coming home

It is a brave thing, swans in winter.

They are going up the part of the mystic river that still flows,

A small triangular path between plains of silence,

Bobbing cold feet beneath the surface and churning about with a calm air,

A dead air, a wind that does not stir. And on the ice their children sing.

In a dream state I sit in my filth outside terminal B

Hoping not to cry.

On the drive home, bottles of liquor chatter softly on the floor—

And my father points out the beauty of a tattered American flag

Clipping east across the bridge we’ve crossed twice

Trying to find the new mall turning Somerville gold.

“It’s too much,” he says. I am not sure if he means

for him, or for her, or for them together.

But my body understands that he is right

And once again begins unpacking itself to make room

For what is to come.

Some things have grown smaller. The pear tree

Beside the house has lost all but one branch.

When I enter the house, my mother isn’t there for the first time.

Pictures hang along the walls of the ones who are gone.

Mi shebeirach for the living in this house. Where they walk,

So love goes. I have spent 7 years

Singing my mothers songs into a darkness

Whose contents seem to hold no domain here, not now. I open

the front door to the sun. It is so warm

I can smell the resin of the pine.

where the cracks run

This we do not talk about—on the third

Day of the third week that summer

In the yellow sands of the Jordan valley,

I rose to myself before the sun, in violet night slipped on

another man’s clothes that had been another man’s

before him, walked down the hill

past sleeping goats to shul to quietly

hold my insides calm and take stock of what kept me

keeping me alive, and then I climbed onto the tractor’s

side and rumbled with it up the hill in silence

as fire lit the field and my friend and I looked on

and shared something though we shared no language,

except the few words of our forefathers our fathers had taught us.

We stepped off and into the shed to pick our tools—white gloves with a few holes but good grey grips and a pair of single handed shears. Eli found us in the shadows, took us to the rotting choupa with grapes budding at its crown in the sunrise.

5/10 and 240 lbs of sun raw flesh, eli read passages to us

every morning, gutteral Hebrew beginning to lilt as he was overcome

by joy at the torah. That day he told us of the day leiah died, body blown across the sand by an exploding bus. A man from Jordan did it he told us.

And he told us of the morning when he gathered the other men in the dawn,

Before the sun rose, faces set like granite stones in the desert, how their tractors

And trucks started like the keening of the women by the water and then locked into step with the anger of a generation. They drove across the valley in a long line,

Past the other socialist kibbutzim where man made rivers trickled by the many tents. They drove a long time and the sun rose and they entered Jordan.

I imagine they each sang lo yisa goy to himself in his little vehicle,

And they shall be turned into plow shares.

And they drove onto the farm on the other side, in Jordan,

Where I am sure a man and his wife were just beginning to get to work,

Rising and dusting their knees and clearing their throats from prayer.

And they tore the land to shreds. They destroyed the crops.

They ripped up the roots and spat the living back onto the earth

In a heap of meaninglessness. And they whooped and shouted and menaced

The family, small children looking up from between their father’s legs

At the machines spraying blood into the sun.

And then they drove back, 

and worked, and prayed, and ate lunch 

in the chadar ochel and danced on the Sabbath,

And had a ceremonial burial for leiah and sat in her house

For 7 days. And later, when they drank the wine they made that season,

I think they tasted everything, though they could not say what.
they had lost the language for it.

both that it will stop or that it won't

Several times the question is asked

“is da levy dead if he’s here

with us?” but a book is not a heart

even in shaking addicted hands.

Sleep is coming to the cloud castle in droves,
with its knives. We thought

We might escape with love

a sense of purpose but while I was dreaming

every plate in the house cracked and

paul was naked out by the stuffed bear

trying to pick a fight with the bard,

the only one of us friends with sleep.

These games are more to the players.

While a john might go home empty

Handed one night and fill his hands

With his own cock, if one of my friends

At the airport loses, I think a gun

Is more likely. And I am beginning to

Feel scared the way men in the dark

caves are scared-- it is not about tomorrow

Or who might save or fight

for us, but the yawning wild

power of what is not me.

The power that closes mouths

And skitters your heart and sneaks

Into the lovers’ bed to tear them.

Heat is eternal

Hence why the bard’s primal fear is chemical

And lends its real self to the story self

In a confusing ink puddle which goes to show

Both are just damn ink.

It's a damn shame.

Where there is dust in these cluttered coves,

There is the possibility of mud, with a little rain.

And there, perhaps, a place where something might stick.

