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Jury-rigged

 

 

It’s a farm fact. How we grew up.

Funky equipment failing and

my father doing whatever

 

he had to do to put it back together

again.  Hammer. Tape. Wire.  Give it

a good slam. No time to mess

 

around, newly baled field

and a rainstorm coming.

You make it go. Which is why

 

it was no surprise

this past weekend to see

this get up my parents have rigged

 

to help my father get up

the stairs so they can go on

sleeping in the marital bed.

 

Mother is steadying my father up the stairs by a rope

hooked to his belt

one step at a time.  You can hear him

 

say pull, then the creak of his weight

as he reaches the next step, then the silence

as he pauses, then pull, he calls out

 

 and she does. My sister and I visiting

for the weekend stand in our old

bedroom.  We don’t go out in the hallway

 

because it seems like something

we ought not to watch, or even

listen to any more than you’d listen in

 

on someone in the next room making love,

both of them with their failing hearts

but his barely working now.

 

Books piled at strategic steps to make

half steps. My mother

and father tethered on the steep

 

risers him balancing

on the step, her with the rope

taut in her hand. Are we supposed

 

to stop them, come parent like

around the corner and demand

they put the rope down, go sleep

 

in the pull out couch

in the living room, go check

into a motel,  a nursing home

 

wherever you get to go, but trained

to do as he says, we stay

back.  We try not to listen

 

to the sounds they make

on the crooked stairs

we children fell down one by

 

one, the corner with the brick

abutment and the metal

radiator at the bottom of it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Some of my poems on line:

http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~simmers/75party.htm     Snakeskin Journal

 

Agni: http://www.bu.edu/agni/

 


 

 

Good news:  my poem "Nobody Go Blue" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  The poem first appeared in Prairie Schooner,  and is included in my upcoming book: Otherwise Obedient. 

 

 

Some Sample Poems

 

Nobody Go Blue

 

 

 

Who meant to be a teenage mother, but ten days

without the pill, and there you have it. A new life.  I didn’t mean

to starve the baby in utero. Brown rice,  pot, cigarettes, no way

she could have come out fat.  So she’s not so tall.  It seemed

 

the war would never end,  four dead at Kent State,  rage

everywhere. I wanted to make a baby, replace a few dead

with my own live child  as if a baby could be a blank page

anything could be fixed on, everything revised.  Who would’ve said

 

it could turn out o.k. in that dark apartment? No idea what to do

but feed her each time she cried, rock her in the chair, stuff her full.

Try not to roll over on the baby, don’t drop her, nobody go blue

in the night. Listening for her breath, I felt that soft spot on the skull,

 

rising, falling in the city night that looked like dawn.  Even the belly button

alarmed me, its plastic, yellow staple threatening to come undone.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

 

 

Dutiful

 

 

It has a plan.  Easy in a way.  Goes where

it says it will go. Does what it says it will

do.  Grief.  Doesn’t disguise

 

itself as joy.  The dead go and don’t come back.

Don’t call and want to start over again.

They burn the buildings. Scorch the ground.

 

There’s a certain purity to it.  Loves only

itself.  Has its rules. Its particular duties.

You grow fonder of them finally.

 

The body goes into the ground. Is ash. Is done

with itself. You know where

they are because you put them there.  You kissed

 

the cold forehead.  Stroked the disheveled

eye brows.  The bruised arms.

I carried my father’s clothes

 

cross town so he could be dressed

one last time. Pressed my face to his jacket.

Found a toothpick in the side pocket.

 

There’s only one suit finally. 

One pair of shoes.

You get the last word if there’s anything to be said for that.


 --              published in Field,  Winter 2004

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following are some poems from my upcoming book: Otherwise Obedient

 

Otherwise Obedient

 

 

 

It should go like this.  No distance

between ranch house and barn.

House and ranch as one.

The whole yard a paddock.  Horse shit.

Hay.  Dirt.  Picture window

and the horse pressed up against it.

Let the flies be flies where they need be.

The woman standing in the door

calls the horse to her, she’s shaking the bucket.

She’s whistling softly.  He’s

rubbing his haunches on the house,

shifting on his hooves, nuzzling

his muzzle toward her.

You drive by the house suddenly

waxing nostalgic for the horse

buried in the upper pasture a long way

from here.  Even how she tried to kill you.

Tried to buck you off her back each day.

To pass you off under

low tree limbs, lie down on top of you

when she could.  Otherwise obedient.

She came when you called.

She ate the treats you gave her.

We should keep them close,

even if they’re too close sometimes.

Great backs pressed against the walls

of the house and that smell everywhere

you turn.  Too many flies.

The sound of hooves beneath the window.

Great molars grinding dry stalks of

hay and the huge lungs like bellows. 

We lie awake in the dark too often

listening to nothing.  Just crickets maybe.

