morning

There is cream cheese and lox on the table

And Codie’s ghost romps within the fence,

Tongue too long to be contained.

At once the puppy smaller than a hand

And the 80 pounds my mother struggled to carry up those stone steps

Before dropping her on fresh stitches and crying in a puddle

At the bottom.

Big globules of snow are starting it all over again,

I do not have time for merry Christmas today,

If you get in my way I will continue on.

At the gym I think about nothing for 45 minutes.

My heartbeat shakes the world.

My vision jumps—black padded brillo to

an empty wine bottle. My father saying

“I am devastated” as if reading the summary off

the back of a dvd case.

I take off my shoes.

My whole body wants to throw this off.

His body is humped and solid as a hill,

Hands turned slightly in over the half inch mole

He refused to have removed, instead turning it into a button

That had to be pressed. His novel reads

A foot beneath the frozen dirt. He is resting in the city,

Letting his abdomen loose to recline in a chair that has become his bed.

His clients are all dead or in jail or free,

Roaming across the country in vans and broken down sedans,

Old tires spinning over a fresh laminate of snow.

His clients are all innocent, have not committed their crimes yet,

And he is a gi, drunk in a smoke filled plane

Playing poker a half mile above the heads of cows in Wisconsin.

He is at home lacing up his boots as the berlin wall falls.

He is walking outside in slippers and yelling “scat”

At the coyotes before grilling salmon.

He is 80 years old at the dinner table telling his grandchildren

To never trust crooked  republican scum.

He is hugging me tight and saying in my ear “just keep writing.”

eve

here we stand and play and sit

gnawing away at cold pits of grass clod frozen

up there in larynx chords and in stomachs

holding the things that have closed us close

holding each other up to the light

they arrived at 1 am, my hunger slanting

the dark towards unsealed windows,

clasping hands and breasts over rough flannel

we turned the house down and lit the candles

after a moment holding ourselves in the dark

a blanket stretched across us all

blending oak leaves and smells of fall

into a distinctly winter time, death and collapse

in the air with every breath, fogging like heartbreak

coalescing in cold rain like desperation

it may be the first new years I am taken care of,

silver canted over into purple glass,

the tapping at the windows coming from waves

of heat and sound rather than something trying

to get in or be let out

in brookline they prepare for early bed,

small folding down of pages for tomorrow,

a ritual as old as our people that says “we will still be here”

in between pines in the small town where I grew up

they wander through a sanitized kitchen to grab logs

from beneath the porch, crawling with dirt and life,

and drag them up into the living room to make a fire

before the friends they have known since before they knew each other arrive

we are precarious. A mixture of probiotics and what we consume,

living and dying, freezing and thawing like double paned glass.

The house is changing in nature, just as I am.

Any of us. Charlotte is closing her eyes.

And for a time, none of us seems to be home,

As I flip the lights in each room on and off,

Just to check the bulbs I say,

Just to remind myself of the places we’ve been.

When they scarred my back—they came

As if in dreams to call my name,

Hold my hand for a moment in the crashing waves

I was stretching my fingers and salt was on my cheeks

And afterwards we played pool and it was good.

I have changed this year. An additional ring.

Held. Overflowing. Cards in the pocket.

And a rolled up sleeve. I am going somewhere

That I do not know. And I do know,

That this house with the machine in the basement,

And dreams of grand love, will be with me.

It is a new year in several hours

And the nervousness subsides, leaving ringlets, shadows

Of sand along the pacific.

You are coming with me.

end of the tour

Finished my beer halfway through

Thinking of blooming mushrooms in colored light

Kissing her or stroking the fuzz on his head

He is so proud of  or trying desperately to change.

By the end he whimpers and I am stuck thinking

In the dark room how much closer to this he is.

My life designed around shoring up against the real darkness

Of satisfaction by work or art. It will still be ok

Overworked, underpaid, an argument against guilt,

An argument against any one argument for life.

Next will be a manhattan and when the whiskeys done

Tequila or maybe the expensive stuff 2 floors up.

I am wanting to leave Philadelphia, not the place

But what it has come to mean of where I stoop down

To meet other people. They are not down there.

DFW as Jason segel nervous panning to outborder

The adversary that is not the interviewer,

He is uncharacteristically honest I think

Impractical for any human to be that anxious and so secure

In their way of life.

