First Day

Malden, you smell like donuts,

Gummy sidewalks, and the benches

In front of citizen’s bank where bald

Men in tank tops wait for you to open.

Forgive me my trespasses, it is

My first day. I’ve made it to some

Center ring where the people fly about

Like birds preparing for Janus

And the birds build nests at the top

Of Corinthian pillars. We’ve got

An open floor plan so you can see

Big sky and feel not so old fashioned,

So you can stare off and imagine a woman

In the Philadelphia heat, pulling up her skirt as

She steps over the grass this morning.

In the clocks I wait like moisture, face

Pressed up against some future I might be.

But we are also in the knowledge that

We don't change, the world does, like water

Through a sieve, everything is everything

It was, but different now. And some things,

left behind. I wonder

If I will be happy.

City wind and bus sounds

Store themselves anywhere they can,

Around the corner, in the small of my back.

My family has lived here for four generations.

Who do I think I am

With my blue suede shoes?

summer gone

there is a speed at which

the white of water

and hum of the engine

and slaps of cloth on skin

and wide blue sky fold into one.

we began singing when

we believed, somewhere in our guts

that day lunged forward into night

with open arms, that we were howling

with the wolves of every people.

now the words

are gone, a bright sun behind the veil,

crows following seagulls over

the hill. the family sleeps

in sand, books folded over our eyes like years

spent in cities without hearing

the sound of cedars in the wind. we creak

trying to reach the ones we love,

over wine or whiskey,

plans to get together again

or the few shared perspectives,

our mutual practices, done now not

for purpose but effect, keep it a family

business.

the pen leans weary in shadow,

and day yawns with greater

and greater winds, the boats are crawling back

to their oily dens and the tan white men

with their worked on bodies

to their blond wives, and we are staying quiet

while the rocks build rounded edges with each other,

white clouds are born of nothing and release

themselves,

while the clams shrug into the mud

and bubble with contentedness, while

the language of the ocean whirls stories

of which we can only see the sparkling beginnings –

and the building go up and come down

and some men buy while others drown

and some say on the whole you’ve got to admit

it is getting better, but I say

                       

as long as any man is stuck in too shallow water,

as long any, any person is beaten down like a stake into the sand,

I want to jump into the cold, flashing ocean after him,

I want to tear my clothes and run screaming along the beach.

The sand turns salt, the salt

sand. Water evaporates to come down

again in great torrents of rain.

there is a great sense in this world, one deeper

than perhaps we will ever know,

but there is no sense in a person going hungry.

10 days of awe and then the equinox

we watch the holy beast of fall land

through double panes,

feathers dropping sickly

and storms on the horizon.

each in their room,

folding t-shirts, cutting hair--

Somerville drowses richly, thickly,

grey paved and still hungry after dinner.

when jonah turned his back on Nineveh,

he said he would rather die than change his life.

so God made his choice his world.

In the Museum of Fine Arts, there are urns which tell you

that which you must do.

But it’s historical fact now. How curious

the edges that we have rounded.

I am in Cleveland pouring lagers

in the lava room as the Brown’s win.

I am in Denver holding a hiking pole

to the sun.

I am in Philadelphia painting my lover’s bathroom

blue.

I am in a manic state, dancing naked in the attic.

the world is not holding together

the way it used to

and beneath the house, a yawning pit opens,

the structure begins to crumble.

shall we find something else to do?

we nest, we pray,

this year I ask if we are in the belly of the whale,

or already spat out.

have you learned enough from this darkness?

We throw one hundred stones into the river

after hearing the shofar run out of breath.

the river is yeasty and yellow,

overflowing its banks with a kind of

life giving death.

on the horizon, the great oil tankers loom and

a coal train dings its dingy bell.

I miss the mark, I stray, I make mistakes.

but do I forgive?

what is it the muddy moustache says?
to see what is necessary in things

as what is beautiful.

does the grass forgive the seed?

or the wind for that matter?

or the great plain of which it is only a small part?

I am throwing up my hands these days

and thinking the stars in my bones know

something I will never own.

when the weather turns and everything in us

begins to turn too, longing to relinquish itself,

to fall away fully used as the knowledge of survival settles,

when we see our own hands reaching for an answer, let us not

turn on our phones.

let us not turn to the distracting touch.

is it cuffing season?

even if we lose everything we should not lose,

let us be quite out in the open about it:

there is a mystery here which I will certainly perish on.

this new poetry was made for our blistered mouths.