The green lawn and nobody on it,

but some small, unidentified animal--

possum or is that raccoon

making a clicking sound

as it moves slowly from porch

to that hollowed out yellow jacket nest,

the combs filled with pupa. 

It’s digging them out of the ground now.

Sucking the hives empty.  Scattering them

in the yard. You want to be hearing

something else sometimes.  Don’t

just want to be hearing the trees

dropping their acorns, slicing the leaves

as they fall, or the birds sleeping

in the crooks of trees, heads tucked under limbs.

So much you can’t see.

Can’t put your hands on.

Sometimes you want a back you could climb up on.

Four hooves that could carry you out of here.

When you slide open the door.  When you step down

into the grass.

 

    from The Ontario Review

----------------------------------------------------------------

 

Roger on Guitar, 1969

 

 

 

I didn’t mean to walk out of the apartment without a word.

Roger was playing his guitar and it was raining outside.

I was in the alcove on acid.  Roger playing his guitar.

It was treble. It was three notes and it was the same three notes

 

and it was going to go on being those three notes.

I couldn’t speak.  I walked past the secret service

in the hallway looking for Dave gone AWOL. 

He had narcolepsy. What did they want with a sleeping

                       

GI?  Asleep on the jeep and the mines going off

around him. I stood in the rain over the black water--

traffic at my back and Coca Cola sign on the surface of the

Charles breaking apart in the rain. I saw I was in the world now. 

Not in my parents’ domain.  It seemed easy to go beyond them.

 

To walk away from Roger’s apartment.  To have no idea

where Dave went.


 

-----------------------------------------

 

It’s A Free World

                                                                                                                       

 

She’s gone from home and will keep on being gone.

How unlike anything everything is, but it’s an American thing.

We’re in the world and we’re going to enjoy ourselves.

It’s a free world and we’re free in it.  It’s a democratic thing.

The influences infinite; the choices multitude.

No one she knows knows where she is or what time

she expects herself back.  She’s coming across the parade ground

in the dark, an empty lawn with the sea at the end of it.

Maybe only 6 times today she’s thought of the lover she lost

this time last year. There should be some kind of signal

when it’s the last time we’re actually looking at a particular person.

A sound.  A smell.  A change of color.

Some voice that says look hard here it’s the last look.

How when you’re leaving a town in a country you might never

go back to, you know enough to stare hard at the light on the village square.

You take photos. You stand on the corner and look back for a long time.

Like those two sisters walking out of the family home in Ireland

to never return.  The sister stood in the doorway sprinkling

holy water saying the names of the ones she was leaving behind

in each room asleep.  As if water could protect us or bring us back

from wherever it is we go and keep on going to.

Imagine the lips at that cup, the print of your breath on the water,

that first cool sip.  The woman’s in the middle of the lawn

and almost home at the new home.  A melody starts,

and she begins to sing but the voice seems frail in the dark.

She stands still on the grass.  Takes a deep breath.

She can’t remember the tune quite. Or all the words.

 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

 

 

The Big Fork

 

 

 

All that excercise children like to get.

Their bodies not quite big enough.

Continuous practice.  That leaping and running.

That turning they do in their chairs.

 

Legs too short.  Arms like flippers, and the net too high.

The body could never be big enough.

They go about it in good faith. Stretch the hands

and legs.  The arms.  The spine.

 

So much banging about to do.

The kid hopping his bike up and down the cliff

above  the sea.  He can’t get enough of it.

The steep of the rock.  The difficulty.

 

This is the appetite they have.

How eager they are to sit at the big table.

Lift that fork to their mouths.

Get big like that.

 

And then the parents hauling them back.

Someone lifting you by the scruff of the neck

There’s fun to be had and they won’t let you do it.

Big is never big enough.

 

I saw it on my father’s face when they

were lowering his mother into the ground.

All those years all we do is try to get past them,

the parents, and then we do.

                                                                                   

Yesterday that kid jaggedly running

on new legs toward the water.

The parents suddenly after her.

The great blue deep she ran for.


 

                       from Poetry

 

-------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Exile

 

 

That hollow sound a dog makes,

that fret and tear at the morning.

And your voice yesterday evening

up on the hill calling the lost cat.

Two syllables floating through the woods

back down to me. You say you have no

singing voice, but the notes were pure.

On pitch.  Melodious.

I listened to you calling the cat and I stared

at the racks of flowers in your garden.

Petal, stamen, bud in evening light.

As if what you’d left behind had flowered.

The country you might never see again--

Burst of yellow flowers.

Red poppies splayed open; roses

climbing to the second floor window,

that dalliance at the center.

It’s the beauty of loss.

The pretty of it, the pure stem.

What we do to shore up rotten planks,

that hole in the world through which

what might go does go and keeps on going.

There should be some sort of lock-down

to keep what we love in one place.

Keep that choir from coming towards us through the trees.