Today I woke up late and wiped down the refrigerator

Made my calls to ask what people were willing to give

To destroy the things that hurt us

Then sat in a room berated, only

Being able to think of my dying grandfather.

“this is a crisis>”

isn’t that addictive? Let’s get the great fix.

She is out there thinking of me with another man,

Waiting to call, waiting for my cock in her mouth,

She gets wet thinking about it. She sneaks into the bar bathroom

To send me a picture. This is a new conquering,

Something dark and yellow I am not proud of hidden like a kernel

Inside the life I am building up. I always seem to find them.

Taking our time, paul walks into the other room

I hear him pacing upstairs wanting to give me the space.

Does he hope writing here in the dark

Will grow like the weeds out back in the dead leaves

Or is it deeper and more loving even than a man like me can imagine?

Not about changing me, but seeing what it is that is happening

In the distinct clarity of his life and thinking

“good.”

The poems on my blog have been seen 3 times now

And it is hard to imagine the fear of anything

A reader might say, or what touring might be like

When resigned to the flat field of snow deep in the woods

And walking in what I hope is a straight line out

I think of ryan testing out his hiking gear

Or john learning drums in 2 years or nate knowing he will be famous

Or kb with directing the labor movement or jo with being honest every time

Or my mother with caring in very specific ways

Or pauls voice emotional and discerning and constantly going

And in a very deep way I am envious.

I have walked these woods a long time

And forget the pathways.

For this deep gut feelings, hollow and whole,

Something important happening

And  questioning every which way I might go.

Knowing this is not a fraction of  the capacity each of them has

To voyage, to go out and find

The novel, the job, the life.

For the crisis of this that I want to take way down into the center

Of my soul, I have no metaphor.

And the things remind and the things forget

And whether done or doing or if it sits here and gets washed out

I am proud of their bravery and slowly, more quietly

I am proud of mine too.

he and you

He smiles all the way to sleep,

Pockmarked skin shining amongst

A family he created. 48 dark eyes looking to him for laughter.

What does he read these nights as he wrestles with it?

What light does he turn on?

I want to know because he is doing what must be done,

The same way he would yell scat

Out into the dark before walking out.

He begins every story with “this is the last

Story, I promise” as if we all waited for this to end,

But everybody in the room is holding their breath

In awe that we are inside some magic bubble,

Shadow faces of despair only showing on the rainbowed perimeter.

He is telling us “the fuckers don't want to see us rise,”

He is filling us with air.

It is as if he wants to convince us

He is no role model. Mistakes here

And there, the house flooding,

Cops pissed off or shady clients defended.

The details grow fuzzy as they change with each telling

First it was a field of cinders, then a movie theatre,

A general’s plane or maybe the chaplain’s.

Always he is no hero, he told me he took

A deer’s life and immediately asked god’s forgiveness--

What shines through is his life.

His brutally sharp and strong life,

Muscling its way into the light

Like a seal to the top of the ocean.

Grandpa, is it lapis lazuli? When you read that did you think of me,

Or was that for you, the beauty and tragedy together defying despair?

You know how to look at it, hold it, find it again and again.

When you say, NO let us speak of life—

Do you grow frustrated you cannot give it all to me at once?

I am listening now. I will not wander off

To the cabin in the mountains. Let us turn this ageless stone between us.

You have been married 59 years and alive 85 and awake to all of it,

Alive to all of it as it even as it beats upon you like a storm against cedar panes,

Or bends you low like wind in the cattails.

Unafraid you are laughing

as we speed over the spray, as we break out into the sea.

Are you thinking of your youth now and do you see it in us?

I see mine in you, your intelligent eyes fixed on me

holding some conversation then another

up to the light and putting it down again,

Content and still searching.

Your laughter now is mine at 5,

Innocent and ancient as the struggle we both continue

To just... hold it within us completely for a moment.

I laughed as I tried to catch you between my hands,

But you were always escaping.

After you leave, your son and i

Wash the dishes together.

He turns stairway to heaven way up

and we both know this is something

essentially human,

not knowing and being afraid to know,

the sadness, the hope, the desire to reach across

and touch another human being

down somewhere that is deeper than where death can find.

If your cancer was a boss I would organize the shit out of his workplace and pretty soon he would have no power.

If your cancer was a book I would read it quickly to learn its lesson and then throw it away in a place where it would never come back again.

