured it was unlikely and besides,
I could see tampering.
Maybe, I thought,
there was one guy who did it.
But I forgave him.
After all, he was lonely,
didn't fit in, probably was bullied.
I wasn't afraid of anything then,
even bad things hidden inside good things.

Knight

It smells like Christmas this morning
as the storm has demolished a few spruces.
Every colorful leaf has been taken away,
and our power, if it was ever ours, is gone.
We watch cars and trucks go up the hill
and come right back down the road
that now dead ends at a horizontal pine.

It's hard to have faith in some kind of order
when so many things are broken so quickly,
when long-used pathways are blocked.
I feel like a chess piece taken off the board
before it has been fairly captured, but then,
such can be the whim of an impatient master.

Sandy

Winds pick up and then howl.
This is the behavior of the air
when it is given temperature
and the touch of body and branch.
Movement is not known
without that which is moved.
Foolishly, my heart breaks
as a hurricane dismembers the great spruce
outside the corner of my little house.

These conditions that spin me
up into Oz,
some leftover heat from another life
and the fragile desires I have planted,
why did I think they would last
and not take up with inclement change?

Of course, the wind, my heart, and the world
will all stop someday.
For now I must be content
to catch little branches
of knowing that go blowing by.

Student Body

Did you see
what perturbation
profuse and unruly
proceeds after the body?
After what?
After squeezing or twisting,
after a fever or chill,
shaking or exhaustion,
lightness and warmth,
fullness and release.

Like very bad children
who have skipped school,
truant echos ripple outward,
they fall into the world
and pick up foolish points of view,
including the strange belief
that they did not come from you
and that they do not belong. 

You must be a wise headmaster,
and not fall for pretense.  
They will always be your students,
even if they do not study.

Things

I was thinking of something today
for a poem
but I don't remember what
perhaps
it was the crack between worlds
or that
we no longer worship ancestors
or the anthem
that the trees sing to the wind
or it might have been
the sweet blackness
that you appeared out of to love me
the same blackness
that eats my eyes and my memory
or anger maybe
at a certain lack of resonance in my poems,
a certain distance
from things.

All of Them

The dead are heaped up,
worms on the track this morning,
a hundred squirrels on the road.
Leaves, yellow, red and brown
falling like boats, screws,
coaster cars and darts.

I am on my knees
with a new chant at sunset
in the touching of her eye.
Oh, I did not know,
forgive me for my mean grasp, 
Mother you let every child go.

Casting

Today is your birthday
and we walk
through a garden before dinner.
It is raining lightly, you have a cold
and there is no one there but us.
We sit by a wire form that drips
rhythmically into a green concrete pool.
Four peacocks meander
along the wall beside us.

We are happy with each other,
like the drops and the water,
the peacocks and the wall,
the drizzling rain and your cold,
our little plans and the soft surprises
that always seem to follow.

We love each other gently
and rest in nature's hand,
the same hand that made you
and brought you into the air
and placed you just so,
by the raindrops and me.

The Field

I will make this mine
I said to my mother of my body
and so I was born.
They will beat me
I said of the other children
and so I was afraid.
I am far from the black city
I thought yesterday
and someone was murdered
and the wave of misery
spread out toward me.

I sit quietly all day
and let the air take my mind
up onto a canvas of smudge clouds
and I await a meager rain.

Crows III

At middle age
a man is wise to watch crows.
They are bold
and alone or in company
they are at home.
They carry no bible,
they make politics
only one day at a time,
and the sky is their roof. 

Men face one choice above all
and that is how to die.
I will die like a crow,
out of doors, in a ruffle
of feathers and dry leaves
one eye at heaven
dry and fading like fall,
with nothing in between.

Revel

The decades gyrate
like a crooked ferris wheel
in a colorless carnival
where the drunk and blind
throw baseballs at cloth cats,
toward the black future
that will take back
every hue we have been loaned.

