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.
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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
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