 


The Massachusetts Review                                                    

 

-----------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

Migration

 

 

Last night when you lowered your body down

on top of me,  I thought of the monarchs

at the tops of pine trees in Mexico.

It was high in the mountains.

I’d been gone from  home a long time.

I stood in the pine forest and listened

to the thick body of those butterflies. 

Heavy in the trees.  The limbs

clotted as with snow.  Monarch on top of

monarch and the outer wings shifting

to keep position.  Some sort of pulse in the trees.

As if breath itself had taken on a body.


-----------------------------------------------------------

 

 

The Confusion About What It Means to Be Human

 

 

It was the same day I decided to be a nice person. 

That nothing would bother me here on in.  I would

sit still though bored. Not get up and leave the room. 

I was sitting in that room. I was being pleasant; 

I could hear a cat mewing in the hallway of the school.

But it wasn’t a cat.  Was someone’s baby being carried

in its plastic seat.  The kind you can leave on top of cars.

You can forget the baby’s up there but the baby won’t be any

worse for the wear.  Will bounce down the highway unharmed.

It was the same day I confused sheep blatting for humans crying.

Some sort of debacle.  Lost children.  They sound like that.

Like cats.  Like sheep and large birds.  It’s the confusion

we have from the outset. Before we can name anything,

when just about anything warm will do. It’s the same problem

animals have.  Cat mistakes dog for mother.  Horse adopts calf.

Infant sucking on whatever happens to be offered. That milky

teat dangling down. And the cats in the barn confused by cows.

The smell of milk.  That white trail cows leave but then the cows

rolling over on top of the cats and not noticing.

Even in my dreams, small black foxes suck at my breasts.

When they see it’s me crooning at them, they jump down,

run back into the woods making little barks like love cries.


                                            The Massachusetts Review

 

--------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Translation Problems

 

 

I made mistakes in French.

I made mistakes on the French train.

I made mistakes in the hotel.

I was tired

in a French town.

I got lost.

I made bad change.

I could not understand the woman

I was traveling with.  In English.

We were driving

a car through cicadas.

It’s a translation problem.

That one place in the city of.

In the town of.

Something you thought

you could find,

but can’t locate.

Perfect posture,

beautiful eyes, but

you had to wait for her

everywhere.

If you wanted her.

Village of.  City of.

The town you could get lost in.

Train hurtles

through the station

and does not stop.

I made mistakes.

I was riding

in the wrong coach.

I was sitting backwards

in a foreign tongue.


 

---------------------------------------------------------

 

It

 

 

 

It wants to get loose.

It talks about home. 

 

Goes up the side

of the mountain.

 

Taller than any mountain

you’ve ever been this close to.

 

It walks on the clean cobblestones.

Suns itself.  Drapes a colored cloth in the wind.

 

Has snow on the top.

Looks at beauty and empties itself into it.

 

It billows.  It gives itself over to itself. 

It has a white swan and a cold clear lake. 

 

The swan gets up and tries

to get into your lunch. 

 

You kick at it. Get back you hiss.

You throw a piece of bread as a decoy

 

so you can get away from it. 

The large white wings and that white neck

 

with the hard yellow beak

at the end of it.


                                     Field 

 

-------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Tantrum Girl

 

…damned, most subtly and most malignantly!damned in the midst of Paradise!  - Melville

 

Girl on the beach is having a temper.

There’s a wail and a thump that won’t stop,

and the ocean with its small blue-

sun-slick waves.  Everything pretty,

and she won’t stop crying.

There’s birds above her and people sleeping in the sand.

How you could make yourself heard

above all that sea cracking and the wind,

but she’s doing it.  People crane to see

where it’s coming from.  That moaning.

That screaming.  Temper tantrum

kicking herself around in the sand.

She is trying to turn herself inside out.

Unhook the lock on the body.

Mother  takes her into the sea to give her

a little dip.  A little cool water in the face

helps sometimes. An ocean helps.

A washing of tears and snot and sweat.

Mother holds her as she flails and wails.

There is no other child before her.

No other voices rising above the surf.

One might envy the body of a child.

That fresh skin.  Those limber limbs.

Bend this way and that so smoothly.


                  The Journal

 



 

Where She Came From
 

Where She Came From (after Jonathan Edwards)

 

 

 

we wouldn't expect to find one human shaped mound or anything

do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley

not-withstanding all the special warnings and messages

graceless, godless, impenitent, and unbelieving

 

do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley

the world was in her heart

graceless, godless, impenitent, and unbelieving

the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace

 

do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley

her heart was in the world

the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace

one that stands or walks in slippery places is always exposed to fall

 

her heart was in the world

not-withstanding all her special warnings and messages

one that stands or walks in slippery places is always exposed to fall

we wouldn't expect to find one human shaped mound or anything

 

 

                                                                       


 

 

 






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