And the cliffs have begun to be covered in art,

The way up north on 5^th the blocks of vacants bear

The burden of a hundred names. But—

I try to surround myself with poetry

Though I know I am nothing

of the sort. I want my father to shake me

and say “there is no reason to do that

or the other, and it’s all games the poor

and the rich and reaching for anything

is as much an attempt to get it

as it is sell it. And that’s true of the union, and walmart,

the police, hillary rodham,

and you and i. so snap out of it and get a better job,”

so I could slap him and find some fire but,

I am still not waking up. And while sleeping,

I can’t write, but if I only write,

To everyone on cobbs creek in the flooding,

And to the little jewish kid getting his face pushed

Against the chain link and learning to forgive his mother,

There’s no fight. And without the fight we all die in dust.

da died and I don’t know what he might

Feel about the ivy crawling

through the room he lost his head in in east Cleveland

Or the mattresses being dragged through streets

By bareback men in the summer heat but I know

That I ain’t dead and it feels better to hold a heart in my hands

Than a damn book. I’m not happy with dreams—

Redemption, salvation, paradise.

I’ll know we’ve got it when I smell petrichor.[1]

---

[1] “Readiness is all”

December 3rd, 2015

Even as she pulls you closer

Overhead red stars and sweat, darkened wood grooves,

Oak fans spilling van gogh onto a crowd of upturned beards

As a recorded eagle cry ricochets through the soundscape—

You cannot help wondering about the laundry watered garden in tuscon,

Or the roof tucked with stars in the savage crevice of el paso

Or a thousand other cities and the love which goes with each.

Philadelphia shrugs up its hood in the December rain,

The street is filled with crawlers and limpers and fuckers and

Slitherers but in the houses, a sterile electric hum signals

Our inability to think of anything meaningful to do on such a day.

One such house is filled with boxed books and paintings turned

Into the wall. It sleeps the way half the city sleeps, without choosing it,

Up on its massive quads and dreaming of nothing but itself

Or an end to itself.

Another great grey ennui for the next bend in the schuykill.

After the dirty, but constant, factories curl around their own tails

And disappear, there’s a stretching that you wish would end.

When you first moved into a dorm room

And you wanted to sleep with the econ major

Whose eyes said “ I need you I need you Ineedyou

And I’ll do anything to make you know it”

You said “once you love someone, you

Never really stop.” It was a grand gesture in a superman t-shirt

And one year long relationship with a 16 year old under your belt.

There’s a picture of that night, dented tin can on a bedside table,

Someone’s hand over her mouth.

And since, with a deep green sweater over dead leaves

And an autumn of morning after morning waking

Up with nothing under your heart and it falling into the

Lower intestine where nothing but a muscle wall,

A tired muscle just like the heart, kept it inside you at all,

And since then a bit of playing and red lipstick on men’s suits

And several compliments to your bartending

And a couple bosses fucked with

And a couple nights impossible to remember with hands

On hard pectorals and business casual imposter laughing laughing

At the power you have, and the new people in your life

Terrified, terrified of the eyes you slip into

When you want to keep a room away from you by making it look

And LOOK LOOK all the evidence you are doing it right, from adoration,

To the $$ in hands unaccustomed to it spending it at bars and grocery stores

In southwest, to the great mess you make everytime you come home with a life so big, to the tension with your father not because of what he’s done but between

His body and how you tell him and LOOK LOOK the sadness which exceeded love, and LOOK the fear looming larger than she ever did and LOOK you’re not sure you’ve even loved once and now you’re here with somebody’s real life, real body, real choices of where to live and what job they take and where they go for pizza in your hands and LOOK everyone’s got to feel this way sometime so why not you now you aren’t responsible for shit except never stopping trying to figure it out with all of yourself and LOOK everybody makes mistakes but you gotta trust when you love it’s love and when you hate it’s hate and when you fear and hunger and run and create and build and show and look its all real its all impossibly real because LOOK  since you were 13 and had to reckon with death nothing has been the same except you, except the warm mind beating itself against the world to make a damn pretty image before it goes dark

It matters, it matters and the figs are falling

Around you soft as dreams

And light goes out in the houses by the applachian trail one by one

And the wolf of the night begins its keening

But you are waiting for 5 o’clock still when beer will go to $3

And it will feel, surrounded by faces you owe nothing to,

That it is starting over in a way it never could before

But it can everyday. you look around, annoyed

At a moralizing tone and the idea that any advice or truth

Can scroll through your life like a red news ticker beneath a handsome face

And just when you are ready to strike out

The voice disappears.
______________________

Will it touch? Her

Sitting on the dusty floorboards like a hundred bags of glass

Shaking. Asking for more.

______________________

When the woman from west Virginia comes,

She brings red handkerchiefs and kimchi

She brings the glinting of light from the mountains

And the anxiety of a small town.

Smell of 13 hours on the road, eyes from sun glare,

Unaccustomed to telling people what to call her,

But enough knowledge from where she started

To self consciously flirt as we pass a bottle of wine between us.

___________________________

The feeling of ending is back.

Hollow echo. Call across the lake.

Phone out of batteries. Rain falling between the leaves.

