Poetry 365

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don’t remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park—I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell’s Farm—
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

broken wires
tubes
and rusty needles
in the nose
mouth
and penis.

on the forehead
misleading like a star
dullard or burnt-out bulb

in the spiraling wriggles
of the intestine
the putrid stench
of missing dreams

in sleep
when heavy footsteps come
and give key
it wakes up
grinding worn-out cogs

in the eye-wells,
the spinal passes
the skull-sky
at the bottom of the stomach

tongue-tied
and unable to down a drop of water
like the steel grandpa
who lay bedridden
for yet another lifetime.

The winter of Yolo County Fair’s 1989
First Prize for Apple Pies showed me
how to keep my pie flute golden while
it baked by simply making an aluminum
foil collar for the pie pan like you might
for the TIn Man’s whip-lashed neck.
While she showed me how to weave
a lattice tio for y cherry pie she
told me her apple pie won because of
the Gravensteins, those large, yellow
red-striped apples she drove 40 miles
to Sebastopol to buy that are only ripe
two weeks in July, the same time her
husband’s parents came from Pittsburgh
to discuss her bad marriage getting worse.
While her husband and his parents
drank Wild Turkey in the living room
in her kitchen she rolled our the pie crust
dough made of lard and butter for a nutty
flavor and then she arranged inside the pie
the Gravenstein slices, apple halfmoons
halfmoons, a perfect swirl ad infinitum so that
when the apples baked down in their juice
the top crust would not go hard and fill
with stale air and many bourbon highballs
later, after her husband’d told His Side of
the story, his parents came to the decision
that their son’s obligations to his baby and wife
should not interfere with his personal happiness
or life and the last place her husband took her
before he went away was to the Yolo County
Fair and when she saw her First Place blue
ribbon, she covered her face to hide her tears,
asked him to leave her alone with her pie for
awhile so he carried their baby away to see
the clown. The main reason, though, she told me
she won was simply because those Gravenstein
apples are the perfect sweet-tartness for pies.
You don’t have to add lemon or cinnamon
or sugar or any other spice. That way
all you taste are the apples.

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

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter - bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

How weary, stale, flat, and un profitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world


Take a plane to London.
From King’s Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,
and soon you’ll be on the moors. There’s a pub,
The Drovers, where it’s warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and dink a pint of Old Peculiar.
For a moment everything will be all right. You’re back
at a beginning. Soon you’ll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country,
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step into grace.

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.

I believe I could have saved him.
What he wanted was easy: the poured
sweet wine of encouragement. A smile.

In another life he might have grown
a comfortable margin of flesh, he might
have kept all his teeth and been spared

translation into the skeleton’s cage.
I would have kept an eye on him,
fed him with words passed like bread

broken into a confession of trust.
I would have revealed my own fast,
my own body ribboned into syllables

of bone. I would have untied
the sad bow of his mouth
looped and knotted for a kiss.

Feasting and drinking went on far into the night
but in the end we went home alone to console ourselves
which seems to be what so many things are all about
like the branches of a tree just after the wind
     stops blowing.

Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t
want to see your eyes forgotten
on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse
     of those who can remember nothing.

Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I don’t want to see you end up that was
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
     bridges out of crippled birds.

Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
There are so many better things for you
than to see your feelings sold
as magic lanterns to somebody whose body
     casts no light.