I see these sorts of things
when I force my eyes open
much earlier than I should
but it’s all right, it’s a common theme
it’s round and easy to hold
though desperate in measure

and what I carry with me
through the trenches of the day
is my business alone, but it’s clear enough
to anyone who sees my heavy eyes
or the residue in the gutters
to either side of our path

Falling away
down the side of an easy mountain
you’re receding into everything
the whispered assurances
and cautious clemency
growing louder in my head

Posted: May 17th, 2004 under Poetry.
Comments: none

This is where there used to be
victorious arrivals of the city’s survivors
and there was no static on the wires
no studies in silver, no majestic spires
But then those shots were deflected
by the sidewalk’s unforgiving service
Stymied when our flights were defeated
we couldn’t build boats
from this fairweather friendship
and expect them to float
on the river reversed

That’s what I cringed to remember
this afternoon when I stood at the window
looking down into the rising water
hearing the roar in the basement
and watching the sun begin its slide
down the side of the steel casement,
your voice miles below me in the noise
But when those streets were dry,
you could hear the cold scrape
of the metal world I now occupy
in this mechanical architecture

I’ll admit, I was feeling moorless
after riding in elevators all day
planting my feet, leaning into the lurch
getting used to the sudden shuddering climb
getting familiar with gravity’s rift and resurrection
and later the scrape of the brakes on the train
sounded like the whine of flourescents
trying to make peace with the present
sounded like us making last year’s resolutions
promising to be careful out there
and to cut the crap

Good enough for me, I said
so that’s how we answered
the approaching murmur
of brushes against drums,
the bleating organ, the piano’s dirge
and the cramped fingers on the viola
singing hymns we thought we’d forgotten
Step by step on Ash Wednesday
shaking our heads, lest we forget
the lessons of Ascension Day
in our fragmented calendar of regret,
of ordinary time

You acted like a latchkey kid
saying I don’t mind the rain
and I realized there was no stopping,
no getting off at the mezzanine,
so I stopped trying, let myself go
and receded back into the routine
Felt the plummeting leaden weight
the clothes falling from our shoulders
as we dropped pages of the diary
on the ground behind us

The girls and boys I used to watch
with whom I was enamored and obsessed
were lifted in twos on the escalator
to their places on the balcony
while the rest of us were whisked
from the country to the courtyard
and from there to the garden
pressed through the stones in the wall
back to the thunderous aplomb
the belles of the ball

Because what is a day, after all?
That become our reason and our recipe:
so we took our time, we stopped worrying
about what dark thing might be lurking
around the next sharp corner of the day
shedding our last layers of recognition,
our riddles and reputation. We feel this one
is somehow more urgent, since we
are no longer the laughing stock,
just laughing

Posted: March 20th, 2004 under Poetry, Images.
Comments: none

That’s how it begins:
depth plus width, and down we go
to the other end of a narrow room
to the receiving end of the calendar

it has rendered me speechless
it has rendered me dry
and while I suck down water,
head in the hands,
you supply the old adage:
not getting any younger

such a familiar name
undergirded, above ground
and words aren’t as new anymore
every process takes forever
every practice is routine

expected to stay
long enough to make amends
but not a minute—wait one minute
too numb from drinking
and too tired to go home

—17 March 1999

Posted: March 17th, 2004 under Poetry, Images.
Comments: none

The water in the eye is a globe of bent images, refracted summer days stretching well into fall. We all know there will be no raising of the dead, no pushing the raindrops back up into the clouds, blanched and forgotten.

But that doesn’t make it right.

The water in my eye is a globe that will never fall, but bends and stretches ever downward, freezes as I sleep—and I wake to silence, to the stillness of summer’s end, to departure.

—September 2001

Posted: September 15th, 2003 under Poetry, Images.
Comments: none

I know we’ve talked about this before
but the light on the city blocks was too pure
to forget or ignore

Posted: August 15th, 2003 under Poetry, Images.
Comments: none

Apres moi, le deluge.