You did not know that?
Yet you have been warned,
everything made for you to play with
was cast in sorrow
and engraved with a mark
not that of the maker.
You must wipe away
the accumulation of oil
to know the truth.

Bluebirds

Outside for hours this warm weekend.
The sun laps against my aging skin
as I run around the track slowly
and the air is filled with a golden glow
from our star, our trees, our grass.
Bluebirds wait on the fence and then fly,
chirping gently when they take off
and lift by my head into the blue sky.
They look for moisture in the bugs they eat.
They fly mostly for food, or mating
but they extoll the glories of their bodies
in the middle of the air.

I drink a half a gallon of water
and I touch the sharp balance
in the sweet middle
of wet birth and dry death.

Our Own Perspective

Is something like freefall,
nothing to hold on to,
the world rushing up to find us
and the wind sucking out
the habits of the ears and eyes.
Or it is like a caged tiger
who knows he is not home,
who is angry at the passing
of time and of those who
wanted to hold him this way.

We look at magazines, television,
the road out the front of our car
and we see nothing
but the habits of our mind.
We drive toward satisfaction
but other drivers make us late.
It may be time to open our parachute,
time to open our eyes,
watch and wait for the right time
to kill our ephemeral masters
and escape.

My Place

Gotta get ten acres
down in the heart of the state
where the hoot owl hoots
at the setting moon
in the old oak tree
at the edge of my own little lake.

Sure, it's all God's,
every spinning proton
of every lonely element,
but by God I'll be damned
if before I'm gone
an owl won't fly round
a little ground with my name on it.

No Idea

I thought it was all for me
as I rounded the black asphalt path
at the park and stopped a foot away
from two surprised deer.
We both had that rare
and momentary interest
in something other than
running away or running toward.
Maybe they thought 
you were there for them
said my wife.
She says things like that
because she is there for me.
I stopped in my tracks
and noticed how the words
hung there, round and open.

Pity

Once, a girl on the swing
had half a face, the rest a boil
and I stared and then said
to her mother that I was
a social worker and could I help.

I am still red
from the strike of her eyes
and from time to time
people take pity on me.

Conversion

Soon, I will worship wolverines
by chanting to them in the wild
because I would rather be
bitten in the face
than supplicate what is warm and safe.

Draining

Underneath the city
flows the blood,
almost the same way
it runs in bodies,
but with only
the memory of touch
and no purpose,
no longer bound
to quicken legs,
blush cheeks
or warm lips.

Find this blood
and ask it
what was it like
to serve
such blind masters?

Lazy Sunday

Every inch of ground and air
is filled with scurrying
black beetles, little red ants,
a wasp stuck to my soda,
a brown camel cricket,
a schoolbus yellow butterfly,
a great big green shiny dragonfly
two flies, one of which bites,
all in about one minute.

I must be an enormous thing
in the middle of their world,
taking up three hundred
bug backyards.

To them, my occupation
must consist mostly
of slowly taking up space.

Afternoon

What remains of us,
the fingers of God
when we are gone?
What were we, under the sun
smiling, loving and
as quiet as the twilight?
What remains of us,
why were we outside here
in the middle of the day?
If I knew what I now know
of time and gossamer bonds
and if you had asked me
If I wanted to be here
I would have said yes
because I wanted to know
the rhythm of your heart.

Gift Wrap

When we let in things
that really don't fit
we still don't break.
Crows fly by
without any doubt
about the path they take.
I was worried about
being poisoned
by drinking your pain
but even the baby inside me
it turns out
can be left out in the rain.
A crow dashes
in front of my car
and takes off with a bagel
I let all my history
make off with circumstance
as soon as I'm able.

Dino Dollars

I remember the swamp and palm trees
in the Golden Guide to Dinosaurs
where I walked in their great shadow
because they were more than biological
and not yet fossils.

