St. Mark’s Place at dawn, trash blown, summer light’s perfect clarity so good for artists, wasted here. Lower Manhattan, brick walls remain, black-painted window sills. Somehow I thought the old world hanging on here had some right to peace, even if then or now, there was no peace. From Alphabet City I walk, young enough to be thrilled about it. He lay: rags, or a bag of trash. But a gray-brown face. But black pants, legs bent, shoes gone, one foot bare. I crossed the street. He looked asleep, but something lay too still. The street rose up around him, a pavement’s song, linear harmony, dun and straight. I saw death, & dancing toward the Village, I wondered what this conversation meant: am an urn to filled with flecks of ash, broken centuries later on the floor of sea amid rotten keels, home of colored fish, or, a funnel for all senses, piling cryptic lines like off-kilter bricks in a sagging building?… ...continue reading
Cold rain stammers on lines of street bricks, worn ideas in rows, stained with tar or blood; read them at your leisure, coffee smoldering in her cup, your sweater bunched at the elbows. Eye shadow left open on the sink. Of tears there is a novel, or dictionary of smudged intentions. Here is a man, there a woman. That’s all the franchise needs to boil. Someone coughs in the night. Match snaps fire, lights a face for a moment. You gave up piano years ago, regrets are fool’s cash. A car door slams. It’s time to leave. Or time for two men to drag you out. Where the trees recline in winter. Dirt garnered, a congregation praying above the dug hole. The only prayer you’ll get or need.… ...continue reading
For Walter Butts
The fathers are waiting with their cigarettes and big stomachs for us to arrive. The place where they live does not have time, only space, and they fill it with talks of shortstops and bars, drill sergeants, meals remembered from the days of appetite. Worn jokes about drinking too much and who cares if smoking takes a few years off your life since those are the last years anyway? They talk of their sons, joggers, salad eaters, their strange music and soft hands, the angular jargon of their professions (not jobs). Most will nod, say grudgingly that the kids seemed to come out all right after the crazy stuff with drugs and hair. One will admit he laughed when his son said the kids were driving him crazy.… ...continue reading
There are secrets to how things are made, and they hold the world together. Learning these is part of what keeps us alive. How to clothe yourself and fry an egg, how to wash your clothes and show up on time. I thought about this today while I hung a pair of folding doors and decided, for once, to follow the directions. Then it was process, not mystery, and soon, I had two doors opening nicely, then closing again.
I had never heard of a trotline or seen one run until my roommate and his fishing buddy, an overmedicated vet, decided to run one in the mud-colored river that cut our town in half more decisively than any set of railroad tracks ever could. In two weeks, they snagged only a few catfish.… ...continue reading
In his wallet, Dixon kept his ticket to the concert Lynyrd Skynyrd was flying to when his plane crashed. When he was home from college he used to ride with his friends to the field where Rick Nelson’s plane crashed on the last night of 1985. They drank beer from coolers, passed joints, tried to turn the music loud enough to fill that empty field and the long silence surrounding it. Beneath whatever moon there was and stars shifting too slowly to track, they felt themselves more alive in a place where others had fallen. Graves and the stone monuments cast for the dead are one thing. The places they fell are another, small territories granted mystery because a treasured spirit vanished there. As though some danger may linger, as though blood lost there might rise from the dirt and stain one’s feet.… ...continue reading
I have always lived by the laws of flesh
shrinking tighter and shorter each hour.
Now I’ve nothing to lose but cracking skin.
Yet curiosity stretches wider, too strong an itch.
In liquid imagination, I swan dive into
the pool of my widest eye, splash down
into the vast blue ocean of mind,
wash my bones back to the civilized shore,
where those awaiting my last breath
pick the marrow clean.
On their solid beachhead, my skeleton
has no heart, only a hard brotherhood,
where nothing more than hollow bones
lean against one another
and begin to crack.
– Robert S. King… ...continue reading
“Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.”
– Anonymous
Beyond the lamp-lit room is a plangent rain
—rescuing trees from their near-drought dyings
and I ponder the thousands of nights
—of our separate sibilant lyings.
The western wind that now does blow
—that down this rain may rain
blows not for us – or too much so
—shuttling shuttered pain.
Through colorful rooms we pass and greet
—snug from the night’s down-pouring
twined in un-twinned dreams
—anchored in our unmoorings.
The thirsty grass and withered stalks
—exalt the liquid ambrosia
while in dry and sighing rooms
—we unmake our beds of roses.… ...continue reading