Tonight the car was running on empty as I picked up Ransom, delivering him from the squalor of moving out to a brief respite of dinner and then an incongruous trip to Wal-Mart, where every conceivable utensil and cleaning and maintenance item was gutted by the droves of people all over this town moving out of their places and into new ones, which when you think about it this is a pretty big town with a garish cross-section of people and ages and ethnicities all trying to serve their own agendas while attempting to maintain the civility and generosity for which this region is known. But then, anyway, I dropped Ransom off and the needle was on E and I dropped the car into neutral as I crested the hill that turned Greenwood into Myrtle, my old stomping ground, and cruised the few hundred feet into the parking lot of the Kum & Go at the bottom of the hill for gas and beer to serve us well later in Portugal, this convenience store our old mecca, staffed still by mild-mannered Joe, who was pleasantly surprised that I dropped in, asking after Neil and Selena as always, which jarred me back into nostalgia and wondering as I drove away from the place, marveling that this is the same life within which two years ago I drank cheap wine with those two kids in a small cozy apartment just up the hill in those cookie-cutter dwellings, going there night after night for refuge and silliness and never thinking, or maybe denying, that it could ever end with the simple but far-reaching decisions on the parts of Mssr Stone and Mme Magram to relocate to the left coast. And so. It works out, it always does, on myriad porches all over the continent.

So, Kat. You’re speaking of course of the classic fable “Appointment In Samarra,” most famously retold by H Somerset Maugham. Now it’s getting referenced in all kinds of sanguine paeans to Operation Iraqi Freedom (TM), but it still remains one of the best examples of irony I know.

There’s a special brand of delusion I used to know all too well, but I dropped it along the adopted highways patrolled by your cleaning crews. But now I’ve got my own space to fill, the reassurance of added affinities, cotillions in silver ballrooms, my imaginary sons and daughters. This particular strain of grief cannot be identified by time or predictions hammered home amid arrogant replies. In the cleaning of the house or the settling of accounts, we’ll surely miss something that will surprise us later.

Okay. So I promise that my excerpts from Infinite Jest will be few and far between, and I’m not just using them to be a prick, but that I’m including them because they are like little nuggets of wonderful advice and observation and mirth and a somehow familiar sagacity, and the passages I actually end up including are very down-to-earth and just plain easy to ID with and pretty much True, however you slice it.

“It’s the same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger BU or -C students when he’s driving … when they’ll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately’s snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They’ll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don’t deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they’re constitutionally unable to learn from anyone else’s experience: if some jaywalking BU student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your other student’s or addict’s response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference—they just ponder it. It’s like a kind of idolatry of uniqueness. It’s unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for him to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry.”

Posted: July 30th, 2003 under Poetry, Politics, Literature, General.
Comments: 1

Trade your belt for a new noose, atrophied from disuse.
Here on the cusp is a home-bred loyalty,
a care-worn nametag I used to wear
to the parties you’d hold in your glass house.

Boeing eyes crash-land on rough northern waters
where the automatic return runs ragged
so now, just who is going to toss away words
and force entry, and just where can we put
this shiny new thing?

—October 1998

Posted: July 29th, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

1. Untitled
2. The canoe and the dog and the island
3. 718 East Alton Street
4. The ferry
5. 1998
6. Praying
7. First thought, best thought
8. Venn diagrams
9. Notes & errata
10. Varieties of disbelief
11. Shakespeare
12. Sunburns
13. Green Bay
14. 1998
15. The magnificent tree
16. Goodnight Jack
17. Legal briefs
18. Your last phone call
19. Twenty songs about the same thing
20. One pint
21. Trigger happy
22. The seventeen-hour workday
23. Lemon juice highlights
24. Kids upon the carriage
25. The Viking Room
26. Rollercoaster of love
27. Action figures
28. Out the window with the window
29. It would destroy you
30. Ambulance sirens
31. Regret
32. Regret
33. Regret
34.

Posted: June 24th, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

I’ve settled here,
a place in my mind
and it will do for now
and in spring seasons
to come

Sufficient, and drawn away
from the good people
and apparitions, and a refuge
against the endless trips
shuttling between solace
and speculation

There are flowers everywhere
but you hated pretense
there are kind words galore
but you hated noise
so I locked it all up

But not before pilfering
the coffers inside
the wisdom of the ages
a life’s work, a proud devil
the kindest smile
sitting by the water.

Posted: April 11th, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

So it’s come to this:
clinging to the eaves
above the icy driveway
I think I begin to see
the way to graceland

watching movies starring
former friends bent to the task
glasses spelling disarray
from flux to form
from sin to sanctity

It’s how I order my world
in envelopes of drunken time
excused by no one, no thing
forgiving everything
wiping wrongs from the slate

No resistance to memory,
no police to cease my remembering
of better times autumnal
sheltered under the merciful eye
of nostalgia

So that’s how it is:
Where once I wrote
a thousand poems
now I organize one thought
and hope I wake up in time

To absorb the teaching
the orthodox rituals
that will make me whole in time,
my instinct hearkening back
to ignorant bliss

Posted: January 31st, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

Hindsight
by Nancy Willard

The two of us running up Fifth Avenue,
Michael, a long leap of a lad
in his black church clothes
and his brother’s brogues,
and his hair flying,

and me with my brimmed hat hooping
down the steps of St. Pat’s
till it’s cocked on the wind’s head,
bent on blowing me clean
out of my senses.