Empty house. Packed bar. Seasons changing.

Nothing quite making it ok.

Knowing she is calling. One more word

And that’s it. This time you’ve got control.

Doesn’t make it much better, now does it?

____________________________________

Out over the field like an ocean

Corn subsidies poured out

A sun behind thin clouds

Spreads it all opaque and flat

And so easy to get lost in.
___________________________________________

On halloween it all comes back.

Nobody is unmasking

You though that’s what it takes

To get you up nowadays.

Lipstick is smeared like blood across her lips

In the fluorescent lights and the thrum of a west philly happening--

All the good liquor on the floor in the closet

Beneath the blanket you won in college for swimming in 40 degree water

Hungover and watched by almost 100 people, you almost threw up.

At some point in the night, arms

turn into the seasoning that makes taste.

And so it all comes back up.

juggle

She tells me I sang nursery rhymes

In my sleep and spoke of a clearing

In the woods. Staying away

from women is hard to do

 when wanting to be touched

Climbs up my throat like a ladder

And that fragile thing takes a long breath.

At the beginning of spring, the rains come,

Throwing flowers down into my lungs.

I stay behind the windows, curling and uncurling blinds

At different hours of the day like a lizard

Turning its body in the sun.
I venture out for food because the refrigerator holds nothing.

Coming back, I see the chimney missing a few bricks

And the birds perched there scattering.

Isa didn’t want me to see her like that.

She wears a smock to the bar.

It's the first time in months

And I’m 3 beers deep because she

was 15 minutes late.

Somebody died, it’s unclear

Because we haven’t quite figured out

How to talk to each other.

She cries when we make love that night

And wakes me in the morning unsatiated.

Later in the week, I drive by the building

That holds her studio on a grey day.

There is a gargoyle juggling stones

That weigh far more than the room I live in.

The red civic behind me honks

And I glance at the angry face backed

By city hall itself, squatting over the scene

Like some great arachnid.

Whose web is this?

Giggling with the last moments of diethylamide

I grabbed my brother’s hand and we fell to the floor

Weighed by the g force of the moment taking off.

“I am no fool about love” I begin,

but something about the lights tells me

this is no time for convincing myself.

There are no pews or knee cushions

for the eyes that look at you while

you look into the distance for something

else

Wearily I see anna pull back her hair

And smile crookedly at her last meeting with the union.

She is going south for love.

She wants to sit by the dogwood trees

And have weekends.

Something about her will disappear though

In those contented moments when she is still.

Some hunger, some void

Into which anyone might throw themselves

Like runners off a cliff face

To fall fall fall before being yanked back

By some bunjee saying “not yet.”

I cannot be the only one for whom

Finally loving something in themselves

Makes it harder to love another

But yet want it all the more.

Or if I am, better to be outted as an asshole

And have others stay away from the remains

Of a person begging for water but never taking a sip.

o go to sleep melodrama, have a drink

And take nyquill. In the morning perhaps

You will feel none of this and you can feign surprise

when you ensnare another you do not love.

last year today

It is the second night of hannukah

All the doors are still open

Years have passed since the decision

Not to render beautifully—

On the trolley home I run into a doctor friend.

He has more money than me.

We pull each other out—

Me his face from the book

Him my feet from the bar I would drop on.

As we speak, it strikes midnight and it is his birthday.

I go home and cash checks on the duct taped screen of the computer my parents bought me in highschool.

Certain things have to last.

The drawers with all the most precious things have holes in them

Where the first letter from sara goes missing

Where the years worth of half dollars my uncle sam collected for me

Can’t call back.

It is forced to be ok—24 hours in brooklynn

Whose final 3 are beyond memory

And then back without a word from anyone I saw

Or anyone I left.

My girlfriend is angry I don’t love her enough,

So these days we are drifting apart.

I won’t sacrifice feeling good about my heart

As long as it beats.

Some things catch you by surprise

Since you were 13—your ability to listen,

The distinction between you and you,

A willingness to sacrifice ad infinitum for an idea of a life.

Whose revolution? And when?

I am annoyed with the flamboyant educated black men I went to school with

For loving themselves more than I allow myself.

The candles are downstairs heating the house,

And a cat with 10 fingers and trouble balancing

Looks me in the eyes as I close the lights and decide

Tonight is a wash, tonight will not break me through

He asks me” have you moved on

From the road to yourself

From your striving into some great way

And some huge feeling

And something more?

“

“I do not think you have”

before the tattoo

And where is my body now

Muscles taut and purple against morning light

A hundred year old cloth crutched across my back

And into a nothing day the fall stays warm on the skin

While leaves dance across each other into a folded blurry sketch

Of the backyard where we lie with the barnacle mushrooms and stumps

It will change and stay the same

With the kakaka of ink dug deep.

This will remember

This will remind

This will continue growing outwards with time.