If your cancer were deep and I could only see the edge, a truth whose depths I could barely comprehend with my 25 years of life, whose life was tied to your life and whose meaning only you could see, I would long desperately to be with you, to talk about Shakespeare and agree about revolution, to read poetry and sing old songs, to hear you tell your life so slowly that I’d miss my plane

And stay for dinner and a Mel Brooks movie and I’d watch you lean into your chin and begin to snore and know that you are something that only comes once and every particle of this earth is blessed to have its shadow cast by your fire.

nes gadol

haven’t been home since

I heard—coasted along

Glistening streets from the airport to downightown,

Industrial grey forest enclosing a polluted river

Which as we approached we listened for harder and

Harder until we were on the single lane

Bridge, at the bottom of two hills

And we turned the lights down and then

The car off and we tried to listen hard then,

The moment hanging off the edge

By so much weight on the past and future ends of us.

It is hard dating an organizer, but something else

Dating KB. I played games with her

Family, lit and doused the depressed brother, held

The father a respectful fist away, and of course

Flirted with sue. It was almost enough—

He is up there in the stars in a plane he barely knows

How to fly, or out there in brookline

Sleeping fitfully in his chair as the news

Cycle changes. He is reading yehuda amichai

In his later years and so am I, 500 miles away

Drunk and sleep deprived in a man’s house he

Does not know, but would like. We are both

Feeling sore and leaning back trying to piece out where

We are open, where we have closed,

And what has been opened once again.

I am thinking of the gains he made for our family,

The house by the ocean that sings

softly in the nighttime to the birds,

And of how he was never drunk

in any of his stories—no matter

How debaucherous.

It is the first night of hannukah,

And the Aryan psychiatrist and Mexican

Union organizer don't seem to have a candle in the house—I am drawn back to the ransacked temple, heaving in pain, invaded and

Changed forever, the priests and peasants

Searching through it like a ct scan. I’m sure there

Are things they hoped never to find,

But did. But hope too. Borrowed time.

I am thinking of him and three months and

A great miracle happened there

But I cant hope that

Maybe in another version of the story

The oil really only did last for one

Night but it burnt with the light of a star,

So bright, blasting the ruins of the temple

And for a brief time turning everything there beautiful

And stark, highlighting what it was and what it did and all the ways that hands ands time had changed it. Showing the past overlaid on the present

Like an xray. And maybe like that

I think a great miracle is happening in the condo by coolige corner

Where my grandather sleeps

And my grandmother wakes periodically and looks over with a determined look.

Maybe that brightness and that miracle

Have been happening for a long time.

down there

At the bottom of kolob canyon

I face my fear in the form of a lost trail.

Hang ego up like wet denim

Or bang it against the impenetrable--without

Some way of holding it we are only

Slippery rocks beneath  the falls.

Road open for 1 hour 2 times

A day, home amongst burnt stumps

And aquamarine fields—how long

Have you longed to finally be sucked dry or

Flooded, stunned by sun or

Cradled in the shoulder of the mountain?

Sooner or later everyone moves

In their own way. Land is for sale

In the shadow of zion. The cool

Waist of the river is only a place

To suck blood for some. But wind

has found a way through rock,

Nate lies out in the sun hatless and giving

Sweat to the air—anxiety evaporates

When the river slides its smile between my toes and

Reminds me we are going everywhere.

Even if I never moved again

Love would find its way.

night before

Back at it—drinking free

Across from michael’s father,

Alcoholic breath stinking somehow

Uncold December wind from the imperfect seal

At the pub door. Two of them are gone,

Garage door shut on their outstretched fingers

Rubbed raw by dishes and cheap detergeant,

Canning them as they tried to secret to the outside,

To the green leaves and manicured lawns—

But the speed of $10 per hour is not fast

Enough and the distance to the border lengthens

Like those camera shots of horror, seeming closer,

Even as they move farther away.

In the great dark hours between 11 and 1

When I wish my day alive, the streets

slide along whispersmooth tracks and homes

shut off one by one in a race to close me into

a drink or a lovers arms, or both, or lately

neither in the first sober spiraling out of the circle

since I started working and drinking at 13.

I refuse to be counted down to sleep

Counted out as I take care of myself discreetly

And expediently in the blue shadow light

Of a computer screen.