Of the family
when everyone was still there –
brass-knuckle voices, the ball game,
lawn chairs and drinks
with maraschino cherries –
“You jackass! No wonder
he walked away” –
barbecue sauce black
and two outs for the closer –
another win for the Cubs
in an otherwise winless year
Love casts out fear
Hence I found myself
three trees from the big house
working my way back
one black trunk at a time
Abundant in the air,
thwacks and grimacing jaws –
a cracked wall in the one frame,
rubble in the next –
a nuclear flash
and,
at last,
the muffling down,
a caroling
in paper soft as spring
It’s not at all but
I’ll say it, like
open-heart
surgery
and not in rivulets
but sheets
and who knew
the pavement sloped down?
You could fall back down
into it,
flailing until the angel arises
to be the you,
the better day
I’ve folded them up and boxed them
(in a brown box, no more).
You’ll want no gloating, no
easy answers – Sentimental, I think
you’ll say – so I take my sunlit
paths of pine needles, my sugar-berried
friendship – and flatten and tuck them
into a neat remembrance
all for myself.
Their secret rides our own whistled word,
for this and every
bird’s a love bird.
They’ll be tightening the chain
on my bike today. I’ll be done with
slipping and clacking.
Slick steel will join intentions to powers.
You’ll see where I’ve been when I’ve gone on by.
A man speaks on the bus to another man who hears voices (I hear this man, and the voice in my own head, but not the man on the other end of the line) and I wonder how the other man knows it’s not real, and a thing he should ignore. And all the many voices in my own head persist, and I wonder which is real, and how I know the difference.
I lay by my wife and felt her fingers,
and then all her bones together –
a skeletal, scary thought
with a cold wind blowing through it –
so I hastened to add the rest,
first the organs and then the
blood and tissues I couldn’t name,
and finally the skin and
mass of golden hair.
But even then she wasn’t herself,
so I started decking her out
with all her qualities, her smile and
hard soft-heartedness,
her way of leaving things
and that twist when she dances.
And how she cooks, with her million recipes,
and curls up in the corner of the couch.
The further I went, the warmer she,
and the drowsier I,
got, and God it’s good
to sleep with her
and not with that bag of bones!
Utrecht Journal 