The green brontosaurus' long neck
rose above the triceratops at the edge of the swamp,
plants dangling from his firm mouth.
He loved his dinner there
in the grey clouds peppered with pterydactyls.
In that picture, the volcanoes were settling,
becoming more friendly
after their violent birth
and I didn't really think about
where the tyrannosauruses would eat.
He was happy as the Sinclair dinosaur
and he did not know he would power our
Dodge Dart, where I sat in the back seat.
He was like me, not yet part of any particular world
that he had to make useful.

Transpiration

In Juarez, a mother's arms
are too small to hold
her son and the world
that promised to save him
from a little cardboard house.
A metal river of guns
rolls south through the night
to water the terrible flowers
of mourning;
Blue-eyed terror,
creeping brown hunger,
and golden opportunity
that is said to grow
somewhere upstream.

Our Right to Vitamin C

Why not raise taxes
on the middle class?
They are like oranges
and they are full of juice.

Dreams

I dreamed I put
everyone I didn't like
on C-47s
and flew them to New Mexico
at night, past the gold cities
and dropped them in the desert
where they clustered like crabs
and tore each others' claws off.

I was so happy with the result
that I left the house
like a bluebird on a sunny day.
There was no woman in Starbucks
yelling at her child
just because he was a child.
My passive-aggressive workmate
was now assertive, and also taller.

I enjoyed going out more
and everyone wanted to be with me.
I was surrounded.
By degrees I had trouble breathing.
I went home and sat
with some bad electricity in my spine.
There was something in there I didn't like
and I only had one option.

I woke with my beautiful wife next to me,
the sun on her chestnut hair
I woke to a world speckled with woe
in the pink and particulate air. 

Angel

What angel made this and me?
Oh, for her I touch again
fresh wind, brave dart of crow,
and the shawl of time caress.

Without a giver still can a gift be,
and ecstasy an eye retain,
in the thumping heart of now
her bones are mine to dress.

Adopt-A-Highway

A scratched up thirty-days-sober AA keychain
and a hundred bottles of beer on the road. 
The drivers sing the endless and foolish refrain
excepting one and just maybe, but that's how it goes.

Fall

My father died twelve years ago today
in the flame red trees of Vermont.
He saw many flaming fall days
and he grew like a maple tree
and he was full of good syrup.
Now the trees are even taller.
I have not been there since then
and I miss my father and the trees.
He did not tell me the story
of the old man
reflecting on his falling life
on a crisp October day,
in the middle of the chapel of trees
that will call him back home.
I will write that story. 

Being In It

If I lived in the Old West
I would have a whiskey,
a revolver and a horse
but I would not have nostalgia
for the Old West,
especially around doctors with only
knives and fire for operations,
a cold and drafty cabin
and travel through Indian territory.

I can almost smell nostalgia,
something like oat and honey bread,
the drying of the crimson leaves and
the musky perfume of your soft skin.
Despite the layoffs, the aches of age,
and the ragged ripples of the road,
I'll pose with you for a sepia print.

Hump Day

The middle of a busy week
accumulates around my head.
I remember Saturday mornings
where the clear and clean space
of the green yard and blue sky
grow bright right with me.
But then, without the rest of the week,
Saturday would have no name.
From the need for rent money
I would have no rest.

A fat fly cruises around my office.
I take off the screen, open the window,
and he goes right out.
He went back to work, I think.

Deer, Still Warm

What if I stood over her
and commended her to heaven?
I would be arrested maybe,
for not following the way
of all that is already dead;
Paper, numbers, the past,
the future, regrets, opposites,
structure, hope, worth,
city hall and steeples.

So I drive by and a pink X
will be sprayed on her hide
like a profane cross.

Tennis

You are leading discussion
on the four foundations
of body, feeling, mind and phenomena.
The group discusses sound.
Tennis players are being banned
for grunting is where
the observation ends.

When I ran 'Club 56' at the Y
in grad school
the kids had smeared the place
with their sundaes,
ran out screaming.
Good job
said the director.  
I wonder where the kids are now.
I'm sure one of them
has sat for ten days as you did
to know
the clamor of the mind.

It is better
said my director
to be a coach and not a judge.

Awareness deepens,
the game continues.