Poetry 365

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like his sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven, But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

And this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.

I don’t need to know any more about death
from the Japanese beetles
infesting the roses and plum
no matter what my neighbor sprays
in orange rubber gloves.
You can almost watch them writhe and wither,
pale and fall like party napkins
blown from a table just as light fades,
and the friends
as often happens when light fades,
talk of something painful, glacial, pericardial,
and the napkins blow into the long grass.
When Basho writes of the long grass,
I don’t need to know it has to do with death,
the characters reddish-brown and dim,
shadows of a rusted sword, an hour hand.
Imagine crossing mountains in summer snow
like Basho, all you own
on your back: brushes, robe,
the small gifts given in parting it’s bad luck to leave behind.
I don’t want to know what it’s like to die on a rose,
sunk in perfume and fumes,
clutching,
to die in summer with everything off its knees,
daisies scattered like eyesight by the fence,
gladiolas open and fallen in mud,
weighed down with opening and breeze.
I wonder what your thoughts were, Father,
after they took your glasses and teeth,
all of us bunched around you like clouds
knocked loose of their moorings,
the white bird lying over you,
its beak down your throat.
Rain, heartbeats of rain.

in see, in captaincy
in collar, see. in carpenter.

the fathering. in senate
the reckoning, in senate

this is the hole in your roof.
this is the bed you carry on your back.

this is the usual undoing.
the fathering, upon the undoing.

this is walking, heel and toe
this is walking on toes.

this is passing lip to lip and hand to hand
this is your pretty clothes, she knows

in starts and phrases. starts, and in dispraise
and in habit being like and being unlike.

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or many even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don’t want you to feel that you
have to
just because I’m here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

Stars through the windshield glinted,
shrunken, delirious as the eyes
of sharks. I heard mother’s
heart (my head
cradled in her elbow’s
crook) chant faster, and father
tramped down the pedal
when his lane was clear. Later,

lungs drowning in my chest, I sucked
at oxygen fresh from a tank. Thin
voices leaked in, trembling
the tent’s wrinkled,
transparent skin. My mother’s
face was a pale smear on the air,
her jacket a haggard ghost. “Doctor,’

father said. (I remembered his brown
palms, coarser than emery cloth
on my back, circling slowly
to draw insomnia from my blood;
the fat scar barnacled on
his thumb would whisper
along my ribs: A man becomes
all that he’s lost.) He rasped,
“Doctor…will he die?” I let

go: he hiss of piped air drowned
his answer. And when I came to,
they were gone. Bones of cold light
flickered above my bed; hot urine
eeled between my legs and froze;
fins, in my fever’s depth, ripped
through swelling tides of sleep:

the blackness swallowed its stars.

In a cream-colored room with blue curtains,
a woman in long skirts gazes at her lamp.
She perfects “the art of longing.” In poems I have
gone with her to that room, escaped with relief
the travail of the fathers, their difficult
beauty, made no room in my words for the wood
they chopped, the cabbages they grew. Now I see
their hands, the nails squared, earth biting down
in the furrows. I smell the stew of tobacco, hoe-
handles and sweat, and today I long to go down
in a dense atmosphere of men working, the stone
that sinks below those lilies floating on water.

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells—
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

2. Heritage

Don’t you steal that flag, my Mama had qualms
But a boy gotta have something to boast on
Crack that rock, slit that toad
Nature’s a hoot if you shoot your load

Flies in the oven
Flies in the head
I’ll kill that fly
Till I kill it dead
And no more will that fly
Bother me
As I roam and I ramble
In the tumbleweed

3. Tough Love

My dad and I were very close
I like to say, int’mately gruff:
We hunted bear, skinned slithy toes
You know, played ball and all that stuff.
Daddy had his pride and maybe was aloof
But when he hit me, that was proof—
Proof he cared
More than he could ever share.
How I hated those men who took him away!
Pop was a passionate man
Just like me
And I’ll teach my son, Clem
To love just like we men.

Late at night, when you’re so lonely
your shoulders lean to the center of your body,
you call no one and you don’t call out.

This is dignity. This is the pure loneliness
that made Christ think he was God.
This is why lunatics smile at their thoughts.

Even the best moment, as you slip
half-a-foot deep into someone you like,
deepens to the loneliness in it

and loneliness that’s not. If you believe in
Christ hanging on the cross, his arms spread
as if to embrace the Father he calls

who is somewhere else, you still might hear
your own voice at your next great embrace
thinking Loneliness in another can’t be touched,

like Christ’s voice at death answering himself.

A few days ago
my father sent me a box
of wintergreen to replant
so I won’t forget him.
I wonder if he saw
the rims of the short notched
leaves get brown
or missed much of the deep odor
before he mailed them,
and thought they might look scorched
by the hot passage
from his yard in South Carolina
to this room of mine.
Today, among other thing,
I bought soil
and packed it against the roots
of his gift. If that fails,
I’ll write him that
there is still nothing more
I can say that this to the message
he gave me through
these wild masks: it is natural
to be shy with one’s daughter,
but when I see those curled,
lost faces trying to live,
I feel my back stiffen
and remember that once,
passing a stranger
whose thin coat brushed the ground,
I couldn’t find
my way home
or recognize myself
in the tiny person
looking at me out of his eyes.