Oh, why did I let that boy go?
God himself loved the sight of us.
I would be the blue light in his eye,
the left one, the far-seeing one,
the one he’s rubbing now, maybe.

Posted: January 25th, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

i. Dear Terpsichore

This time it won’t stop for anything, and these words are not my own, they never were, and everything I’ve said and will say is borrowed, (some of it, where indicated, stolen).

But you knew this already, you must, or you wouldn’t be so keen to the art.

In the crowded pulsating room the fog thickens as money and drink are passed around among the characters of unsettling dreams I’ve been having. This is as real as it gets, I guess, that is, sure is pure.

Her eyes are so large and she is approaching a focal point, a vanishing perspective, lost … nonplused by the saccharine sounds.

And I feel great things are on the horizon. And I feel fortune is smiling upon us. And I feel so much depends on the weather. And I feel the winter song of eves past, fifteen years old and running under snow bright sky. And I feel my mind won’t stop racing and just settle.

Lovefools. Resigned to witness the sinful dancing, conceived by devilish angels.

ii. Beginnings

This ongoing connection, I think, was set into motion years ago, on a warm sunny Saturday morning in October. Driving around downtown running errands for the night I flipped through the radio dial and happened serendipitous upon an old favorite song so apropos in its attack, that it triggered in me an imagined scenario, pieced together from disparate elements of past and future and fantasy.

Parking at the storefront, I sat there until the song was over, my eyes closed behind my glasses, watching the short film in my head while the radio sang along.

I saw us in hollow beige light, dancing and moving together—this had never actually happened, not yet anyway—and looked down in my cinematic imagination at her dark hair and gentle features.

And in realtime, while maintaining this scenario, I thought it was all possible, it could have all been mine, and it seemed an innocent celebration of youth: our dance there in my head, a dance as yet unreified.

Posted: January 10th, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

Pulsing forward in semaphore script, I can see scattered code amidst the lights just beyond those walls out there. And they’re calling in the guard that’s coming down out of the skies in their stealth and stammer, unfurling banners and dropping rope ladders for the citizenry.

And I’m watching it from my window, having just awoken from my nap at dusk, the orange light arranging itself in shafts on my wall as it marches in through the iron frames, and the music is building steady waves of choruses, over and over and over and—

In the breakdown the cover’s ripped off and I can see the stark steel skeleton framework, and I hear someone say “this is good, we can do something with this … ”

So I stand still and continue observing the academics marching to the mess, while I stay behind and drink my tea, watching the brilliant blue crackling sky come pouring up and out of the horizon towards me, the autos skidding on capillaries below my window, the lights flipping on and dancing diagonally towards me, shuttling before me from north to south, and down the hill and under the bridge, across the river into further winter darkness.

And the orange veins in the clouds pulse ever on. She couldn’t take it, I figure, she went away—so you cry and cry … no mistaking, you can hear the sirens, I can hear them still in the wake of years, whining and crying out in troubling tones while the string section builds in thirds, towards a halfhearted collapse …

And I lie back down … forget eating … close my window so I can’t hear the cars anymore … they pitter patter away home.

Posted: January 6th, 2003 under Poetry.
Comments: none

That’s a hell of an
opening line,
you beautiful bastard.
Coming down like that
from the hellish above
and lip-smacking
sauciness to serve you
well into the weekend

Can’t argue with that,
she said, but I was too slow
and I’ve gotten too old
so instead of taking part
we can stand apart and watch
rituals that never change
directions pressed
into the roads rutted
by tradition

Got to stay in my room
and come up with a plan
concoct an antidote
The scene just beyond:
Beauty in the next room,
thunderstorms outside,
breakbeats inside—
collide and divide.

Posted: December 6th, 2002 under Poetry.
Comments: none

Let the old dead
make room for the new dead
drawing the curtains
in the big house next door
Neighbors all gone out
into the descending white sky.

Winter’s in the air
heavy footsteps on frozen leaves
cloudy breath behind windshields
ice on the evergreens
dark limbs raised on high
the month we call November

The girl grew up
the family moved away
leaving snow drifts in the backyard
and in gray fields beyond
where my friend and I celebrated
the winter solstice, young
and not yet noticing
the encroaching white sky.

Posted: November 4th, 2002 under Poetry.
Comments: none